For the better part of 4-5 years now, Wunderlist has been mine and my colleagues backbone to organizing projects. But not only, we kept track or release dates, and keeping basic time tracking of everything there is to do. It’s been great for managing freelance task, Stock item ideas, a place to scribble notes. Moreover, you could add bookmarks, add movies, even home expenses and general tasks. Wunderlist has always been reliable with notifications. Furthermore, it had a great and incredibly fast sync-between devices and has never, ever let us down once. Up until a few weeks ago, it was our “main” tool for, well, everything!
But, a few weeks ago, Microsoft introduced To-Do with a terrible announcement attached to it. That Wunderlist will be shut down.
“Wunderlist will eventually be retired as we continue to reinvent task management with To-Do. In the meantime, there will not be any features brought to Wunderlist, but we will continue to ensure the security of the Wunderlist experience.”
Task Folders
Sub-tasks & Attachments
Yes, although you can Import your Wunderlist tasks to To-Do, I strongly advise against that. Because, well, To-Do doesn’t have any sub-tasks and attachments. Therefore, these get lost somewhere in emptiness of space, and you only get your main thread and tasks. Pretty much a big blow to the back of the head if you kept your Wunderlist nice and organised. I honestly don’t understand why the import feature was even implemented in the first place. Since the To-Do app was announced as a preview ( translation: very, very, very poor beta ) therefore everything you import now, you’ll most likely have to delete and import again. Time management done right *insert sarcasm.
Project / List Collaboration
This is another incredibly painful aspect to see. For many of my projects I ask customers or co-workers to install Wunderlist and we create a shared list. We can all track progress and add ideas in easily, plus attach a tone of screenshots. Not to mention that this is an awesome thing to have when you’re out shopping and you’re wife wants you to get a few more things. Add them to the list, and voila, presto, instant sync and you get the list. Well, not anymore. Unless you plan to share a Microsoft account with everyone, To-Do doesn’t allow project collaboration ( yet? ).
Reliability of Reminders … What reliability?
All fanboys were happy, instant sync on all platforms!
Final Thoughts: A great beta, not even close to the real thing!
As a freelance web designer, if I would deliver a preview like this to any of my customers, not to mention, release it to the general public, I’d probably never work again. But Microsoft did and they continuously say “Updates are coming soon”. And by soon, expect at least a few months, in which, the question comes to mind. Do I still trust or use Wunderlist? Because it will inevitably be killed and therefore, all tasks will be lost? Sure, there are plenty of solutions out there to cover the death of Wunderlist. However, none of them are as simple. None of them offer free plans for your wife when you want to create a shared shopping list. Or for a customer that wants to see sub-tasks being marked off. And none of them come close to the simplicity and reliability that Wunderlist offers.
Therefore, the question is, what will happen to To-Do? Will it ever fill the shoes that Wunderlist had? Because Microsoft have a bad habit of purchasing apps, then murdering them to incorporate them into their Office suit. Which is great, unless you take Sunrise Calendar for example, which had a huge amount of features that Outlook never got.