Ever since our household became a dual iPhone home, I’ve been looking for a shared list solution that syncs between phones. My wife and I create lists over time, and email or text each other when we think of something that we need- not a very elegant solution. There are a few applications built with this in mind, but they all overthink the problem. Some are so focused on groceries, that they’re useless for other things; Others focus on price tracking and coupons. I don’t care about databases of products and prices. I want a shopping list that I can edit on my phone and automatically shows up on my wife’s.

I started using PlainText to keep track of notes and ideas. It syncs with Dropbox, so all of these notes are automatically synced across all of my devices. Nice. The brainwave came when I considered what would happen when I accessed a Dropbox shared folder in PlainText. I created a Lists folder, shared it with my wife and gave her the same setup: a Notes folder in Dropbox that contains the shared Lists folder. Dropbox takes care of the syncing and basic merging et voilà, we have shared shopping lists!

Shared Lists