Milestone release
pon 3.0 is here — rebuilt from the ground up
Today is a special day for us: pon 3.0 is available on the App Store — the biggest update in more than ten years of pon. Not a reworked version, but a completely new app: every line rewritten, on the most modern iOS foundations, with a new design, a new Watch app and a new iPad app.
And yet: pon stays pon. Everything you know works the way it always has — your lists, sharing, the smart sorting. Just faster, prettier, and with a few genuine superpowers.
Just say it
Fill your shopping list without typing: dictate “2 cartons of milk, 10 eggs and coffee” — pon recognises products, quantities and attributes and files everything correctly. Works with Siri too. Speech recognition runs entirely on your device.
The pantry that keeps itself
A pantry feature is one of the most requested — and most apps solve it the same way: you log every package in and out by hand. Let’s be honest: nobody keeps that up for long.
pon takes a different path. The app learns your pantry instead of making you maintain it. From your shopping, pon learns how often you buy something and how quickly you use it up. It also knows typical shelf lives — and from that it can work out what is still there, what is running low and what you had better use up before it expires.
Is it accurate to the gram? No — pon does not ask questions when you take something off the shelf and put it back. But it is surprisingly close, it gets better with every shop, and it costs you: nothing. Which is exactly why it works.
pon learns — and only on your device
Behind 3.0 sit a whole set of machine-learning models and a small AI model for suggestions: sorting your list in your supermarket’s order, buying rhythms (“coffee is due again”), package sizes, prices, plus statistics about your own shopping.
The most important part is not on the spec sheet: everything pon learns, analyses or suggests happens exclusively on your device — using the on-device capabilities iOS provides — and stays there, locally or in your own iCloud. The only thing our servers ever see are shared lists on their way to the people you share them with — as a relay, not for analysis. No external tracking, no ads, no subscription. That has always been true of pon, and it stays true.
New everywhere
The Apple Watch app has been rewritten from scratch — with your list on your wrist and complications for your watch face. The iPad app finally makes proper use of the big screen. Plus: widgets and a Live Activity for the shop you are in, loyalty cards always at hand, and the new iOS 26 design.
Speaking of loyalty cards: they get along famously with WalletCard, our second app. Cards you keep there show up in pon by themselves — and at the checkout, pon reminds you of the right one.
pon now speaks 12 languages (Portuguese even comes in two variants) and supports 28 regions — with fully translated product catalogues and each country’s supermarkets.
💡 Two little tips to finish
The list overview greets you in Icelandic one day and Swahili the next — 155 greetings from 56 languages, matched to the time of day. Tap the greeting and pon tells you what it means, where it is spoken and how to pronounce it — with audio. And pon keeps count of how many you have discovered. How many will you find?
And: not a fan of the colourful artwork in the app — you would rather keep it plain? No problem, you can change that too, entirely as you like.
What’s next?
We are far from done: the Android app is in the works, and a public API for your own ideas around pon is coming soon as well.
Honestly, though
pon 3.0 is new from the ground up — and we have spent months testing, measuring and polishing. Still, with this much new code one rule holds: somewhere, a bug is hiding. If you run into one, write to us — we read every message and fix things quickly. Until then: be a little patient with us. It gets better week by week.
Free — and staying that way
pon has always been free and remains so: no ads, no subscription, no tracking. If you like pon and want to give something back, we would love your support — a voluntary contribution that helps development and changes nothing about pon being free for everyone.
Thank you for using pon — here’s to the next ten years!