A shared shopping list that works on iPhone and Android together

Most households are mixed. The shared list has to work on the phone you have, not the one the app maker wishes you had.

The mixed-phone problem

The obvious free option on an iPhone is Reminders, and it is good — until the person you share groceries with pulls out an Android phone. Reminders shares only between Apple Accounts through iCloud, and Notes has the same limit. On the other side, Google Keep works everywhere, but it is a plain checklist with no aisle sorting, and its location reminders were retired when Keep’s reminders moved into Google Tasks.

So the practical requirement is an app with a real iPhone app, a real Android app and one account behind both — plus a browser version for whoever is at a laptop. That is the shape of Home List and of a few good competitors; the comparison covers which.

What is identical on both

The list. Anyone adds from their own phone and it appears on everyone else’s within a second or two, sorted into departments so a big shop reads in the order you walk it. Tick something off in the aisle and it is gone from every phone. Type “mi” and Milk is waiting, because the app remembers what your household buys.

The store reminders. Pin a store on an iPhone or an Android phone and it reminds you the same way when you arrive with items unchecked — with the app closed, from the lock screen — and can tell the rest of the household you are there. Both platforms handle the geofence in hardware, so it costs almost nothing in battery either way. More on the store reminder.

The rest of the household. Chores that repeat and can be claimed, a shared calendar with reminders, and receipt scanning that reads the paper on the phone and keeps what things cost. One invite link, tapped from any phone, and the person is in.

What differs, honestly

Very little, and none of it in the list. Each platform words its location permission differently: iPhone asks in stages and settles on “Always”; Android calls it “Allow all the time” and, on some phones, has battery settings that can delay a wake-up — the app tells you when it detects that. Calendar import reads whichever calendars are on that phone, so an iPhone sees iCloud and Google, an Android phone sees Google and whatever else is signed in. Receipt scanning uses each platform’s own on-device text recognition.

Premium is bought on whichever phone you have — the App Store, Google Play or the web — and unlocks for everyone in the household regardless of what they carry.

The third surface: any browser

homelist.app in a browser is the same household, free. It is where a long list gets typed with a real keyboard, where a term of school dates gets pasted in one go, and where whoever does not want another app on their phone can still take part. Two things stay on the phone, because browsers cannot do them: the store reminder, which needs a geofence, and receipt scanning, which needs the camera.

For families in particular

A family grocery list on iPhone and Android is the common case, not the edge case: parents on one platform, teenagers on the other, a grandparent on whatever was cheapest. Everyone gets the same list, the same chores and the same calendar, and a teenager can add cereal from their own phone exactly the way a parent can. Nobody has to switch phones to be included. More for families.