Google Home will Own your ‘Keep’ Shopping Lists Starting Today: April 10, 2017

Google Home to have Primary Google Shopping List

If you’ve got any shopping lists on Google Keep that were made via Google Assistant, all of them will be necessarily moved to the Google Home and Google Express apps on your smartphone starting today, April 10, 2017. The mandatory move takes effect today, following which you can only access those shopping lists on these apps by tapping the List icon or using the shortcut on Google Assistant. All the data will be stored on a “primary Google Shopping List,” according to Google.

If you still prefer to have your lists on Keep, Google suggests that you create copy the old lists, create new ones and then delete the old ones before the move is made.

If you missed the deadline, you can still copy them from the Google Home and Google Express apps. New items added to the new lists you create on Google Keep won’t be automatically moved to the Google Home or Express app after this.

 

Though this move is targeted at US users of the Google Home smart speaker, as well as Google Express users, it will likely affect international users as well. The only problem is, Google isn’t very clear about how people without the Google Home hub should handle this situation.

The strategy is clear – make shopping lists accessible via Google Home or Google Express so people can conveniently place their orders (and compete with Amazon Alexa on Amazon Echo in the process?), but it seems like a bit of a sudden decision.

While this could boost usage of Google Assistant on Google Home to order stuff through Google Express, it’s not clear how much traction the company can gain against the online retail giant Amazon. The Alexa assistant on Amazon Echo and other devices can order directly from the Prime catalog of products, but with Google Express, the order will be placed with various big box retailers that Google has tied up with around the country.

It could be a useful thing in the US, where Google Express currently operates across the breadth of the country. But what about outside the country? Does having your Google Keep lists moved to the Google Home or Google Express app make sense if neither the device nor the service is available in your country?

Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for Google to clarify several things for international users, and it’s even more important now that they’ve launched Google Home in the UK as well.

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