My Collections

Old vs New

This page describes the two main variants of the applications explaining the differences and how to move to the new version.

We are no longer actively developing the old variants (My Storage, My Freezer and My Collections) other than to add compatibility features where a change in the new would break both versions.

New Main Screen

Old Main Screen

Differences

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:

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

New Collection Screen

Old Collection Screen

Migrating

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.

Installing

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

History

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.