AnyList Blog

Massive Update to Meal Planning

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Just in time for resolutions season, we’re excited to announce a huge update to meal planning in AnyList!

This update is packed full of improvements, making it easier than ever to get started with meal planning and stick with it for the long run, so you can reduce stress, save money, and eat better.

Check out our launch video to see everything that’s new:

The Queue gives you a place to keep track of recipes you want to make soon, without worrying about calendar dates.
The Ideas tab is filled with personalized suggestions from your recipe collection to provide inspiration when you’re drawing a blank on what to make.
Templates save time by letting you easily reuse meal plans you follow regularly, like a weekly dinner routine or a cherished holiday menu.
And even more! This update is chock-full of new features: adding ingredients to meal plan notes, planning for leftovers, searching your meal planning calendar, a grid view for recipes, and more. See our release notes for a full list of what’s new. (Did we mention that we’ve been working on this for a long time? 😄)

AnyList’s meal planning features are available exclusively to AnyList Complete subscribers. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, now is a great time to unlock the full power of AnyList and nail your resolutions for the coming year. With all the money you’ll save by being better organized, wasting less food, and ordering fewer takeout meals, you can’t afford not to upgrade!

We’re eager to hear what you think, so please let us know if you have questions or suggestions.

Thanks for using AnyList and happy New Year!

Google Is Shutting Down the Google Assistant Notes & Lists Integration

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 -0600

Google is shutting down the Google Assistant Notes & Lists integration for non-Google apps on June 20, 2023.

Unfortunately, this means that beginning June 20, it will no longer be possible to use Google Assistant to add items to AnyList.

We know many of our customers rely on AnyList’s integration with Google Assistant and that the loss of this feature is frustrating and disappointing.

We are continuing to communicate with Google and hope to be able to support Google Assistant on Android devices again in the future, but we don’t have anything to announce at this time.

If you’d like to explore other ways to add items to AnyList by voice, please see our support articles for using AnyList with Amazon Alexa and Siri.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions, and we thank you for your continued support.

– Jason & Jeff

Personalize Your Recipe Collections With Full Color Icons

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 -0600

The latest update to AnyList includes hundreds of full color icons for personalizing your recipe collections.

The same icons can also be used with your recipes — useful if you don’t have a photo for a particular recipe.

You can update to the latest version of AnyList from the App Store or Google Play.

We hope you enjoy this update, and if you have any questions or feedback, please let us know.

Introducing Online Shopping

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 00:00:00 -0700

We’re excited to announce that you can now shop online for groceries, right from AnyList! We support many retailers and services, including Instacart, Walmart, Kroger, Safeway, Albertsons, Amazon Fresh, H-E-B, and Shipt.

Online shopping is currently available in the latest version of our iOS app, for customers in the United States. Support for other platforms and countries will be considered for the future.

For full details, including step-by-step screenshots and a complete list of supported retailers and services, please see our help site:

Online Grocery Shopping Overview →

This functionality has been highly requested over the past few years, so we’re excited that it’s now available! If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know. Your feedback is greatly appreciated, and helps us to make AnyList more useful for everyone.

AnyList Widgets for iOS

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0600

Update - October 3, 2020

AnyList v5.17 for iOS, with support for widgets, is available now.

You can learn more about AnyList widgets for iOS on our help page.

We’re pleased to announce AnyList v5.17 for iOS will include support for widgets, so you can quickly access your lists and meal plan right from your home screen.

The update will be available in the coming weeks, but if you’d like to get early access, you can join our TestFlight beta testing program and help us test the update before its release.

Use the List widget to keep track of what’s on a list, without needing to open the app.

Keep frequently used lists just a tap away with the Multiple Lists widget.

Take a quick glance at the Meal Plan widget to see what’s for dinner tonight.

Or use the large Meal Plan widget to see what meals you have planned over the next few days.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please let us know.

Why AnyList Won’t Be Supporting Sign In with Apple

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 00:00:00 -0600

Starting June 30th, Apple will be enforcing a new rule in the App Store requiring many apps to support Sign in with Apple. AnyList is one of the apps affected by this new rule, which means that we must either implement Sign in with Apple or make other changes to our app. After considering the merits of Sign in with Apple, we have decided not to support it. We understand that this may surprise some of our customers, so we’d like to explain in detail why we made this decision.

Third-party login systems like Sign in with Apple cause many user experience and customer support headaches. People don’t remember which login system they used to create their account. (“Hmm, I created this account a couple of years ago. Did I use my email address? Facebook account? Sign in with Apple?”) Simple questions like, “How do I reset my password?” no longer have simple answers and depend on which system you used to create your account, if you can remember. And if you get locked out of your account and used a third-party login system, we may not be able to help you ourselves and will instead have to direct you to another company, with all of the hassles that entails.

In addition to these customer experience problems that are common to all third-party login systems, Sign in with Apple introduces several more that are unique to it.

One problem is that most Apple IDs are tied to an iCloud email address. So most accounts created via Sign in with Apple will use an iCloud email address. But many of those iCloud email addresses are unused and unchecked, because a customer’s “real” email account is their Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail account. If we try to contact a customer using their iCloud email address, they may never see our message. We used to run into this problem constantly with customer support, back when AnyList used the built-in iOS email compose interface for sending support requests. This interface often defaults to using an iCloud email account. So people would ask for help, we’d reply, and they’d contact us again later, angry that we never replied. Our reply was going to their iCloud email account, but they didn’t see it because they only ever looked at their Gmail account, in the Gmail app.

Another issue is Sign in with Apple’s “Hide My Email” feature. With this feature, if you create an account with us, Apple will generate a special email address just for that account. So rather than your email address being john.doe@icloud.com, we will see your email address as something like dpdcnf87nu@privaterelay.appleid.com. While this is an intriguing idea that provides a measure of privacy, in practice it creates numerous support and user experience headaches. Here are a few:

If a customer contacts us asking for support, and we need to look up something in their account, typically we can just ask them for the email address on their account. But with “Hide My Email” that wouldn’t be easily possible, because the customer would have to figure out the privaterelay.appleid.com email address used for their account.
Furthermore, if there are platforms where AnyList doesn’t support Sign in with Apple, like Android, and someone wants to log into their account, they’d have to know their privaterelay.appleid.com email address. (And that certainly won’t be easy to find if you no longer have an iOS device.) And then they’d have to create a password with us, since they wouldn’t be able to sign in using Sign in with Apple.
Finally, for a service like AnyList, which is heavily focused on sharing lists with other people, the “Hide My Email” option greatly complicates collaboration. Typically, customers share a list by typing in the email address of the person they want to share with. If that person already has an account, the list is instantly shared. But with the “Hide My Email” option, your spouse or friends obviously won’t know your privaterelay.appleid.com email address, so when they enter your email address, our systems will believe that you don’t have an account. At that point, you’ll get an email from us asking you to create an account. If you accidentally create a new account, it won’t include the work you’ve done in your existing account created via Sign in with Apple. And if you manage not to make that mistake, then there would be a link between your email address and the account you created with Sign in with Apple, negating the value of hiding your email address.

We agree with Apple that privacy is a fundamental human right, and understand that the “Hide My Email” option in Sign in with Apple is well-intentioned, but it feels like Apple didn’t really think through all of the implications for basic user experience, customer support, and collaboration. At AnyList, we respect your privacy. We’re a small company that makes money when people like our app and pay for it. We do not make money with creepy tracking or by selling your information. When you provide us with your email address, it is never sold, shared, or used to invade your privacy.

Beyond customer experience, there are also many problems that Sign in with Apple creates for us as developers, which has knock-on effects for our customers.

First, implementing support for third-party login systems like Sign in with Apple significantly increases the complexity of handling user accounts in our systems. Instead of having one system for common operations like creating an account and signing in, supporting third-party login systems can quickly turn account management code into a rat’s nest, with special logic necessary to handle each different login system. This is especially true when supporting multiple third-party login systems (e.g., Facebook Login, Google Sign-In, Sign in with Twitter, etc.). This makes maintenance more difficult and error-prone, and if there’s any place where you cannot afford to have any errors, it’s in security-critical code like account management.

It’s also time consuming to implement support for a new third-party login system, particularly for a small company like ours that supports our app on multiple platforms. It’s not enough for us to add Sign in with Apple to our iOS app. We also have to add it to our web app, Mac app, and Android app. (Creating even more complexity, Apple does not provide any real solution for supporting Sign in with Apple on Android, see below.) So if we choose to support Sign in with Apple, that means that we have to spend a significant amount of time to get it working everywhere, rather than spending that time improving the core list, recipe, and meal planning functionality of our app.

As developers, we always have to do our due-diligence in evaluating the security implications of our work. In the last month a massive security flaw was reported in Sign in with Apple, so serious that Apple paid $100,000 to the person who found it. If you read the linked report, you’ll see that this serious flaw was also very simple, which doesn’t provide a lot of confidence. For something as critical as a service for logging into accounts, it doesn’t seem wise to use an immature service (less than a year old) that has recently been the subject of a serious security flaw.

Another sign of Sign in with Apple’s immaturity is the sad state of the documentation for it. Good documentation is critical to facilitating developer adoption of any service. Since Apple is expecting developers to adopt this service by June 30th, it seems reasonable to expect decent documentation. Sadly, like most of Apple’s recent developer documentation, it’s sorely lacking. For example, Apple vaguely states that you can implement Sign in with Apple on Android, but there is no direct documentation on how to do it. We understand that Apple probably doesn’t care much for Android, but if they are going to provide a login system, and are going to force developers of multi-platform apps to adopt it, then providing no real support for a major platform that these multi-platform apps run on is not acceptable.

Finally, from a policy perspective, Apple explicitly states in their usage guidelines, “Apple reserves the right to disable Sign in with Apple on a website or app for any reason at any time.” If customers cannot log into their accounts, then they can’t use our service. Giving a third-party such powerful control over a core part of our service when it’s not absolutely required is unnecessarily risky, in our view.

At this juncture, you may be thinking:

“You have a point, but I use AnyList and it offers to let me sign in with Facebook. Doesn’t it suffer from many similar problems?”
“Anyway, don’t the new App Store Review Guidelines require you to support Sign in with Apple, since you offer Facebook as a sign in option?

These are both excellent points, and it’s absolutely true that some of the arguments above apply to creating an account via Facebook. That’s why we’re also announcing that we’ll be removing Facebook Login from AnyList. Our support for signing up using Facebook was begrudgingly added years ago as an experiment in offering another signup option, but we were never enthusiastic about it. That’s become even more true as time goes on, since Facebook constantly seems to be upping the ante with creepy privacy practices. We use the Facebook SDK to provide login functionality, and every new release of the SDK seems to add new tracking options that are turned on by default, which we have to take action to disable. Furthermore, the Facebook SDK has quality problems, and recently caused a huge number of iOS apps to crash due to a misconfigured server. You can expect to see an AnyList app update soon that removes Facebook Login.

We hope this post has helped to explain why we won’t be supporting Sign in with Apple. We’d love to hear your feedback on this post. If you have any comments or questions, please contact us and we’ll get back to you.

AnyList Now Works with the Google Assistant

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0700

We’re pleased to announce that AnyList now works with the Google Assistant. To quickly add items to your lists, just say, “Hey Google, add milk to my shared grocery list” or, “Hey Google, add sunscreen to my packing list.”

You can choose to sync some or all of your lists in AnyList with your Google Assistant, so you’ll always be ready when inspiration strikes.

To get started, go to the Settings tab in AnyList and select Google Assistant under the Voice Assistants section to link AnyList with your Google Assistant. Step-by-step instructions, including screenshots, are available here:

Link AnyList with the Google Assistant

Once your account is linked, you’ll be able to use your Google Assistant to add items to lists, create new lists, and ask about the contents of your lists. For more information, including a full list of supported commands and answers to frequently asked questions, please see this page on the AnyList Help website.

You can use AnyList with your Google Assistant across a wide variety of devices. Most Android phones have the Google Assistant built-in, and if you have an iPhone, you can download the Google Assistant app. You can also use Google Assistant-enabled speakers, like the Nest Mini, and smart displays, like the Nest Hub Max.

We’ve received many messages asking for AnyList to work with the Google Assistant, so we’re excited that it’s now possible! If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know. Your feedback is greatly appreciated, and helps us to make AnyList more useful for everyone.

AnyList for Android is Out of Beta

Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0600

We’re pleased to announce that AnyList for Android is now out of beta and available to all on Google Play. 🎉 Now you can enjoy the full power of AnyList on both Android and iOS, and you can share and sync across platforms, to keep all of your family & friends on the same page.

Over the last few months, we’ve worked to bring our Android app up to the same level as our iOS app. We’ve added List Themes, Item Prices, Web Photo Search, Location-based Reminders, and much more. So no matter your mobile platform of choice, you can enjoy the same great AnyList experience.

Since our app is brand new on Google Play, we’re starting from square one. If you enjoy AnyList and you’d be willing to leave a review or rating on Google Play for us, we’d greatly appreciate it. 😀

We’re excited to finally be available on Android, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on the app. If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know.

AnyList Complete Pricing Update

Fri, 08 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0700

Effective March 1, 2019 the price of AnyList Complete subscriptions will be changing as follows:

The price of a one year individual subscription will increase from US$7.99 to US$9.99.
The price of a one year family subscription will increase from US$11.99 to US$14.99.

We always strive to offer straightforward pricing that delivers an excellent value, and as part of that effort we’ve held AnyList Complete prices constant since 2014. However, we do need to raise prices occasionally as expenses grow due to inflation and other factors.

We’ve also dramatically expanded the functionality of AnyList Complete since 2014, adding features such as a desktop web app, a Mac app, an Apple Watch app, import of recipes from the web, a meal planning calendar, stores & filters, recipe scaling, web image search, list folders, and item prices.

While we know that no one likes to see prices increase, we hope you’ll be understanding of the need for a modest increase to the price of AnyList Complete.

We greatly appreciate your continued support, which is what allows us to properly maintain the existing app features, continually improve the app with new features, bring the app to new platforms such as Amazon Alexa and Android, and provide great, personal customer support.

We’ve got lots planned for 2019 and beyond, and we always welcome your suggestions for what to work on next. If you have questions or suggestions, contact us and we’ll get back to you. Thanks for your support!

– Jason & Jeff

AnyList for Android is Here 🎉

Fri, 30 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0700

We’re excited to announce that AnyList is now available for Android, at long last. We’ve released a public beta on Google Play. Now you can share lists and stay in sync with family and friends who are using Android phones as well as iOS devices.

As a beta, AnyList for Android is a work in progress. While most of the core functionality of AnyList is available, there are still some features that we are working on. To see the current status of each feature, check our status page for AnyList for Android.

If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know. We are eager to hear your thoughts on AnyList for Android as we continue our development efforts.

AnyList Blog

Massive Update to Meal Planning

Google Is Shutting Down the Google Assistant Notes & Lists Integration

Personalize Your Recipe Collections With Full Color Icons

Introducing Online Shopping

AnyList Widgets for iOS

List Widget

Multiple Lists Widget

Meal Plan Widget

Why AnyList Won’t Be Supporting Sign In with Apple

AnyList Now Works with the Google Assistant

AnyList for Android is Out of Beta

AnyList Complete Pricing Update

AnyList for Android is Here 🎉

AnyList Blog

Massive Update to Meal Planning

Google Is Shutting Down the Google Assistant Notes & Lists Integration

Personalize Your Recipe Collections With Full Color Icons

Introducing Online Shopping

AnyList Widgets for iOS

List Widget

Multiple Lists Widget

Meal Plan Widget

Why AnyList Won’t Be Supporting Sign In with Apple

What about Facebook Login?

AnyList Now Works with the Google Assistant

AnyList for Android is Out of Beta

AnyList Complete Pricing Update

AnyList for Android is Here 🎉