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If your grocery app stopped syncing with Alexa and you have been trying to fix it, stop. It is not your account, your device or your setup. Amazon switched off the interface that made it work, and no amount of unlinking and relinking will bring it back.
Here is what actually changed, what still works, and how to get your list somewhere useful.
What Amazon switched off
Amazon's own developer documentation is unambiguous:
As of July 1, 2024, List skills and the List Management REST API to access Alexa lists, such as the Alexa Shopping and To-Do lists, in your skills or apps are no longer supported.
That single sentence explains a wave of one-star reviews. Until that date, an app like AnyList or Todoist could read and write Alexa's built-in shopping list directly. You said "Alexa, add milk to the shopping list", Alexa wrote it to its own list, and the third-party app pulled it across. The item appeared in both places and nobody had to think about which one was the real one.
After that date, the bridge is gone. Alexa still keeps a shopping list; outside apps simply cannot see it.
Amazon is equally clear that this is a developer-facing change rather than a customer-facing one: customers can still reach their Alexa lists in the Alexa app, the Amazon app and the Amazon retail site. The list did not go anywhere. What went away is everything else being able to read it.
What still works, and where the list actually lives
The native list is intact and reachable from more places than most people realise:
- In the Alexa app: tap More → Lists & Notes → Shopping.
- In the Amazon shopping app.
- On amazon.com.
- In the Whole Foods Market app.
- By voice on any Echo device: "Alexa, what is on my shopping list?"
Adding and removing by voice works exactly as it always did. "Alexa, add butter to my shopping list." "Alexa, remove butter from my shopping list." None of that was affected.
Custom lists
Alexa is not limited to Shopping and To-do. Say "Alexa, create a list" and it will ask what to call it. A named list behaves the same way — you add to it by name, and it appears alongside the others in Lists & Notes. Useful for splitting a hardware-store list from the weekly groceries, which is otherwise the main reason people wanted a third-party app in the first place.
How third-party apps work now
The apps did not disappear. They changed how you talk to them.
Because they can no longer touch Alexa's own list, they operate as ordinary skills with their own invocation name. That means the phrasing changes from an instruction to Alexa into an instruction through Alexa:
| Before July 2024 | Now |
|---|---|
| "Alexa, add milk to the shopping list" | "Alexa, tell AnyList to add milk" |
| "Alexa, remove candy from the shopping list" | "Alexa, tell AnyList to remove candy" |
It works. It is also three words longer every single time, and everyone else in the house has to learn the new phrasing or their items land in the wrong list. That friction is the whole story of this change, and it is why some households have simply moved back to the native list.
The practical decision: pick one list and make it the real one. Running Alexa's list and an app list side by side used to be free because they synced. Now it is two lists that quietly disagree, and the disagreement always surfaces in the supermarket.
Getting items out of the list
There is no export button, and no supported way to pull the list programmatically — that is precisely what was removed. What exists is sharing:
- In the Alexa app, open the list and tap Share, then pick where to send it. It goes out as text, so it lands in a message, a notes app or an email.
- By voice: "Alexa, share my shopping list", then name a contact when prompted.
Sharing sends a snapshot, not a live link. Whoever receives it gets the list as it was at that moment; later additions do not follow. For a single trip that is usually enough, and for anything more it is an argument for both people using the same account's list rather than passing copies around.
Share options move between app versions, so if the button is not where this describes, it has been relocated rather than removed.
If you are choosing today
Use Alexa's native list if your household already lives in the Amazon ecosystem, you shop with the Amazon or Whole Foods apps, and you want voice to be the fast path. It is the only option where "Alexa, add milk" still works with no extra words.
Use a dedicated list app if you need features Alexa's list does not have — aisle sorting, recipe imports, genuinely shared editing between two phones — and you accept the longer voice phrasing. The apps are better at being lists. They are now worse at being voice-driven.
What no longer exists is the option people actually had before: both, kept in step automatically.
If the speaker itself is the part you are still deciding on, our smart home gear page covers what to look for before buying — and if you are adding devices to the same account, it is worth reading how to secure a smart home first, because account access matters more here than any network setting.
Sources
The deprecation date and wording are quoted directly from Amazon's Alexa Skills Kit deprecated features documentation, which also confirms that customer access to the lists in the Alexa app, Amazon app and retail site is unaffected. The replacement invocation pattern for third-party skills is standard Alexa custom-skill behaviour rather than anything specific to one app; the exact wake phrase depends on the skill's invocation name.
If you'd like to read other articles similar to The Alexa Shopping List: What Changed, and What Still Works You can visit the category Voice Assistants.