Especially when they help us save money.  Or time.  Or both.

Shopper is the No. 1 grocery app on iPhone, letting you create a shopping list and add to it anytime by typing in the name of what you need or by taking a photo of it.  Pretty awesome.  Even more awesome is that Shopper integrates weekly flyers from some of our favorite stores and lets you know when any coupons are available.  Shopper covers stores like Target, Best Buy, CVS, Lowes, AJ’s Fine Foods, Albertson’s, Giant Food, Nordstrom, Publix, Raley’s, and more.

Find healthy foods and manage your grocery list with Shopper

ShopRite just announced that it is launching an iPhone app so that shoppers can search and find the sale prices from its weekly circulars.  And of course, there are already dozens of nutrition, restaurant and shopping apps out there, whether it’s the Meijer WineList app, the Good Guide app, which ranks more than 70,000 products on health, environmental and social performance, or the Whole Foods Marketplace app, which offers directions to the nearest store and 2,000 free recipes. Many feature mobile coupons, which allow smartphone users to save money at the register, without ever touching a mouse or a piece of paper.

So, does all this “app-iness” prove that Americans are increasingly in love with grocery lists?

“No,” says Phil Lempert, the consumer trends expert known as the Supermarket Guru. “It proves we are in love with apps.” He expects the proliferation to continue, and for many of them to do very well, even after the novelty wears off.

“These food applications allow us to make decisions in a supermarket about nutrition, whether something is available in an organic form, find out about food allergies — and it brings it all right down to the store base. These are going to be very successful.”

But will our love for apps lead to an ultimate replacement of the grocery shopping experience altogether in lieu of ordering our groceries online and having them shipped to our front door?  Lempert doesn’t think so.  And he can’t envision a world without supermarket shopping, unless it’s for the most boring, unemotional food purchases.

“Our smart refrigerators will have scales on the shelves, for example, and be able to let us know that based on past usage, we’re running low on milk, or our smart pantries will be able to tell us we need canned tomatoes,” he says. “But produce? Meat? The fun foods? No. We’re not going to stop wanting to shop for that — we love it. We really get into it,” he says. “Food is very primal, and an online experience is never going to replicate the excitement we get walking around in a store.”