Maple - Household Planner 12+

So much improvement, room for more!

I used maple when it first came out, i wrote a review and subsequently deleted the app and returned to Cozi until recently when I tried the app and found the improvements great, great work on the roadmap productivity, I paid for the app this time and we now use it for about half of our workflow for managing our household- 2 kids, 2 dogs, 2 adults and our nanny. The main issue we have is that it doesn’t integrate with Alexa, (though we do appreciate the Google calendar integration so can explore ways to use this in other ways), and because we add all our to do items and shopping items to Alexa lists via the voice commands from devices around our house we continue to have to manually update those before doing anything in maple. I would love to be able to update the app on a desktop somehow as the adults in our family don’t have phones on us that much through the day. I looked to see if there were any API docs to be able to add items to lists via postman but don’t see anything that would make this app more extensible. We like the UI, it’s pretty, the billing is a little confusing for a household as the membership appears to be for a person not a household and I wouldnt pay twice to enable our nanny or husband to access the premium app if I have paid for it for myself.
We are still exploring ways to use the app to streamline our day to day use of it, more integrations would really help here.

Developer Response ,

Wow, so happy to hear you are enjoying the improvements. We are truly doing our best over here! The integration idea with Alexa is a really cool idea and I'm sure something our team will explore in the future. In the meantime, we have some really really exciting updates coming over the course of the next few months that we hope will continue to make managing day-to-day life way easier. Thank you for taking the time to write this review. It means a lot to hear you can see and feel the improvements we've been working so hard to make.

Robust, but lacking a few key features.

So far I really like this app as a competitor to FamilyWall. However, it misses out on a few things that I personally find very valuable—I cannot customise the defaults on the Calendar, so every time I input a new event I have to take the time to adjust the notifications, and make sure the event doesn’t get added to my food prep list (seriously?). The calendar also doesn’t include public holidays, and there’s no option to set task events (like recurring bills) to not show on the main calendar. This clutters my scheduling calendar quite a lot and makes the various event lists less desirable to use.

It outshines FamilyWall in the impressive offerings for tools and including the meal prep and budgeting options inside the paywall. However, the calendar pitfalls are (to me) major drawbacks, considering the calendar is the most important function for a busy family. Event lists? Awesome addition. Not being able to customise those key functions? Not awesome.

My final gripe—no swipe to delete function on to-do lists, and no “delete all completed tasks” option. You have to manually select, scroll, and click delete on every list item to clear them away completely after they’ve been checked off.

I want to love this app! It has some awesome features and is beautifully robust—but these little functionality features make it hard to want to switch from my current workhorse.

Reminders

I love this application. The only two downfalls I wish would be added in the next update are as follows: I am a mother of four. Two of them only have Apple watches, the other two are toddlers and have different schedules since one is in sports the other is still too young; just turned toddler. This application is great at helping me organize except I cannot add family members to create their own tasks and set reminders because it wants more clientele. Therefore, you must invite someone into your “household” in order to assign tasks. It would make organizing much easier if I could list other family members who do not have a phone. My last dislike of the application is one that I think definitely needs to be revised by the developers. The time reminder is simply a notification ding set at a max and minimum of 10 minutes. Nothing more, nothing less. It makes it almost useless because then I have to go into my clock application to set alarms and label them with what I just labeled and set a reminder in, Maple.

Developer Response ,

Hi there! Thanks so much for this feedback. I've shared both examples with our product team. We definitely have both feature requests documented on our roadmap. Apologies it's falling short for you in these two ways but I assure you we are working hard behind the scenes to improve Maple for you as quickly as we can! Feel free to reach us at support@growmaple.com if you have more feedback.