A Family App for All: The 11 Best Apps for the Whole Family

family app choices

Scheduling all of the events and keeping track of a busy family can be tough, but there’s a family app (or several) that can work perfectly for your family. We’ve taken a look at the top ten family apps to help you stay organized and connected.

The parenting years can be a hectic time in life. And the challenges COVID-19 brought us made it especially difficult to have meaningful face-to-face interactions with many of our loved ones. While we can always make a phone call or see people via Zoom video chats, there’s something especially comforting about knowing there are family apps designed to help make your life easier! If you’re looking to manage calendars, chores, and to-do lists, look no further than these top eleven must-have apps.

What’s the Best Family App?

The best family app for you depends entirely upon your family’s wants, goals, and needs. If you have older kids and want to keep track of them, you might want to use a tracking app. If scheduling meals or events seems overwhelming, a calendar app might best suit your needs. These questions might help guide your quest for the perfect app before downloading it.

  • Will we actually use it?
  • Will everyone who needs to download it?
  • Will it make our lives easier?
  • Will it enrich our time as a family?
  • How will this app use my family’s data?

In addition to these apps, there might be apps that aren’t explicitly in the “fam-tech” sector that might also improve your family life, like Signal for messaging or a shared Apple or Google calendar for scheduling. If those solutions are already working for you, keep on using them! At FamilyApp, we have yet to find our dream family app, but here are some good solutions to get you started.

What’s the Best Family App for Meal Planning?

1. Lala Breakfast

Getting your kids or teens to eat balanced, nutritional meals can often seem like an exercise in futility. But the creators of the Lala Breakfast family app for iPhone help take the stress out of the morning routine. This app for recipes and meal planning even allows your kids to get involved in the process. They’ll be able to select from a variety of foods, and this will create a shopping list for parents, which is great motivation to prioritize your family mealtime. And, when kids are more involved in the recipe-building process, it’s more likely they’ll get a meal they like! You can also check out their sister Lala Lunchbox app for some meal ideas later in the day.

2. Maple

Maple’s robust calendars and helpful preloaded plans and ideas provide additional structure and order to your daily routine. Its interactive family chats and notes features offer an insightful way for families to communicate basic needs like grocery lists. Its pre-loaded to-do lists, for everything from planning a racecar birthday party to finding affordable childcare, can also take some of the pressure off organizing big events.

3. Remember the Milk

Available for Apple, Android, and Blackberry, Remember the Milk is exactly what it sounds like: your one-stop shopping list! We’ve all been in those situations where we forget an ingredient at the grocery store and don’t want to run back. For that, this top family app functions as a to-do list and reminder that ensures you never have to do that again. You can always remember the chicken, pasta, soup, sauce, potatoes, or whatever else you need for your special baked casserole. It even provides a recipe collection! Since you’ll be able to sync it across more than one device, all family members can immediately update their calendars. So your recipes will be able to rise to new heights!

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

What Is the Best Family App for Chores?

4. OurHome

Ever feel overwhelmed by basic organization tasks or chores and wonder how to get your little one involved? Whether taking out the garbage or cleaning their room, it can be challenging to get them to help out. Luckily, OurHome is perfect for tackling the to-do list. Its gamified task management system rewards you and your family for completing all the fun and mundane tasks, from budgeting to feeding the animals. So subscribers can get their kids in on the fun of taking care of chores around the house. As an added bonus, they’ll be saving time and frustration. Its points system and ranking is another motivation for checking off items on the to-do list.

5. BusyKid

Offering your children an allowance for a chore well done is an important tool for teaching your kids about money. And the BusyKid app in the family app store can make this task even easier! In addition to providing chore suggestions, your children can complete their calendar chore charts at their own pace. Once they’ve completed a chore to your satisfaction, you can transfer money through your bank account. Whether they want to save it or cash it out is up to them!

6. Homey

Homey is the best app for keeping the house in order and teaching the younger members of the household financial responsibility. The app syncs across all devices in the household allowing families to create savings jars with financial goals. You can also set weekly or monthly recurring chore lists for each family member. If a one-time chore pops up, you can send a picture to your child with a deadline, and when the chore is completed, your child can send you a photo back. Homey also allows you to manage allowances while teaching responsibility by setting some chores as responsibilities with no compensation and others as jobs with a reward.

What’s the Best Family App for Scheduling?

7. Cozi

This great family app is available for Apple, Android, Amazon Fire, and Windows at the app store. With Cozi, you can simplify the hectic schedule of your family! These days, kids and parents are busy and running in 10 different directions. Cozi can easily organize activities, to-do lists, appointments, and shopping lists so that you all know what’s going on. It can be hard to stay in the know, but using Cozi as your family calendar can make it easier.

Image by TeroVesalainen from Pixabay

8. Life360

Like Family Locator, this GPS tracking app is available on Android and Apple devices for those who need to know where everyone is. If you have a big family, Life360 can be the ideal way to keep tabs on everyone. In addition to being able to communicate, this family app allows location sharing. You can even choose to talk in group chats. With so many everyday events, Life360 can be ideal for staying in touch with parents, grandparents, and other relatives.

9. FamilyWall

In these days of information sharing through Facebook and Twitter, it can seem like your personal data is up for grabs. Fortunately, FamilyWall is a secure family app iOS offers to share photos, events, and to-do lists with everyone. It even has a color-coded calendar that shows all the upcoming events for your family and a chat function. Its real-time locator can use GPS tracking to find family members or their devices on a map. And, more importantly, geofencing will inform you if your kids travel to a new location.

What’s the Best Family App for Memories?

10. Steller

It can be a fun pastime for parents and kids to get together and make a picture book of a special event. And the Steller family app can do the legwork for you! To create your own family story, all you have to do is add the words and the photos. Steller will provide a variety of striking layouts so that you can share a vacation, birthday party, or graduation. While you can put this story on social media, privacy settings will ensure it’s only shared with those you choose. It’s integrated with third parties, too, so you can get fun offers from travel destinations to keep exploring the world with your family.

11. Chatbooks

It’s hard to take time to preserve all your family photos amidst the busyness of everyday life. But fear not, Chatbooks has you covered! This fantastic app empowers tech-savvy parents to easily take photos from their phones and create photo books. It links to your social media account, so you can conveniently preserve all of those fun memories for years to come. It’s a fantastic way to use technology to connect with family members who might not be online since you can print out a lovely book for great-grandparents and extended family members.

Get Everyone Connected With a Family App!

With life as busy as it is, it can be hard to keep up with basic family schedules and communication. Even little innovations, like turning family recipes into a fun game, can go a long way.

These eleven family-friendly apps are a great place to start connecting with your family and loved ones online. Do you have a favorite family app for 2023? Share on social #getfamilyapp! With an app out there for every purpose, there’s no reason your family can’t stay in touch and organized.

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