Maple Family Assistant

All it took was 30 mins signing up, messing with the app, testing it out… there’s literally a typo on the first form field when signing up. Calendar screen is cluttered, and barely viewable in modes like weekly view. And I couldn’t scroll to see other days. The calendar tab shows all tabs, menus, account info, so much so that there’s only like 30% screen real estate left for the actual calendar. Plus, for the free version they hold back weekend planning! Ridiculous, it makes it that much harder to try it out. So I thought, OK, we’d be using it on a family iPad mostly, so I installed it there… even more unusable. Wow… calendar view would not even show the full week and Friday was hanging off the right side of the screen. Again, scrolling left or right didn’t work… so I rotated it, and then the left menu bar (which again, takes up an unnecessary 25% of screen space) overlaps the Monday/Tuesday in a glitchy way, with text all crashing together. Then no buttons worked, and seems the app has frozen. Granted, this was an iPad Air that’s 5+ years old, but it has no problems with any other apps. Maybe this is why the App Store only shows 2 images and barely shows you what the calendar screens look like. Deleted apps, deleted account, sorry Maple… going elsewhere.

I love the app, the design, and the simplicity of how to use it. It is great for managing a large household with lots of activities. It’s extremely handy to be able to share folders with babysitters, other family members, and create chore charts, and to do lists and really so much more. I love all the updates that continue to stream in and it feels like Christmas when I see they have added a new ability to this app. I did however give this app 4 stars because I am struggling with when I add information to any list, note, meal plan, or folder it sometimes pops up with a Error updating message despite being connected to the internet or cell data service. Then it will either crash losing all my inputted data or the item I’m creating will delete all info I have just loaded. I have tried deleting app and reinstalling and it still doesn’t work. I still use it and still love it and I still HIGHLY recommend it for all the moms struggling for a home management system but just be aware of that tiny glitch as your creating folders/files/lists. Double check it adds it so your info doesn’t delete when you close the app.

I used maple when it first came out, i wrote a review and subsequently deleted the app and returned to Cozi until recently when I tried the app and found the improvements great, great work on the roadmap productivity, I paid for the app this time and we now use it for about half of our workflow for managing our household- 2 kids, 2 dogs, 2 adults and our nanny. The main issue we have is that it doesn’t integrate with Alexa, (though we do appreciate the Google calendar integration so can explore ways to use this in other ways), and because we add all our to do items and shopping items to Alexa lists via the voice commands from devices around our house we continue to have to manually update those before doing anything in maple. I would love to be able to update the app on a desktop somehow as the adults in our family don’t have phones on us that much through the day. I looked to see if there were any API docs to be able to add items to lists via postman but don’t see anything that would make this app more extensible. We like the UI, it’s pretty, the billing is a little confusing for a household as the membership appears to be for a person not a household and I wouldnt pay twice to enable our nanny or husband to access the premium app if I have paid for it for myself. We are still exploring ways to use the app to streamline our day to day use of it, more integrations would really help here.