Every developer of a list app secretly believes there is one correct way to sort a shopping list. I know, because I've believed it at least three times — alphabetical (obviously), then newest-first (obviously), then the order of the aisles in your store (that one I still stand by). Then I watched my wife use Listo. She scrolled past my beautiful sorting, found the two things she cared about, and told me the list felt "shuffled".
That was the moment the penny dropped: the right order of a shopping list isn't a sorting algorithm's opinion. Sometimes it's "all the dairy together, because that's one corner of the store". Sometimes it's "the order I'm cooking in on Saturday". And sometimes it's just "this one list matters this week, keep it on top". So instead of picking a winner, Listo now does all three.
Category groups: the list sorts itself into aisles
Switch the sort mode to Category and your items snap into labeled groups — Bakery, Dairy, Beverages, Household — with a small header above each one. "Paine" files itself under Brutărie, "Apa" under Băuturi, without you tagging anything. Walk the store corner by corner and the list empties in order, instead of making you pogo between aisle three and aisle nine.
Things you've already checked off settle quietly to the bottom as one plain group, so the categorized part is always the part you still have to do. And priority items float to the top of their own category — urgent, but not torn out of context.
Manual order: the list stops having opinions
Some lists aren't for walking a store at all. A packing list, a cooking-order list, a "do these errands in this sequence" list. For those, switch to Manual and every item grows a grip: press, drag, drop. The list keeps exactly the order you gave it, on every device, forever — no algorithm quietly tidying up behind you.
Category
Items group themselves by aisle with headers. Best for the weekly supermarket run, zero effort to maintain.
Manual
Drag anything anywhere. Best for lists with a sequence in your head that no app could guess.
One honest note on Manual mode: it still keeps three broad bands — priority items stay in the top band, unchecked items in the middle, checked-off ones at the bottom. You reorder freely within those bands. In practice that's what everyone wanted anyway: nobody drags a bought item back up between two unbought ones on purpose.
Pinned lists: this week's list stays on top
Listo keeps your lists grouped by month, newest first — tidy, but sometimes wrong. The birthday-party list you're filling all week shouldn't sink under three quick Tuesday lists. Open the list's menu, tap Pin, and it floats to the top of the page with a little pin icon and stays there until you unpin it. That's the whole feature. It's also, per the support inbox, one of the most quietly loved.
Where to find it all
- Open Settings → Preferences → Sorting order and pick Category or Manual — or Item name, Created time, and Store order, which are still there for the loyalists.
- In Category mode, tap any item's category badge to move it — Listo remembers your choice for that product from then on.
- To pin a list, open the list's menu and tap the pin. Tap again to release it.
If you share a list with someone — the shop-together kind of sharing — your sort preference stays yours. Your partner can walk the same list in store order while you see categories; the list is shared, the way of looking at it isn't.
All three features are live today, free, on Android and iOS. If your store's layout laughs at my category order, or the dictionary files something absurdly wrong — email me at support@rolisto.com. I read every message, and half of Listo's best behavior started as one of them.
— Andrei