Sept. 26, 2011
The Good
- Can add items to list via barcode scanner, voice, or text
- Lists specials at various stores
- Supports multiple lists
- Syncs with Recipe.com shopping list
The Bad
- Barcode scanner rarely gets items right
- Doesn't show a complete list of local stores
- Can't sync non-Recipe.com shopping lists across devices
- Occasional crashes
The Price
Free
Shopping List from Recipe.com makes a go at being the grocery app that you have to bring to the store with you to make sure that you get everything your household needs. Unfortunately, a finicky barcode scanner, lacking store selection, and some bugs mean you ought to leave this app home until it's improved.
Multiple Lists But No Sharing
Shopping List from Recipe.com starts at the most obvious place: the shopping list. You can either create your own that lives on your phone or sync with your Recipe.com shopping list (this, of course, requires a Recipe.com account, but those are free, easy to set up, and then let you add ingredients from tasty-sounding recipes to your list). Syncing with your Recipe.com list is fast and easy. Lists that live on your phone, on the other hand, will only ever live there; there's no way to sync them to other devices running the app or share them besides email.
I encountered a problem right away when creating my list: the app crashes every time you try to create a list with an apostrophe in it. So forget creating "Sam's List" or "Food for Sally's Party." Not a major issue, but you'd think that's the kind of thing that would be found in testing before the app's release.
Adding Items
You add items to your shopping lists in three ways: via barcode scanner, by speaking the item, or by typing it in.
Barcode scanners that instantly recognize the product are common to many shopping list and grocery apps, with varying degrees of quality. Shopping List from Recipe.com uses technology from RedLaser, one of the best barcode scanner apps. While this means that actually scanning the barcode is easy--just hold the code far enough from your phone for it to be in focus and position the barcode to fill the screen--strangely, Shopping List has a lot of problems scanning products.
In my testing, Shopping List was only able to successfully scan Tropicana orange fuice, Jif peanut butter, and Stash tea. It couldn't recognize a number of brand-name vitamins, generic rice milk (it thought this was soup), a small-brand tofu, Whole Foods brand salsa or almonds, or Purina cat food.
The voice recognition feature wasn't much better. It got Tropicana and vitamins as a generic category, but hung on the processing screen for long enough that I gave up when trying cat food and peanut butter.
Adding items by typing them in worked best. When the app was able to autocomplete an item, it would. Otherwise, it allows you to add any product name to a list.
When you do find an item you want to add to a list, you have to choose which list it goes in each time, rather than selecting the list and then adding a series of items to it. This results in many unnecessary steps and makes adding items to the list a chore.
Needless to say, for a grocery app to be truly useful, it has to be easy and accurate when adding items. Shopping List from Recipe.com is neither of those things right now.
Specials and Stores--Some of Them
When you do add an item to a grocery list, the app shows you specials on that item at local supermarkets. This is a nice feature, but it would be nicer if the selection of stores was more complete.
While you can use the iPhone's built-in GPS to find your location (or approximate location; the app succeeded in finding me in Providence, but put me in the wrong zip code and section of the city), don't expect to see all of your nearby stores.
For instance, while the app offered me most of the major local supermarkets, it left off Trade Joe's, Target, and Walmart, despite Walmart being the country's largest supermarket.
The Bottom Line
Shopping List from Recipe.com has all the ingredients of a good grocery list app. Unfortunately, some of those ingredients don't work well--the barcode scanner or voice recognition--while others, like the store finder, are too limited. There are better grocery list apps out there. Until this one is improved, use one of them.
What You’ll Need
An iPhone or higher, iPod touch or higher, or iPad running iPhone OS 4.0 or later.
