Home List vs Apple Reminders

If every person in your house has an iPhone and all you need is a list, Reminders is already on your phone. Home List is for everything past that.

Reminders is genuinely good at this

Apple’s own guide describes grocery lists in Reminders, shared lists with reminders assigned to people, and alerts when you arrive at or leave a place. For an all-Apple household that only wants a list, that is a strong free option, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

The catch: everyone has to be on Apple

Reminders is an Apple app. There is no Reminders app for Android, so one Android phone in the house means somebody is left out of the list. Home List runs on iPhone, Android and in any browser, and the same list is live on all of them — every change shows up on everyone’s phone in about a second.

What Home List adds at the shop and after it

Home List’s arrival alert can tell the whole household that someone is at Aldi with eight items left, so whoever is at home can add the forgotten thing while there is still time. On the way out, photograph the receipt: line items matched to the list, prices recorded, and over a few weeks a running record of what the household actually spends.

Chores rotate on their own schedule and can be claimed with a tap, and there is a shared calendar that subscribes into Google, Apple or Outlook. No ads on any tier, ever. Premium ($2.99 a month, $24.99 a year) adds arrival reminders at every shop rather than one, spending analytics — monthly trends, shop-by-shop breakdowns and export — and restock predictions, and unlocks for the whole household at once. Everything else on this page is free.