Current State of the Art in Grocery List Apps?

August 6, 2014 4:28 PM

I need a new grocery list app that a) has iPhone, Android, and Web Apps; b) allows for multiple lists; c) allows sharing; and d) other preferences below.

My husband and I have used ziplist for a while to keep our joint grocery shopping list. It was always buggy -- I could never add to the list he owned from the android app -- and now they've changed from lists to tags on the web app but not the mobile app and the tags don't make sense and aren't sticky and it's not syncing properly and basically it's gone from annoying to unusable.

So now I need a new solution. I don't need or wnat any recipe planning/etc., just a shopping list app that I can add things to one by one. I really liked that ziplist had auto-complete suggestions and (more importantly) automatically grouped entries by category (e.g. frozen, produce, etc.), so I'm loath to just switch to a catch-all to-do app and lose that functionality. It really needs both iPhone & Android apps and to sync nicely. We could probably just share one account/login but it would be better if we could share some lists but not others with each other. And it of course needs to be able to be checked off as we walk through the store and have some sort of "clear all checked" button when we're done.

Does anyone have a solution that they like and works well?

posted by brainmouse to Shopping (9 answers total)

I like groceryiq a lot and it fits your requirements but you would have to investigate the web and android portions since we both use iOS.
posted by brilliantine at 4:55 PM on August 6, 2014

I found OurGroceries to be less annoying than GroceryIQ because it isn't as insistent on categorizing or using name brand stuff.

We use it in a multiple OS house, but there's no browser app.
posted by thewumpusisdead at 5:04 PM on August 6, 2014

I like BuyMeAPie a lot. I use iOS but apparently it's also on Android.
posted by aubilenon at 5:20 PM on August 6, 2014

We use GroceryIQ on both iOS and Android and it works Ok enough that I stopped looking for something to replace it with, because everything else seemed worse. I will be reading this thread with interest though.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 5:37 PM on August 6, 2014

OurGroveries does everything there except, possibly, have both individual and group lists. You can add groceries to the list on the web.
posted by jeather at 7:09 PM on August 6, 2014

After Astrid was shut down (*sob*), my partner and I switched to Out of Milk. It has a shopping list, to-do list, and pantry list, but the interface is set up so that you can ignore everything but the shopping list if you want. And the synchronization is pretty fast; we tried and rejected a handful of shopping/to-do list apps because syncing of shared lists was.
posted by neushoorn at 12:28 AM on August 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Another vote for GroceryIQ - it syncs within a minute or two between my wife's iPhone and my Android phone. It works fine, haven't seen the need to replace it.
posted by exhilaration at 8:10 AM on August 7, 2014

My spouse and I, a mixed-platform household, switched from a more commercial app (the one that's owned by coupons.com, maybe it's GroceryIQ) to Our Groceries due to problems with sync and annoyance at the constant push of brand-name products. We are happier now.
posted by expialidocious at 10:47 AM on August 7, 2014

Response by poster: Thanks all, I'm off to play with a bunch of these, I'll report back soon with likes/dislikes and some best answers.
posted by brainmouse at 12:25 PM on August 7, 2014