Family apps come in two generations. The difference is smaller than it looks.

Facts about other companies checked 12 August 2026, from their own App Store listings and websites. Prices and ownership change; check the source before deciding.

If you have gone looking for a family organizer recently you will have noticed the market splits cleanly in two. On one side, apps that have existed for a decade and are built around a shared calendar. On the other, a wave of apps barely a year old that describe themselves as a family operating system and lead with AI. It is worth understanding what actually separates them, because it is not what either side's marketing says.

We make one of these apps. That is a reason to read this sceptically, and a reason we have kept it to facts you can check yourself — every claim below comes from a public App Store listing or the company's own site, and we say where.

The first generation: type it all in

Cozi, FamilyWall, TimeTree, FamCal. Different apps, same shape: a shared calendar with lists bolted on, and a promise that the family will finally be organised once everything is in it.

That model works, and for a lot of families it has worked for years. Its cost is the thing people actually complain about in reviews: everything has to be carried in by hand. The school letter arrives as a PDF and becomes a typing job. The dentist confirms by email and becomes a typing job. The WhatsApp message about Thursday becomes a typing job. And because the typing job is nobody's job, it becomes one parent's job — which is the part that eventually kills the habit.

The second failure is quieter. An organizer only helps if it is complete, and completeness depends on the least motivated adult in the house entering things. One person maintaining a beautiful shared calendar that the other never opens is not a shared calendar. It is a diary with an audience of one.

The second generation: send it a photo

Since 2025 a different pitch has appeared: stop typing, just send the thing. Photograph the letter, forward the email, say it out loud — the app works out that it is an event on the 14th, that it concerns your son, and that someone has to bring a costume.

This is a real improvement and we are not going to pretend otherwise: we built the same thing, because the manual-entry problem is the actual problem. Going from open app → new task → type → pick a person → pick a date to photograph it is not a feature, it is a different relationship with the app. It is the difference between a tool you maintain and a tool that maintains itself.

What actually changed, and what didn't

What changed is the input method. What did not change is everything downstream of it. Both generations end up holding the same thing: where your children are on Tuesday, who your family's doctor is, what your household buys, when you are away from the house. A photo-first app does not hold less of that than a calendar-first app. It holds the same amount, faster, plus one new thing — the content you sent to a model in order to get there.

So the questions that decide whether you will be glad about this in three years are not generational at all. They are the same four questions either way:

• Is there an export, and what does it produce? This is the one that makes every other answer reversible. An app with a real export is a decision you can undo.
• Where is the company, and where does the data sit? Not the same question — a European company can and often does store data elsewhere.
• If it has AI, whose model, and on what terms? Retained for how long, used for training or not. We wrote a separate page on what to ask and where to find the answer.
• Does the price cover the family or one account? Two parents on separate subscriptions is a different number from the one on the pricing page.

The part nobody puts in a comparison table: these companies get bought

This is the real lesson of 2026, and it applies to both generations at once.

The first generation consolidated. Cozi and FamilyWall — for years presented as the obvious alternatives to each other — now sit under the same owner. FamilyWall was acquired by OurFamilyWizard in 2024; both are part of In Tandem. If you switched from one to the other for reasons of ownership or data handling, you switched within a single company.

The second generation is consolidating before it has finished arriving. Maple, one of the three apps most often named in the new wave, announced it had been acquired by Wander and is shutting down on 31 December 2026 — after which, in its own words, all data will be deleted with no way to recover it. That is not a criticism of Maple; being acquired is a normal outcome and an early market is supposed to look like this. It is a description of the risk you take when you move a decade of family logistics into a one-year-old app.

We are a one-year-old app. This risk includes us, which is exactly why we would rather write it down than let you discover it. The protection is not picking a big company — Maple's users had a funded company too. The protection is picking one you can leave, and checking that before the announcement rather than after. If you are in this position right now, we wrote the route out: getting your family out of Maple.

Where we sit, plainly

Somiya is second-generation in how you put things in and deliberately old-fashioned about everything after that. Photograph the school letter and it becomes the right task for the right person. Then: the data stays on EU-owned infrastructure in the EU, there is no analytics SDK in the app, the AI provider works under a zero-retention agreement and never trains on your content, and there is an export button that gives you your calendar as .ics, your lists as CSV and the whole account as JSON, any day you like, including day one.

What we do not have, and you should weigh: no Android and no web version yet — if half your family is on Android, this is not currently a question of preference, it is a blocker. No free plan, only a 14-day trial. And a track record measured in months, next to Cozi's fifteen years.

If you want the same comparison with the individual apps rather than the categories, we keep those separately and they include the parts where the other app wins: vs Cozi, vs TimeTree, vs FamilyWall. There is also an honest round-up of the field, in which we are not first at everything.

Questions

What is a "family operating system"?

Marketing language for a family app that accepts unstructured input — a photo, a voice note, a forwarded email — and turns it into structured events and tasks, rather than making you fill in a form each time. It is a genuine change in how the app is used. It is not a change in what the app knows about you.

Is an AI family organizer better than a shared calendar?

At the thing families complain about — the endless manual entry — clearly yes. At the things that matter over years, it is unrelated. A newer app is not more portable, more private or more permanent by virtue of being newer, and the current crop is mostly iPhone-only and mostly a year old.

Which of these apps share an owner?

Cozi and FamilyWall both sit under OurFamilyWizard, part of In Tandem; FamilyWall was acquired in 2024. Maple has been acquired by Wander and closes on 31 December 2026. Checked 12 August 2026.

Should I wait for the new apps to settle down?

Waiting has a cost too — the year you spend waiting is a year of typing. A more useful rule than waiting: pick whichever app fits, and export it once, early, while you are still cheerful about it. If the export works, you have taken most of the risk out of the decision. If it does not, you have learned the important thing on day one instead of on the day of the announcement.

Somiya is a family organizer for families who are done retyping their own lives: photograph it, and it becomes the right task for the right person, with the reminder going to whoever has to act. No ads, encrypted on your phone and on EU servers, exportable from the first day. €9.99 a month or €59.99 a year for up to 8 people, with a 14-day free trial.

Get Somiya on the App Store →

Something here out of date or wrong? Tell us at hello@somiya.app and we will correct it — including when the correction does not suit us.