Picking more than one household at once

The control

A tick box says what a radio button cannot

The old menu offered one house at a time, plus an entry called "all my households" that opened a screen explaining there was nothing behind it yet. That entry was honest and it was also the only place in the app where choosing more gave you less.

The menu is a list of tick boxes now, with a select-all row above them. Two houses ticked is two houses in view, everywhere the scope reaches.

You cannot untick the last one. The tick simply does not come off, because a screen with no household chosen is a screen with nothing on it and no way to say why.

What follows it

One list, sorted by when things happened

The thread list reads every house you have ticked in a single request and sorts the result by when each room was last spoken in — so it reads as one week rather than as three households stapled together.

Every row names its house. On a single-house view no row names anything, because a household repeated down a page you already know the household of is a word saying nothing.

Tapping a row takes you into that house and opens the thread there, under that household’s own rules. Bobby is not addressable from the combined view and the screen says so rather than offering a box that would swallow what you typed: he answers in one thread, in one household, with that household’s tools.

Choosing nothing

Not the same as choosing everything

Having chosen nothing and having ticked every box look identical today and stop looking identical the moment you join a fourth household. The first should include it. The second should not, because you ticked the boxes that existed when you ticked them.

The app keeps those apart, and so does the request it sends.

A house you have left

Drops out of the selection on its own

If you leave a household while it is ticked, the server answers for the houses you are still in and says which those were. The app compares that with what it asked for, drops the one that has gone, and tells you it did.