J
Jared Peters
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Grocery shopping is one of those unavoidable tasks we all eventually have to deal with, and sometimes we need a little help making sure we don’t forget the milk on the way home. Some people might be content to just use the built-in notepad app on their phone, but Android offers tons of solutions for keeping up with and managing a grocery list to make your shopping trips much more organized. This guide will go over several of the best apps available on the Play Store.
Listonic offers one of the most robust shopping list experiences available on Android. It offers a sleek, easy-to-navigate interface and plenty of features that keep you on top of managing your lists. It features some pretty advanced sorting, including letting you organize products by store aisles, syncing and sharing across devices, and the ability to stick price tags on your groceries to help you save some cash.The app itself features a fantastic and clean layout. There’s not much clutter on screen, and you get a functional side navigation bar, plus some well-designed animations throughout the app. The icons and designs used in the lists and settings are pleasant to look at without being too busy or overbearing, and that’s something that many, many apps struggle with.
As far as functionality goes, Listonic is nearly unmatched. When creating a list, you can choose from “quick list” options. These quick lists show the most popular items typically on a grocery list (bread, cheese, toilet paper, etc.) for you to quickly add to the list you’re creating, plus shortcuts to items you frequently use and things you mark as favorites. If you go through trash bags often, Listonic will keep trash bags as an option in your Frequent tab. Of course, if you don’t like the idea of searching for specific items, you can always type in custom items for your list. For each of those items, you can input a custom price to help you keep track of how much you’re spending, and you can adjust the sorting by either category, alphabetical, or custom.
Listonic also offers an account system for keeping your notes backed up. Creating the account is free, and you’ll be able to check out your shopping lists online and share them with friends and family. This can be extremely helpful if you need to send a list of things to buy to a spouse on their way home from work, for example. There is also a small 4 x 1 widget that you can place on your home screen, but the widget leaves much to be desired.
Listonic is a completely free app, and the interface is tough to beat. It has enough bells and whistles to fit into any power user’s app arsenal, so this should definitely be high up on your list of apps to check out.
Out of Milk made the cut on our list last time around, and it’s still just as fantastic as it was back then.It still gets plenty of updates and bug fixes and offers tech support if you ever run into issues. So if you need a reliable, long-standing application, this might be the way to go.The interface in Out of Milk isn’t terrible, but it’s not the greatest on this list, either. What it lacks in aesthetic design, it makes up for with features. When you first start up the app, you can create four different types of lists: shopping lists, grocery deals, to-do lists, and pantry lists.
The shopping and lists are fairly self-explanatory, allowing you to compile lists of things you need to pick up at the store. You can sort these items in several different ways, including custom sorting, alphabetical sorting, and category sorting. A unique feature here is that you can scan barcodes to get items into your shopping list instead of manually typing something in or searching for it in Out of Milk’s database. You can also get some nitty-gritty details out of these shopping lists, including things like detailed price histories for an item. By keeping track of an item’s price when it’s on sale, you can quickly find out if you’re getting a good deal or not. Plus, sharing these shopping lists to other users or to the web is quick and easy and makes it easy to coordinate the shopping with other people in your household.
The grocery deals part of the app is a very cool feature. It’s only available to US users, but you can glance over which grocery stores have deals on particular items, so you can plan your shopping trips out a little more effectively. If Store X has a better deal on bacon and eggs but Store Y has a better deal on peanut butter and jelly, you might want to stop by each store to get the best deal you can. Out of Milk makes it extremely easy to keep up with those deals.
One of the coolest features with Out of Milk that will win you over is the pantry list. Sometimes you forget to put a couple of items on your shopping list for the week, and that’s where the pantry list comes in handy. Instead of jotting down the things you need, this list keeps track of what you do have, kind of like an inventory. Whenever you run out of sugar, you can drop sugar off of your pantry list, so whenever you’re at the grocery store you can look over what’s in your pantry to decide what you do and don’t need. It’s an incredibly simple yet useful feature for people that tend to forget things.
Out of Milk is free, but with an in-app purchase you can grab a few pro features, including custom fonts, themes, and dedicated support from their staff.
Our Groceries is another app that made our list last year, and it’s still a fantastic option. It really shines when dealing with multiple family members or roommates that are responsible for splitting up the grocery shopping.You get a nicely designed Holo interface, and even though it’s slightly dated by material design standards, it’s a great, easy-to-use interface for most users. You’re not overwhelmed with features and options right from the start, but instead a simple list of lists and recipes. Adding and removing items from lists is simple, and managing your lists is a snap. Plus, Our Groceries allows you to set up real-time syncing across multiple devices, so you can set up a family list and whenever someone buys something off of the list, it will mark it off for everyone else that’s viewing the list. You’ll still get all of your traditional sorting options, including alphabetical sorting and the ability to sift things into different categories. You can also upload photos for different shopping lists, which is a feature unique to Our Groceries.
A very cool feature for Our Groceries is the ability to create “recipes” and add different items and ingredients to that particular recipe. If you want to make pizza for dinner, you can create a pizza recipe that will remind you to get dough, tomato sauce, cheese, toppings, etc. Tapping ingredients in a recipe list will toss it into your recent shopping list to remind you to pick something up the next time you’re at the store. If you’re trying to just pick up a few things for a particular meal instead of doing a full grocery shopping trip, this is an incredibly useful feature.
Our Groceries is one of the best options for dealing with cross-device syncing. It supports Android, iOS, and BlackBerry, so it covers almost all typical smartphone users. Plus, it’s totally free.
List Ease makes grocery shopping incredibly easy with its own take on interface design and price tracking. The app sticks to a skeuomorphic notepad design, which stands out in an era of minimalism and clean design. Some people still prefer the look of a traditional piece of paper, though, which is why List Ease is a great option.Like other grocery shopping apps, List Ease lets you set up simple lists of things you need to buy by either manually inputting items, searching for them in a database, or scanning a barcode. It splits up items into well defined categories by creating tabs for things like drinks, fruits/veggies, or dairy products. Each item can be tagged with individual prices, and the app will track the total amount for all of the items currently in your shopping list. While some users might not be crazy about the notepad design of the app, it makes everything extremely easy to see in one glance.
The app supports syncing across multiple devices, and it will push notifications to your device whenever someone else purchases and marks off an item on your list. This is a pretty useful feature to proactively keep you from buying anything unnecessary on your list. Plus, the app will offer up daily coupons to try and save you money. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work quite as well as an app like Out of Milk, but it’s still a very effective solution. The coupons are updated each day, so users that regularly check and keep an eye on possible discounts can save quite a bit of money.
Like Out of Milk, List Ease also supports creating a pantry list. This list tracks items that you already have at home and notifies you whenever a particular item might be running low. This can help you (and other members of your house) stay on top of what you do and don’t have and can prevent you from buying too much of something you didn’t really need.
The app itself is free, so if you’re interested in trying out the unique design of List Ease, there’s no fee for entry.
Bring! Shopping List takes an extremely minimalist approach to the idea of managing a grocery list, and it’s a fantastic option if you’re looking for something without too much clutter. It focuses on just a few core features to create a very functional app that’s simple to use.The interface on Bring! takes an unconventional approach to a shopping list. Instead of listing out words in list form, it creates tiles with hand-drawn images for each item that you select. There are over 350 images that cover plenty of different categories, and the end result is a very great design. The app is full of great animations, too, so making and managing your shopping lists is a great experience. It has tons of categories for each item in your list to make finding them later extremely easy, and marking something off of your list is as simple as tapping its icon.
Like some other apps on this list, Bring! allows sharing your lists with other members of your house. It automatically syncs the app across any Android or iOS device to keep you from accidentally purchasing double quantities, and it can also keep your pantry list and owned items up to date. It’s a great solution for when you have multiple people picking up groceries in different trips in your house.
Aside from the excellent interface, the one feature that truly makes Bring! stand out is its Android Wear support. It’s currently the only grocery list application on the Play Store that supports Android Wear, so you can quickly glance through your shopping list (and mark items off) without even touching your phone. Since the app was already designed with large, touch-friendly icons in mind, it’s a perfect fit for wearables.
If you want an app that offers a refreshing take on the shopping list experience, and/or if you own an Android Wear device, definitely give Bring! a spin.
If you’re not interested in using a dedicated grocery shopping app, you can always grab a great note-taking app to cover everything you might need to remember. But if you do need something a bit more specialized to help you keep up with multiple family members and roommates, coupons and prices, or your current inventory stock at home, one of these apps can definitely help make your grocery shopping trips a bit less stressful.
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Come comment on this article: Best Android apps for managing your grocery lists [September 2014]
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