Group shopping app

Why build it

The thing that goes wrong is not the list. It is that someone shops for you and comes home with the wrong yogurt, because they were never told, and nobody wants to send a forty-word text about yogurt. A shared list keeps track of what is needed and says nothing at all about the trip itself, which is where the mistakes actually happen. That is a different problem, and it wants a different app.

What makes it different

The shape is a live trip rather than a list. One person is at the store and everyone else in the group follows along: what is going into the cart, what is still open, how far along the run is. When the shopper hits something in the aisle, an item that is out of stock or a choice they cannot make on your behalf, they raise it against that one item and someone at home answers in seconds. Preferences stick from one trip to the next, so which oat milk you meant stops living in one person’s head.

Where it stands

This one is parked while RoomAid has my full attention. It has its own backend rather than sharing RoomAid’s, and it reuses the infrastructure I build across all of my apps: sign-in, the design system, real-time sync. That means what remains is the live trip itself rather than the plumbing. If you want a note when it moves, the list below is the place.