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.

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