Frequently Asked

No — there is no account, no sign-up, and no email address, ever. Everything is stored locally on your phone. Even shared lists work without an account: an anonymous 8-character code (or QR code) connects the two phones.

Absolutely. Your lists live on your device and work fully offline — and so do most of the big features: voice input can run entirely on-device with an offline speech pack, receipt and recipe-photo reading is always on-device, and barcode scans of products you've scanned before work offline too. Only shared lists, new-product barcode lookups, and recipe imports from a URL need a connection.

Yes — tap the floating mic button on your list and say what you need: "milk, bread and two kilos of potatoes" adds all three, quantities included. Voice is add-only by design (it never deletes or ticks things off), and it works in English, German, and Spanish. Full guide: Voice Input.

Tap the scan icon on the List screen and point your camera at any product barcode. The app looks the product up locally first, then on Open Food Facts (a free database of around 3 million products), and adds it — named, categorised, with an emoji — to your list, your pantry, or both. Re-scanning the same product bumps the quantity instead of duplicating it. Full guide: Barcode Scanner.

Yes — three ways: share a recipe page straight from your browser to the app, paste the recipe text, or photograph a cookbook page. The ingredients arrive as a tidy, editable list with quantities and units; you can scale the servings, and pantry staples like salt are unticked by default. Full guide: Recipes.

The Pantry (the fourth tab) tracks what you have at home — quantities, expiry dates, what's running low. Your list shows a "Running low" chip and expiry warnings, and after each shop the app offers to add everything you bought in one tap. There's an optional daily notification too. Full guide: Pantry.

Yes — photograph your receipt after a shop and the app reads the item prices and total onto that trip in History, entirely on your phone. You review everything before it's saved, and you can also edit any trip's items, prices, and discounts by hand. There's even a "Log a shop from a receipt" button for shops you did without the app. Full guide: Receipts & Prices.

The app includes a built-in catalogue of nearly 900 items organised into categories and collapsible subcategories — Produce, Dairy, Bakery, international, baby, pet, and more. A "Most Often Used" section at the top learns what you buy most. Search filters everything as you type, and you can always create a custom item with its own name, emoji, and category.

Tap the ★ star on any past trip in History to pin it to a Favourites section at the top — perfect for your weekly big shop or a recurring list. Tap "Reuse List" on any trip (starred or not) to copy its items onto your current list. And for single items, the "Most Often Used" shelf in the Catalog surfaces your regulars automatically.

Yes — you can keep up to 25 lists and share up to 5 of them. There are two ways to share:

Live shared list — share any list from the Lists sheet and the app creates an 8-character code and a QR code. The other person types the code or scans the QR (from your screen or from a saved image), and from then on both phones see the same list in real time — ticks and additions appear within seconds. No account or email required. Full guide: Lists & Sharing.

Send a copy — share a one-time text snapshot of your list via WhatsApp, email, or any app. The other person doesn't need the app.

Yes. Open the History tab (third tab at the bottom) — every finished shop is saved there automatically as a card, with its items, any prices from a scanned receipt, and your notes. Tap "Reuse List" on any card to shop it again, or the pencil icon to edit it.

When you share a list, the app creates an anonymous code (and matching QR code) and stores that list in Google Firebase's cloud while the share is active, so both phones stay in sync in real time. No account or email is required, the shared data is never linked to your identity, and stopping the share brings the items back to a normal local list. The in-app "Delete My Data" option also removes any shared-list data and the anonymous identifier. If you just send a text copy of a list (WhatsApp, email, etc.), no cloud storage is involved at all.

None. No personal data, no analytics, no tracking SDKs — and the app never talks to any Tim Weston Apps server. Your lists, history, pantry, and receipt photos stay on your phone. The app only goes online when you ask it to: sharing a list (Google Firebase), looking up a new barcode (only the barcode number goes to Open Food Facts), or fetching a recipe page from a URL you chose. Full details are in our Privacy Policy.

Not if you don't want it to. On Android, voice uses the system speech recogniser: with an offline speech pack installed, recognition runs entirely on your device — there's even an "Offline only" mode in Settings that guarantees the internet is never used for voice; without a pack, Android falls back to Google's cloud recogniser. On iPhone, voice uses Apple's Speech Recognition — on-device where your language and device support it, otherwise processed by Apple unless you choose "Offline only". On both, the app itself never records or uploads audio, and Settings shows an honest counter of how much internet voice has actually used.

No. The text recognition that reads receipts and photographed recipe pages is bundled inside the app and runs entirely on your device — no image or text from your photos is ever sent over the network. Receipt photos are stored on your phone, included in your backups, and you can bulk-delete old ones from Settings → Backup.

Our full privacy policy is available at timwestonapps.com/privacy. It's short and written in plain English.