Google is moving Shopping List and other notes into one app to worry about, Keep

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Enlarge / The grocery items and random thoughts you shout at your phone or your speaker are now kept in Google Keep, not in Assistant. Assistant, which in 2018 earned its own monorail wrap at CES in Las Vegas. (credit: Getty Images)

Google Assistant, the app that was once Google's guiding star and is now slowly losing features, is handing over control of notes and lists to Google Keep. This is somewhat good news, as Keep is a decent note-keeping app. But it's also concerning because there's now one major place to keep your data that Google might one day abandon.

As spotted by 9to5Google, Google is moving the Shopping List and other notes you may have dictated to its voice-centered Assistant into Google Keep. Google Keep is originally where the Assistant kept your shopping list, but in 2017, Google moved it into Google Express. Express was Google's shopping-centered site that used to offer an Amazon-Prime-like membership, but it has morphed somewhat into the Google Shopping storefront. As Ars' Ron Amadeo emphatically noted at the time, moving the shopping list created a new, weird, ad-link-littered, non-intuitive place to store the fact that you need to buy more cat food.

Google brought support for storing shopping and other lists in other apps in 2019. This included Keep, but also third-party apps like Any.do, AnyList, and Bring. Third-party support ended in June, so now there's just Keep.

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