Introducing Grocery List: one shared list, no account
A grocery list the whole household keeps in sync, with no sign-up and no ads.
Grocery List is out on iPhone and Android. It does one thing: it keeps a shopping list that your whole household shares, live, so the person at the store and the person at home are always looking at the same list.
What it does
Make a list, add items as they come to mind, and check them off at the store. Tap share and you get a link or a QR code. The other person opens it, and from that moment both phones are looking at the same list. Add milk on your way home and it appears on your partner’s list. They check off bread and it clears on yours. That is the whole app, and all of it is free.
There is no account. You do not sign up, you do not hand over an email, and you do not build a profile to share a list with the person you live with. Pairing happens through a link or a QR code, phone to phone.
How the syncing works, plainly
This is the part most apps use to justify an account or a subscription, so it is worth being clear about. Your lists live on your phone. When you share one, the changes pass between your phones encrypted end to end, through free public relays that I do not run and cannot read. The merging happens on each device, so you both see the same list without a server of mine in the middle. Nothing about what you buy ever reaches me, because there is nowhere for it to go.
That is a real decision with a real cost to me: I have no analytics, so I cannot watch what people do with the app. I made that trade on purpose. It means I depend on you to tell me what is broken or missing.
Why I built it
I kept running into the same thing. The shared list is the feature everyone actually wants, and it is the feature every popular grocery app attaches something to. If you have used Bring!, AnyList, or OurGroceries and bounced off the forced sign-up, the ads, or the version that quietly adds items you did not put there, this is the same shape of tool with none of that. Your list contains only what you typed. No advertiser items, no suggestions pushed from a server, no upsell for the part you came for.
Get it
Grocery List is on the App Store and Google Play, free. The whole app is the free app. It is open source, so you do not have to take my word for any of the privacy claims: the code is on GitHub with my name on it.
Grocery List is supported by the people who use it. No ads, no subscriptions, no data harvest. What keeps it going is whether it turns out to be worth a few dollars to you. If it is, there is a donate link, and it changes nothing about the app either way.