How to choose the best grocery lists app

Categories are by far the most useful features of grocery list apps. Categories are really store departments. Think of the Produce department, the bread isle, the meat department, or the cheese section. Your grocery list app should have all these store departments loaded as categories, and you can associate your items to these categories. When your looking at your list, you have a button that will group all of your items based on category.

The benefit to this - when you're in the produce/fruits section, you get put ten or twelve things in your cart while you are there instead of having to crisscross the store because your items are out of order with the store departments.

Some apps automatically choose a category for you, but it may not fit the store where you are shopping. Categories are an estimate of where an item may fit, but it isn't always perfect. Some apps (like SwiftLists) allow you to create custom categories. They can be whatever you want, and it's especially helpful if you shop at different types of stores. Most of the categories in SwiftLists are pretty basic - so you may want to add your own.

This feature is especially helpful when your lists get really long. Maybe you are shopping for a lot of people and only go to the grocery store once every week or even every two or three weeks. You might have a very long list, and it's super helpful to group these items by department. It just makes shopping much faster.

Have you ever tried using your phone inside a Kroger? Have you tried using your Kroger app to load coupons while inside a Kroger store? I have, and it's almost impossible because I rarely have a signal when I'm in a Kroger store. I could be in the middle of a city and not have a signal. I've had to walk near the front door just to load coupons.

A lot of grocery list apps and apps in general send the data directly to the server immediately. You will see spinners and have to wait a few hundred milliseconds for it to finish when you check off an item. Your Facebook, Instagram and other apps will give you an error if you lose internet access. With a grocery list app, everyting is happening on your phone, so you don't need a signal.

Ideally, your grocery list app should function seamlessly, and there should be no spinners. Every action - such as checking off an item or creating an item, should happen instantly. The app should be responsible for syncing with the backend server, and this process should be hidden from the user.

Having the ability to share lists is very helpful. Maybe a family member is in town and can pick up a few things. You might want to add items to the list while your family member is shopping. If someone in your household notices that you are out of something, they could mark an item as needing to be purchased. With shared lists, all this is possible. 

If you share a grocery list with someone, that person should be able to do everything that you can do, except maybe delete the entire list. They should be able to add items, check items off, and assign categories.

Most grocery list apps have some sort of sharing feature. Ease of use is hit or miss. It's a hard problem from a technological standpoint - both people have to have the app installed and lists on multiple phones have to be kept in sync. You might want to share a list with someone that isn't even registered as a user of the grocery list app you are using. With some apps, sharing is a premium feature.

SwiftLists tries to make sharing as seamless as possible - once you share a list with someone, it will be there if and when they download the app and sign in. It requires no action on the other person's side, but they do have to download the app and sign in (obviously).