My Collections

The old and new applications have a similar look and feel, so moving from one to the other should be straightforward.

What the new version has but the old doesn't:

• Favourite a collection so that it shows at the top of the list

• Simple image editor to crop and rotate images (from V2.0 of the app)

• iOS support

• Sign in with Apple or Email in addition to Google. Browse public collections anonymously.

• A cleaner UI with improved image transitions

• Multi-item quantities supported in items with labels, e.g. 2/3 pint, 0.5 litres. The add/subtract buttons work with the incremental values.

• A comment system where subscribers to a collection can see and add comments to a collection and the items.

• Theming support. A range of colours and simple themes (paid subscription required)

• Global search. Search across all the collections in a unified search view (paid subscription required)

• CSV export functionality to save all or part of the collection to a file that can be imported into spreadsheets like Excel

• Improved print and share options

• Sort and filter options together in an easily accessible panel

• More robust and less prone to crashes

What the old has but the new currently doesn't:

• Push notifications to be informed when a collection has changed

• HTML editor, but this is being deprecated in favour of Markdown

To be clear, you do not have to migrate unless you want to. We are not removing the apps from the Play Store so if you are happy with the old versions or it has a feature that the new one doesn't, then you can continue using them.

If you already have the old version installed on Android, the new version can be installed alongside it and both versions can co-exist happily. They use the same cloud data so as long as you sign in with the same credentials you will see the same collections in both old and new versions.

Be aware that some of the new features such as part items and quantity labels are only visible in the new version. Furthermore, if you use these features then you should not use the old version to edit items as they may overwrite these features.

If you have a subscription in the old version then the new version will recognise this and you should continue to get the benefits of subscribing in both versions. However, we recommend cancelling the old subscription and starting a subscription with the new version when the old one has completely expired.

The applications can be installed from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.

The original My Collections, and it's siblings My Freezer and My Storage, are Android only apps written in Java to create, manage and share collections. They were released in 2017, initially with My Freezer before we quickly realised the generic nature of the application lent itself to holding collections of any sort. Thus the two variants My Storage and My Collections were created to target specific sections of the Google Play user base.

New features and capabilities were added over time but the underlying architecture of the application was slowly becoming difficult to maintain with each release presenting more management headaches (e.g. broken features like filtering, crashes, outdated libraries). Google has been pushing developers to move from Java to Kotlin too, mainly because it is a more modern language with lots of built in language 'safety' features, but also we suspect because Oracle were being dicks over Android and Java. Our codebase was already becoming out of date.

By 2019 we came to the decision to rewrite the application and looked at the various options. We wanted to support iOS but did not want to maintain two codebases, which left us with two main choices of development language. React Native or Flutter. We sided with Flutter as it had, at the time, more integrated language and framework support. 

The new version of the applications were released late 2019 for Android and 2020 for iOS.