A shared shopping list, without the mess
A household shopping list is not written by one person. Somebody adds milk in the morning, somebody else remembers batteries at lunchtime, and whoever is walking round the shop needs to see the whole list.
Getting started
Create a list and send an invitation — a link you can pass along in WhatsApp. Whoever opens it joins the list and sees it straight away. If they do not have the app yet, the invitation waits: after their first launch they land directly in the right list.
What everyone sees
Everyone sees the same list and the same changes. When somebody marks an item as taken, it shows up for the others — which is exactly what stops the same thing being bought twice. There is no "my list" and "your list", there is one list.
With no signal in the shop
Some supermarkets are concrete boxes with no reception, and that is precisely where an ordinary list app breaks. Here the list keeps working: you can tick, add and delete with no connection, and everything syncs when the connection returns. Even if somebody else changed something meanwhile, you get their changes and they get yours.
A few rules that prevent chaos
- Mark what was taken rather than deleting it, so you can see what was missing — and because a deletion beats a simultaneous edit: whoever was marking that item as you deleted it marked it for nothing.
- Use quantities instead of writing the same product twice.
- Do not start a new list for every shop. A standing list that resets keeps whatever comes back every week.
What if we both edit the list at the same moment?
Edits to different items are both kept, and nothing is lost for being offline — your edit waits on the phone and goes out when the signal returns. If you both change exactly the same thing at the same moment, the list does not invent a blend of the two: the later change is the one that stands.
Can I remove someone from a list?
Yes. Whoever created the list can remove a participant, and they stop seeing it.
