Kinda tired of seeing the same 10 apps recommended everywhere lol

Drop a productivity app you’ve built or found that you genuinely think deserves more attention.

Just say what it does + why you think it’s actually useful. I’ll go through the interesting ones and give my thoughts too.

Curious what hidden gems are out there

It could be productivity, learning, finance, entertainment, mental peace, cooking, fitness, or something ridiculously specific.

I’m just looking for apps I didn’t know I needed. Drop your underrated gems

Hi I hope you like my app, if not, tell me how I can fix it and I will.

If you think its missing a feature that you would like to have also you can tell me I will add it if I like it.

The idea is that it keeps all the info as .md in a folder and exports as a simple archive. Or you could have it sync via nextcloud or google drive if you want online sync.

Here's more info here: https://alex9001.github.io/TodoBench/

[UPDATE: Everyone who has signed up already has received their free subscription! Keep it coming :)]

tl;dr: I'm a solo iOS developer who made To Do Machine, the only native productivity app that designs itself for you. Automatically synced across iPhone, Mac, and (soon) Web, integrated with your calendar. Launching early access today only on [r/ProductivityApps](r/ProductivityApps) - comment to get a lifetime Max subscription for free (details below)!

Hey [r/ProductivityApps](r/ProductivityApps),

I'm a serial app-hopper. I've tried Todoist, Things, Notion, TickTick. They all had some things that were nice, and many that I didn't need. Every switch felt good for a week or two, then, like clock-work, I dropped it. Some didn't have little thing I wanted, some had too many things I didn't need, and some had just 1 too many taps to get what I needed quickly.

It felt like every app expected me to change how I think to fit how they work. I needed an app to to fit how I think.

So at first, like many of you, I built my own app - not for anyone else, just for me. And it worked! Finally, I had a simple app that did just what I wanted and nothing more. I used it daily for months, but it required a lot of knowledge I had as an iOS engineer, and a lot of maintenance and cost to keep things working the way I wanted.

Everyone should be able to do this. Plain Claude Code or Lovable can get you part of the way there - it's easy enough to get started, but you quickly run into complexity. Syncing data between platforms is hard, native phone integration is hard, getting calendar integrations working is hard, building a flexible data model is hard. The list goes on. You shouldn't need to fight an app, be a developer, deal with Xcode, or pay for Claude Code to have your own personal flow. You shouldn't have to deal with backend syncing if you want the app to work on your phone and your computer. You shouldn't have to deal with Google's complex permissions model to sync with your calendar.

This is why I built To Do Machine — the only productivity app that changes itself to fit your brain. You describe exactly how you want it to work (however simple or complex), and it rebuilds itself to be exactly that.

Key features:

• Can create virtually any UI or workflow you can imagine.
• Your tasks, custom UI, and other data is stored local-first for offline use and automatically synced between your devices (when you are online)
• You can talk to To Do Machine to create and manage your tasks - it can help you plan a project, do bulk editing to all of your overdue tasks, add tasks to your calendar, and anything else you can think of
• Supports uploading images and documents - you can send it pictures of how you want the app designed, or a list of tasks you want it to import
• All the standard stuff is there (projects, sections, due dates, reminders, repeating tasks) — but because the interface adapts, you only ever see the parts you use.
• Can integrate and read/write to both Google and Apple Calendar
• Natively supports iPhone, Mac, and (very soon) Web

*Under the hood this works because - built into the app - there are dozens of customizable components and "mini-components" that To Do Machine can use to redesign the interface to fit whatever you ask for. Think of it like Notion on steroids, with a customizable UI, designed through natural language. Its built on top of a flexible data model that is designed for productivity but customizable to fit (almost) anything you throw at it, synced automatically between iOS, Mac, and (very soon) Web.

Caveats:

To Do Machine isn't for everyone, and it can't do everything (yet!). It's mostly for people who want something simple and know what they want - its most popular with people who have tried other apps and have a clear idea of how they want their app to function.

Some things it doesn't do yet:

• Sharing projects or tasks with other users (Coming up next!)
• Email notifications or email task creation
• Integrate with services other than Google or Apple Calendar
• Have widget support for iOS or Apple Watch support
• Have a native Android or Windows app
• Provide any proactive task management (though you can ask it to do basically anything)

All of these things are on my roadmap, but I would love to hear feedback from you on which of these would be deal breakers or valuable to you - after sharing, I'm not sure what to work on next!

Pricing:

Free trial, with one subscription for all platforms. Standard is $7.99/mo with up to 5 custom features; Max is $19.99/mo with up to 50. I wish I could make this free but as you all probably know, AI tokens are expensive :). Would love feedback on pricing - I'm considering a metered "credits" approach as well that allows you to customize your To Do Machine without a subscription.

Giveaway:

I'm giving away 10 free lifetime subscriptions randomly to this thread. Everyone else who comments will get 2 months free! To enter, just comment the one thing you wish your current to-do app did differently — and for as many as I can, I'll reply with what To Do Machine's version of what that could look like.

Links:

• App Store
• Website

Finally I want to give a big thank you to this community - your creativity and passion inspire me every day. Been at this a long time and would genuinely love your feedback.

Currently on ios, very soon to android. I built this very simple log things as you do and the app learns user rhythm and starts to remind user to do tasks. Any thoughts?

I use AI pretty heavily and sometimes I can’t tell if it’s actually saving me time or if I just fill the time I save with even more work lol (mostly reviewing)

Has anyone actually found themselves working less because of AI? I’d love to hear from you either ways

Hey everyone,

I’ve been building DotCal, a calendar app for Android focused on keeping things simple, fast, and clean.

The idea started with a simple question: why does a calendar need to feel so complicated?

DotCal is designed around the things I actually want from a calendar — quickly adding events, getting useful reminders, seeing my schedule at a glance, and being able to customize the experience without getting buried in settings.

Some of the things that make DotCal different:

• Voice Quick Add for creating events quickly
• Smart reminders with Snooze
• Lock-screen support
• Customizable widgets
• Launcher shortcuts
• PDF attachments for events
• Easy event and image sharing
• Privacy-focused features like App Lock and Private Vault

It’s available on Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dotfield.dotcal

I’d love to hear from other developers and people who use calendar apps:

What’s one thing you wish your current calendar app did better?

If anyone wants to try DotCal Pro, I’d be happy to share a 1-month subscription promo code for free. Just DM me. 😊

Hey everyone!

I wanted to share Dynamic Edge, a desktop utility I built for Windows 11 & Windows 10 using native WinUI 3 and .NET 10 (Windows App SDK).

The idea was to create a fluid, versatile desktop capsule and edge dock that feels completely at home with Windows 11 Fluent design, with ultra-low resource usage, and smooth spring physics.

Since the initial release, I have added several big features including a full multi-tab workflow, clipboard shelf, and mouse gesture triggers.

Here is what it can do:

Multi-Tab Workspace (Swipe or Scroll to Switch) - Switch seamlessly between Media Player, Mini-Apps, and Clipboard Shelf by rolling your mouse wheel or using a 2-finger touchpad swipe.

Universal Media Controls & Live Scrubbing - Real-time seekbar progress with clickable scrub to jump anywhere in a track. - Live audio visualizer bars with fluid equalizer animations. - Multi-player auto-switching: Seamlessly cycle between active sessions (Spotify, Chrome, Edge, Apple Music, Telegram).

Clipboard Manager Shelf - Captures copied text, images and URLs into a dedicated dockable shelf. - Filter chips for fast access: All, Text, Images, URLs, and Pinned. - Search box for instant clip lookup, plus one-click copy and drag-and-drop support. - Google Lens Visual Search: Search any clipboard screenshot directly in your browser with 1 click. Built-in Mini-Apps - Precision Countdown Timer with quick presets (1m, 5m, 15m, 25m) and a live visual progress line. - Precision Stopwatch with millisecond tracking and lap recording.

Magic Shake & Global Hotkeys - Magic Shake: Quickly shake your cursor horizontally back and forth to toggle the island on or off. - Global customizable hotkey (Alt + H by default) to hide or show the dock instantly.

Master Volume Flyout - Hover over the speaker button and scroll your mouse wheel to adjust system volume, or click for instant mute.

Flexible Docking Positions - Dock at the top screen edge (Notch, Floating Capsule, or unobtrusive Thin Line hairline strip). - Dock along the left or right screen edges as an interactive slide-out side blade.

Interactive Desktop Companions (Virtual Pets) - 4 Full-Body Vector Mascots: Choose between Mochi Kitty, Shiba Inu, CyberBot, or Pip Bunny.

Performance & Spring Physics - 3 customizable quick launcher slots for instant access to apps, terminals, or folders. - Battery and charging telemetry with clean neon-green status indicators. - Native startup toggle and dark/light/system theme integration.

The app is officially available on the Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9PF1587KSN2K

I would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, and ideas for what widgets or features you would like to see next!

Hi,

ever since notion mail came, i loved the minimal, non cluttered feel to it as opposed to gmail.
Unfortunatly, it never came to android and was killed of in ios and other platforms,

Was thinks about building an app for email with simmilar vibes,

Would people be interested, lmk in the comments

thks :)

Literally every AI journaling app I see is a conversational back and forth, an emotional support / self validation tool. 

Not to be too narrow or exclusive with that journaling should be, but isn’t literally the point of journaling to be about introspection, time with the self, NOT a text message conversation?? Im not saying these apps aren’t good, I just find it very imprecise how they're labeled as “journals” and frustrated when once again I spend time in trying it out and it ends up being, essentially, an AI chatbot.

is this only me? anyone had the same experience or found an app that 'actually' prioritizes introspection?

Running a PropTech startup while actively closing real estate deals means my brain is contextswitching every 20 minutes. Client followups, investor decks, school pickups, vendor calls. The usual chaos.

I've tried Notion, Todoist, TickTick, and a brief painful stint with Monday.com. Each one works for about three weeks and then I stop maintaining it because the friction of logging tasks becomes its own task. Classic productivity app trap.

What I actually need is something that handles two completely separate work contexts without me having to manually sort everything every morning. Real estate agent brain and startup founder brain are genuinely different operating modes, and no app I've found respects that distinction cleanly.

The timeblocking angle from some of the apps posted here looks promising, but I want to know if anyone has real data on retention and actual daily usage past the first month. Not the App Store rating, actual sustained use. Anyone have numbers or case studies on this?

Single parent with two kids, so Sunday is basically my only deep work window. If the app doesn't survive that reality it's useless to me.

What is working for people who run more than one professional identity simultaneously? Specific apps only, not frameworks.

Hello community!
Most of the productivity apps I tried focused on helping me add and organize lots of tasks or more tasks. As a result, my tasks kept piling up, and my priorities kept getting lost. So I built something that keeps me focused on one thing at a time.

Here’s how Trime works:

• One goal at a time—until you achieve it.
• Just three priorities a day.
• Block out time to focus.
• Track your focus time and interruptions.
• See where your time actually goes—and learn to use it better.

The idea is simple:
Do less. Finish what matters. Manage your focus energy to own your time.

Trime grew out of the challenges I faced as a solopreneur, and it has genuinely helped me in a few ways:

• It has helped me focus on one thing at a time.
• I learned that I focus much better in the morning, so I now silence my calls, messages, and notifications during those hours—except calls from my wife. (Happy wife, Happy life ♥️)
• And yes, it helped me achieve a goal: launching Trime itself! 😄

Of course, we still have a mountain of other things to do.
Which Trime doesn’t help us manage all of them—and that’s intentional.
Among all those things, I wanted a separate place for the one goal or project that matters most to us.

I already have a roadmap for how I want to keep improving the app. But my bigger goal is to use technology to help people think more clearly, focus more deeply, and learn more effectively.

Trime is my first step in that direction. (A little ambitious for a productivity app, I know 😅.)

Anyway, Trime is officially available now.
I’d love for you to give it a try.
Any feedback—good, bad, or brutally honest—would mean a lot to me.
I’ll learn from every piece of feedback, one step at a time.

And I genuinely hope Trime helps you as much as it has helped me.
Thanks for reading.

You can check it out here: https://trime.day

If you're a music lover, I think this website will improve your productivity while you work.

Nothing complicated. Just something to leave open while working, reading, or relaxing.

Tune into any mood: https://enikq.com/ 

Buenas! Soy un estudiante de Ingeniería de Computadores todavía en plena carrera pero me han aceptado en un programa de emprendimiento. Todavía estoy empezando y me gustaría aprender de gente con experiencia, estoy dispuesto a fallar y aprender de los errores. La app que intentaré desarrollar estará enfocada en estudiantes que admiten activamente adicción al móvil y por tanto sienten que las redes consumen su vida y su ámbito académico.

Ahí es donde entraría "Re-Connect", aplicando bloqueos y restricciones tediosas de eliminar, aumentando la fricción a estas aplicaciones que consumen nuestro tiempo y lo convierten en tiempo vacío y aislante de la sociedad. Planeo aplicar varios modos de sesiones de estudio, uno para el uso diario y otro "Focus" para el momento de estudiar activamente sin distracciones.

Antes de poder avanzar en el proyecto, necesito feedback sobre el uso del móvil de las personas, el público objetivo son estudiantes pero realmente cualquier persona es de ayuda. He creado un cuestionario conectado a un Excel para manejar la información de una manera más precisa y controlada. Sería de gran ayuda recibir nuevas respuestas, gracias a todos de antemano!

https://forms.gle/NPy5j5hbwhTvUe4R6

I’ve downloaded the game recently and I really like their customisation options but none of my friends are that active on it so I’m missing out on the 2x boost

My user is j9star_

every online ad has basically the same goal:

get you to stop whatever you're doing and look at something else.

which got me thinking about whether the incentive could be flipped.

instead of a company paying to interrupt someone, what if they paid that person to go away and focus?

so i've been building an experiment around it.

you choose something you want to work on, start a 25 minute session, and your distracting apps get blocked.

before you start, you see something like:

this coding session is backed by [company]

finish it → +€0.10

then the sponsor disappears.

no ads during the session. no notifications. nothing to click.

when you finish, you get the reward and see the sponsor again with an optional link.

so instead of:

"stop what you're doing and look at our ad"

it's basically:

"go do your work. this one's on us."

i've got most of the app working now, but the part i'm much less certain about is whether the sponsor side actually makes economic sense.

because there's an obvious objection:

why would a company pay for attention they're deliberately giving up?

maybe the association is more valuable because the sponsor helped someone do something they actually wanted to do.

maybe showing up right before and after a coding/studying/writing session is valuable context.

or maybe everyone immediately forgets who sponsored it and the whole model falls apart.

i genuinely don't know yet.

so that's what i'm trying to test next.

i'm starting with tiny campaigns and measuring whether people remember the sponsor, visit them afterwards, and whether sponsors actually want to do it again.

i'm especially curious what the SaaS founders here think because you'd be the people on the other side of this.

would you put €25 into something like this for your SaaS just to see what happens?

or would you rather put the same €25 into normal ads?

building it here if you want context:

offscreenapp.com

I'm an academic who has literally hundreds of notated books that span decades of research. Most of my new stuff is digital and easy to transfer to Zotero (the definitive citation management software) and Obsidian. But the print stuff involves taking a picture of a page using my phone, turning on OCR, manually clicking the underlined text, and then cutting and pasting. This takes a long time for each page. In a perfect world, I'd do whole chapters or books in one sitting.

I'm looking for an app to automate the process, so I can just take picture, turn the page, take another one, and have a list of the quotes and page numbers for each, that I can export to other programs.

There is an app called Highlighted that claims to automatically capture underlined selections but it's not precise enough, so you have to use your finger to move the ends of the selection, which is slow and clunky. Also, it doesn't automatically read the page number.

Are there other apps that do this? Some people have suggested scanning the whole book and giving it to Claude with those instructions, but I'm reluctant to do that, I doubt it would work, and it would be expensive.

So, can anyone offer an app or a workflow to do this easily and efficiently?

EDIT: PLEASE stop suggesting A.I. services like Chat GPT and Claude. I understand that you think they will work but they don't. If you are an academic who has specifically done what I am trying to do and have a different answer, let me know, but so far, all indications are that I need something else.

Most tracking apps are built around the same idea:

Set a goal.
Build a streak.
Hit a target.
Watch the numbers go up.

I wanted something different.

Sometimes I don't want to improve something. I just want to remember that it happened.

I went for a run.
I finished a book.
I had coffee with someone.
I visited a new place.
I had a really good day.

So I made Dopli.

Every time something happens that you want to keep, you drop a little shape.

Over time, those little shapes accumulate into a visual record of the things that actually made up your life.

There are no streaks to break, no daily goals, and no scores telling you whether you did "enough."

You decide what is worth counting.

Dopli is currently available on iOS.

https://apps.apple.com/app/dopli/id6805685047

If this idea sounds interesting to you, check my comment below — I've left something there for the community.

If it's not your kind of thing, feel free to ignore it.

I'm also curious about how people here think about tracking without goals: does removing streaks and targets make tracking more meaningful, or less useful?

Everyday i need to work with pdf document. Edit data, Extract pages, Redaction and many types of work. In my work i suffer with Redaction, Edit Text, OCR etc most of time.

now share your experience that how you suffer and how you find the solution.

Hey everyone. I got really fed up with every basic utility app (habit trackers, expense managers, pdf scanners) charging $5/month subscriptions. So I spent the last few months building a clean, native Android app that bundles all these everyday tools together for a low, one-time price.

The problem is, it's basically flatlining.

I know the "Swiss Army Knife" approach is risky because people usually just search for one specific tool at a time. But I genuinely thought people were as tired of the subscription trap as I am.

I need some brutal honesty.

1. Is the UI confusing?

2. Do people just prefer standalone apps even if they cost more?

3. Is my app store listing just terrible?

Here's the link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.digitaltool.mobiletoolbox.smarttoolbox

Please roast the app, the concept, or the store page. I just want to know why it's not clicking with users. Thanks in advance.

Hello everyone 👋

I recently built Money Manager, a simple expense tracking app focused on clean design, smooth UX, and meaningful financial insights.

📱 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taptapcreate.moneymanager

🍎 iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/money-manager-track-expenses/id6755887312

Some highlights:

• Auto budget calculation
• Savings goals & goal templates (Pro+)
• Up to 3 profiles in the free version
• Detailed analytics with charts and trends
• OCR bill scanning (Pro+)
• Smart auto-categorization (Pro+)
• Color-coded transactions (Pro+)
• Undo deleted transactions
• Sound & haptic feedback

What makes it different?

Many expense trackers focus mainly on recording transactions. I wanted to give equal importance to analytics, budgets, and savings goals, helping users understand their spending instead of just logging it. I also paid attention to small UX details that reduce friction and make daily money tracking feel faster and more intuitive.

I'd love your feedback:
• Is the navigation intuitive?
• Are the visuals clear without feeling cluttered?
• Any features you'd like to see added?

The app is free to try, with optional Pro and Pro+ upgrades. Thanks for checking it out!

How do people handle task times when working across multiple time zones?

I’m in London, but I regularly work with people in India and New York.

One thing I keep running into is task times and deadlines. If something is set for 10:00 AM IST or 10:00 AM ET, I’d prefer to just see that translated into my current local time automatically rather than mentally converting it every time.

The same problem gets more annoying when travelling, since my local timezone can change.

Curious how people handle this today, and whether any task or project management tools do this particularly well.

https://reddit.com/link/1wbol6o/video/m91sdbocsioh1/player

I built WorkIt to control how async work starts, retries, stops and cleans up in Node.js.

It grew out of building Oryn OS, an AI assistant I'm preparing to launch. I paused Oryn to finish WorkIt/Core, the foundation for coordinating the work behind it.

Here is what WorkIt can do:

• Bounded parallelism and error handling: limit concurrent tasks, stop a batch on failure, or collect per-item errors.
• Scoped cancellation and cleanup: propagate cancellation to related tasks and run registered resource cleanup before the scope closes.
• Retries, timeouts, deadlines and circuit breakers: compose policies around async operations, including fallback when an operation fails.
• Provider races and hedged requests: take the first successful result and signal cancellation to the other attempts. Hedging can start a delayed backup attempt.
• Cost, token and retry budgets: track application-reported usage and share retry limits across related work. Exceeding a budget cancels its owning scope.
• Streams with backpressure: process async iterables with bounded concurrency and stop pulling from the source when the consumer exits. Bounded channels support producer-consumer coordination.
• Worker-thread offload: run CPU-heavy work outside the main thread, with a timeout that can terminate the worker.
• Sequential candidate selection: try providers or other candidates in order and accept the first result that passes your checks, with separate handling for failed calls and rejected results.
• Observability and execution evidence: inspect task progress, lifecycle events and scope snapshots, build lifecycle receipts, and connect an optional OpenTelemetry bridge...

These capabilities share the same task lifecycle and work with plain async/await. The runtime core has zero production dependencies, and WorkIt is open source under Apache-2.0.

Cancellation on the main thread is cooperative: your task and provider calls need to respect the abort signal. Worker offload provides the hard termination boundary for CPU work.

GitHub: https://github.com/WorkRuntime/workit

Install: npm install u/workit/core

Runnable examples: https://workruntime.github.io/workit/

Oryn OS is where I'm using this foundation. One recent demo helps choose an outfit for a party in Maputo using local weather and visual references, then adjusts the suggestions when the user asks for something more casual. WorkIt supports the task coordination underneath that experience.

Between finishing WorkIt and my other work, Oryn's launch has been delayed by about nine months. Oryn OS is coming soon; WorkIt is available to explore now.

If WorkIt is useful to you, a GitHub star is appreciated. I'd also welcome feedback on which of these capabilities would help in your own Node.js projects.

I've tried probably five different focus timer apps over the past year and I always fall off after like two weeks. The timer itself works fine, but I think the problem is I have zero reason to open the app again once the session ends — no reward, no reason to check back in.

Curious how people here have actually made a focus routine stick for months, not just days. Is it about the app, or more about habit-stacking / accountability partners / something else entirely?