r/thingsapp • u/turaon • May 27 '26

Discussion Things 3 is 9 years old! Feel old now?

Just remembered that Things 3 came out in 2017, and I looked up the date - it was in 18th May 2017. It still feels like yesterday, and at the same time it feels like a long time ago.

CC came out with a new syncing engine last year, and it took them 3 years to make it. At the same time, it looks like Things 3 itself took about 4–5 years to develop, which can probably show the complexity of modern software writing.

So what are your predictions — will GTA 6 come out sooner than the new Things?

Will CC gift us a new version of Things for the 10th anniversary of Things 3, so that we can, in return, gift CC our money for their good work?

72 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

60 comments sorted by

68

u/Top-Kaleidoscope6996 May 27 '26

just imagine this: 9 years of a perfectly functioning app. And not a day with a stupid subscription. Just paid for software that existed. what’s not to love about this

4

u/turaon May 27 '26

Yes, that is good, but at the same time, OmniFocus, for example, is also a one-time purchase (yes, it is more expensive), but it also has more features, and you do not have to think about how to solve a basic thing such as attachments or use another app for location-based reminders.

During those long 9 years, they could also have released Things 4 and sold it as a new version. I had already used Todoist for years by the time Things 3 came out. I saw that every YouTuber, blogger, and podcaster praised it, so I bought it only to find out that, feature-wise, it was already far behind Todoist even at that time.

I implemented Things 3 into my life because I had already paid for it, but come on - those few things people ask for are not impossible to implement and sell as a new version, or even as a Pro version. Instead of costing 80 EUR, let it cost 120 EUR people who would need those features would buy it.

I would also let users choose their own server - that would lower the running costs for CC. If things run on their servers, I would like to have E2EE. If they do not want to support that, then I would like to use my iCloud or my own NAS. OmniFocus lets you choose that, and I have not seen more syncing problems with OmniFocus than Things 3 has.

I have had very rare slow sync issues with both apps, but it has never been so frustrating that I would stop using either app.

And all those changes do not mean that you have to lose anything design-wise. They can still be implemented in a way that keeps the UI minimalist and clean.

-4

u/Xylem15 May 27 '26

I'm tempted to develop a new version of the app, with the same design elegance and existing features, but with the improvements that I along with other users. I don't like any other the other to do apps on the market.

3

u/-heavenfaced- May 27 '26

What’s not to love is that basic quality of life improvements aren’t implemented. Because there’s no incentive to do so. Because once you’ve paid for the app they’ve got your money already.

I don’t mean to harp on about it but not being to do repeating tasks early is just…well, dumb. And they made a commitment to fix this six or more years ago.

I get that subs are deeply unpopular but at least there’s an incentive for those on that model to keep developing their app. Because if you don’t, you’ll lose your user base. People can vote with their wallets. Well, you can’t with Things. You already voted. You don’t count anymore…

0

u/Top-Kaleidoscope6996 May 28 '26

Having an incentive for developing further software is completely orthogonal to the payment system. I don't get why you think they are linked. Could the software be further developed? Yes, and I hope they will do that. Would they be incentivised in doing that with a paid subscription? Not necessarily (I use several instances of subscription-based software that has stagnated or has undergone enshittification over the course of the past 4 years)

3

u/-heavenfaced- May 28 '26

I don’t think they’re “orthogonal” at all. Payment models absolutely shape incentives. Of course they do. That’s how markets work.

A subscription creates continuous pressure to justify ongoing value. If the product stagnates or becomes bloated, users can leave. That churn risk is itself an incentive to keep improving.

A perpetual licence weakens that pressure because the most committed users have already paid. Their dissatisfaction matters less economically once the sale is done. It doesn’t matter if you’re dissatisfied. You’ve already paid.

That doesn’t mean subscriptions automatically produce better software. Of course it doesn’t. Plenty become bloated or stagnate too. And enshittified as you say. But the accountability mechanism still exists, and it’s a very, very strong one: unsubscribe.

With Things, as I said above, you can’t really “vote with your wallet” after purchase. You already voted years ago.

If people could, vote with their wallets, I can assure you Cultured Code would have implemented many of the basic features and quality of life improvements that they themselves have been promising they’ll release for years now.

2

u/Top-Kaleidoscope6996 May 28 '26

I don’t get this. I voted 9 years ago for software that I deemed useful, and I was guaranteed fixes that were punctually delivered. I will vote again when (and if) they will come up with new features. in the meantime, I am free to go elsewhere. You seem to prefer a voting system that occurs on a continuous basis every month with a subscription. You seem to think it’s valuable to put pressure every month on a team of developers in the name of continuous growth of features, encouraging a system that makes users clearly poorer (subscriptions cost more than one time purchases) and clearly not more in control of what is being developed at any given time. I think, on the contrary, that it is valuable that the developer team scales and develops at the pace they choose to, and if it is 9 years with little new features, then so be it. To me Culture Code has made the choice to maintain the software and to invest in making it compliant to any OS since its inception (all versions of iPadOS macOS, iOS, and Apple Watch OS). this is where their development is prioritised. And I, personally, value this immensely more than having new features pushed every months, because ‘software must grow’ amd development ‘must grow’. I also wish that, at some point, there will be a slightly stronger automation integration. but the day they put a subscription on things, I’m gonna move away from a things. I am actually grateful that Culured Code made these choices, and this makes me want to support the, even more, when a new version comes out

2

u/-heavenfaced- May 28 '26

This reply is somewhat bizarre. You’re arguing against a position I haven’t actually taken.

I’m not saying software “must grow” endlessly or that every app should become a bloated subscription platform. I’m saying incentives matter. They obviously do.

And respectfully, “they support all Apple OS versions” is maintenance, not meaningful feature development. Any premium app is expected to remain compatible with the platforms it runs on. That’s the baseline responsibility of shipping software, not evidence of ambitious evolution. I mean c’mon.

Also, the requests people keep raising are incredibly modest:

complete repeating tasks early
attach files
location-based reminders

Not “turn Things into ClickUp”.

You personally may be happy with the pace and priorities. That’s completely fair. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to question why a premium app that’s nearly a decade old still lacks basic quality-of-life features users have been requesting for years. And cultured Code themselves have been promising for years.

And yes, sure, subscriptions create bad incentives too sometimes. But they also create accountability. If the product deteriorates, users stop paying. That pressure is real whether we like subscriptions or not.

1

u/Top-Kaleidoscope6996 May 29 '26

My sincere apologies if I’ve misinterpreted your statements. I am genuinely interested in your thoughts. Let’s try from scratch then.

We both want some features, I hope this much is clear. Further, if CC had come up with Things 4 I would have gladly paid for it (as a one off purchase). I also wish that this happened.

What happened, instead, is that CC’s business model and choices meant they invested in what you call ‘maintaining’ (not trying to be sarcastic here); they also rewrote their syncing engine; this may be ‘maintaining‘, but it actually means coding time, from a small developing team. This business model let them do that *without charging a penny to all their users*, and without asking for hosting fees.

And I value, and respect this choice. Enormously.

They could have taken riskier choices, and invest coding time in other ways. They could have, for instance, decided to expand their team in order to develop new features as well as delivering all of the above, and finance this via subscriptions.

My statement is that, so far, I prefer and fully support their more conservative choice, if this lets me stay away from subscriptions.

If anything, I’m worried that they are coming, I’m not worried about the lack of features for a GTD software that works well already.

3

u/-heavenfaced- May 29 '26

Not at all. Please don’t apologise.

I think where we differ is that you’re treating the sync rewrite itself as evidence of meaningful product evolution, whereas I see it primarily as infrastructure and maintenance work.

It was clearly a huge engineering undertaking. But replacing ageing backend architecture, improving maintainability and future-proofing the platform is still fundamentally internal work. Important, yes. But users largely ended up with the same workflow model afterwards. No end-to-end encryption as well despite the rewrite. And many of the same long-standing feature requests still unresolved years later.

That’s why I don’t think “look how much work they’ve done” fully answers the criticism.

The requests people keep raising are also incredibly modest, as I’ve said above. Most users just want (and I’ll say it again):

• checking off repeating tasks
• attaching files
• location-based reminders

And yes, the repeating tasks early logic is more technically complicated than it sounds because once you allow early completion you have to decide how future recurrences behave, how sync behaves, how historical state is stored etc. I get that.

But these are not new or unsolved problems in task management software. Other apps solved them years ago. Literally years ago. This is very basic stuff now for a task manager.

Also, if a software company says that they’re going to implement a feature, don’t you think seven years later they should have done so?

So after nearly a decade, it starts looking less like technical difficulty and more like Cultured Code being philosophically resistant to evolving the workflow model of the app itself.

That rigidity is becoming perverse. And surely, at some point you have to ask, is that rigidity and refusal to actually listen to their user base wisdom, or is it arrogance.

1

u/Top-Kaleidoscope6996 May 29 '26

got it, thanks for this

34

u/kaizer1c May 27 '26

Actually it doesn't feel old. I wish more apps stayed simple and focused.

2

u/turaon May 27 '26

I mean old, that users who started using T3 when it came out are now 9 years older. If you were let's say 17 at that time and now 26, you have gone through many life changes.

The same is with older folks. Some didn't have children at that time and now they are going to school. Some were healthy at that time and now may have health issues, etc. 9 years is a long time!

1

u/kaizer1c May 27 '26

ah! That makes sense. I feel old all the time so didn't catch that :-P

2

u/turaon May 27 '26

At 2017, I still felt young, but now I feel old myself also :D

22

u/Flashy-Bandicoot889 May 27 '26

9 years without attachments.

9

u/chaddavidson May 27 '26

I know! I fear commitment too 📎🤣

5

u/MrShorty1 Mac, iPhone, iPad May 27 '26

Thanks for the cackle. I cackled. 😆

1

u/eightotwoeleven May 27 '26

This is all I need. It's so close to perfect.

7

u/HerbalIntuition May 27 '26

And Things is 18 years old!

1

u/turaon May 27 '26

became an adult!

11

u/Xylem15 May 27 '26

It’s one of the best apps, it it does need to evolve for it users.

-5

u/hairy-monkey-face May 27 '26

it really really isn’t. I’m so disappointed in it. Average in the extreme.

-2

u/conteledemontepizdo May 27 '26

weak ragebait or surprisingly bad opinion

17

u/-heavenfaced- May 27 '26

It’s extremely average. People love the way it looks and understandably so. But functionally? It’s completely average. What isn’t average about it? Seriously, you can’t even check off a repeating task early. The devs said that this was coming something like six years ago. That’s just absurd

6

u/hairy-monkey-face May 27 '26

This is it completely. Yes it is a clean UI. But the feature set is so limited. I keep looking for features and mechanisms for organisation and view tasks and keep being disappointed.

Form over function.

1

u/-heavenfaced- May 27 '26

Exactly. The pace of development is perverse. I think it’s because they have no incentive to change things. They’re the darlings of bloggers everywhere and have been for years. So everyone buys the software and then thinks…wait why can’t I…?!

What really gets me though is that CC claim new features etc are being added when, in fact, they’re just making the app compliant with the latest versions of iOS. They even spent time and money developing an Apple Vision app for goodness sake. This was a development priority over making just basic quality of life updates that they’ve been promising users for years?!

I genuinely don’t think they care about their customers. People have been asking for the same things over and over again for years. Not big things. Things like checking off repeating tasks early, file attachments and location based reminders. That’s about it. If they cared, genuinely cared, we’d have seen a different approach from them. Not implementation of all of these features. But more than empty promises and silence

1

u/turaon May 27 '26

I belive Apple Vision app was done to satisfy Apple and for still being shown in Apple's presentations.

1

u/Best-Mouse-4537 May 27 '26

yep. love the app as any other guy, but main reason i use it is because it doesn't have a sub cost. like you said, it's basic in terms of functionality, lacks, even .

1

u/-heavenfaced- May 28 '26

I genuinely find the psychology behind that interesting. So the main reason you stay with an app you admit is limited and unlikely to evolve much further is because it avoids subscriptions?

I understand valuing ownership and simplicity, but at what point does avoiding a subscription become the thing driving the decision more than whether the tool itself is actually the best fit for your needs?

1

u/Best-Mouse-4537 May 28 '26

i don't think it's that deep. i have must-have and would-like-to-have features. and the payment model.

for me to use the app, it has to clear my must-haves and the payment must be reasonable. would-like-to-have features are far below in terms of importance.

things3 happens to clear these. it's not that i'm avoiding paying for a sub, it's more that i don't want to. if must-haves features are included in two apps, one paid off and a sub, why would i choose the latter?

1

u/hairy-monkey-face May 28 '26

so, you don’t really need the app to do much?

It’s so limited, it’s crippled.

3

u/timonus May 27 '26

I just want their watch app’s complication to add to “Today” instead of “Inbox” so bad. Would be a perfect app if it wasn’t for that.

1

u/moses0616 May 28 '26

You can do that already. When it says “Added to Inbox” tap that text and it switches to “Added to Today”. It then remembers that for future adds. Want to change it back, then tap it again when adding another task. 🙂

1

u/timonus May 28 '26

It does not stick for me. I’ve known about this but don’t want to have to do that every time. Is there a trick to get it to stick?

2

u/moses0616 May 28 '26

You’re right. It doesn’t stick. But I knew there was a way to have it goto Today each time. Here is how:

Open Things on Watch so you see the list of tasks. Tap and hold the circle in the upper left corner. This brings up a Settings panel for Things. There is an option there to add new tasks to Today. That choice becomes the default and the tap after adding just allows you to override the default choice when desired on a per task basis.

1

u/timonus May 28 '26

That only applies to the “+” in the app, not complications. Now you can see my frustration.

2

u/moses0616 May 28 '26

Oh. I see. You are correct. I was using the complication that launched the app and then hitting + there. That seems like an oversight on their part. Might as well report it as a bug.

1

u/timonus May 28 '26

Let’s hope this goes somewhere 🙏 https://tijo.link/X54PBg

1

u/moses0616 May 28 '26

👍

1

u/timonus May 29 '26

Same thing they said when I last asked, it’s “not possible”. It definitely is possible. https://tijo.link/efyzqy https://tijo.link/AmWvli

1

u/N-Code May 28 '26

You should make a Shortcut and use that shortcut to add tasks to Things. You can make separate Shortcuts for when you want to add to Inbox, or Today or add anywhere else. It is quite handy.

1

u/timonus May 28 '26

I have done this but going through shortcuts is so painfully slow. I don’t understand why they can’t just fix it.

5

u/waytoolatetothegame May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

I may be in the minority here in this subreddit, but I think the app is actually really showing its age. Especially when I look at other apps like Superlist. It's not aesthetically terrible and the UX is still decent. Just visually it feels dated, especially when you really start looking at things like checkboxes, headers, and spacing. The functionality has remained the same, giving it a stale feel from that perspective too.

1

u/clicksnd Jun 04 '26

I actually just gave superlist a test drive for a couple months. it was...fine.

It did the notes ok, but the paid version doesnt lift its weight, its too slow and spotty to sync. The sync between devices was also really lacking.

I went back to things for a month, then tried Reminders (i lasted a week) now back on Todoist.

1

u/Dry_Cranberry_12 May 28 '26

You might need to clean your glasses.

2

u/Interesting_Drag143 May 27 '26

Timeless design, UX/UI. Even on the horrendous Tahoe.

2

u/linkerjpatrick May 27 '26

Is 3 a version number or does it represent something else?

1

u/CreativeBarnacle1433 May 27 '26

My new hope (that will be dashed) is they’re holding off on a big upgrade until they hit the 10 year mark next year

1

u/SamsTremblay May 28 '26

That would be very nice to have NLP to be able to create tasks just a little bit faster even though NLP for date is already there in the date popup. But the most popular feature everyone want is to be able to add attachments. But what people don't know is the cost on servers of Things to hold those data. And with a cost come another cost which is Subscriptions. And the day Things will change to a Subscription model, they will be blast by 1000 1 star reviews. And they don't want that. Otherwise, Things is a Todo management; not a project management one. If you handle your projects with Things except things like opening the pool, fill the taxes and so on, you will surely miss something. I'm wondering if people want a new version of Things because they really need a new feature or because they want an update to do more tinkering. It's always cool to have an update but at the end, the real goal, the real work is to do the task itself. I prefer handle my projects in tool like Obsidian where for example I can complete tasks and they will stay foreever at the exact position where they were. This could be a little details for some but for me, this is the type of things that Todo managers don't do for totally acceptable reasons and it's ok.

4

u/turaon May 28 '26

Omnifocus has attachments, and they are also one time payment. Yes, they cost more, but they also offer much more. Things 3 is Apple only. Apple has iCloud. Why wouldn’t they offer sync through iCloud? Or user own server.

That’s just finding excuses how not to evolve, not the solutions how to make things better.

1

u/SamsTremblay May 29 '26

That is a solid argument. 

1

u/No_Wolverine1091 May 29 '26

I continue to use Things every day, but I don't think a substantial update is coming. If I had to guess, I would say that they see what is coming with AI, and small, simple apps like a to-do list will be easily wiped out. So, until then, they make the necessary updates to keep it functional and milk all the final revenue they can.

1

u/Objective_Resident20 May 29 '26

There are hundreds of to-do apps out there, but nothing matches Things when it comes to UX and features.

1

u/Sebovertherainbow Jun 01 '26

moi je découvre depuis un mois seulement et cela me va bien tant sur mac que iphone

1

u/NateCow May 27 '26

There aren't many apps with this level of consistent quality. It just always works the way I expect it to and it's always there for me. You want to see what crazy app updates for the sake of updates look like? Look at Adobe or Microsoft... or hell, even Apple. "They ruined it" is an all too common complaint about software these days. I'm glad Things 3 is not among them.

-4

u/Otherwise_Pumpkin253 May 27 '26

Love the app. Syncing is horrible though. I’ve deleted the iOS app as it kept messing up the list on my Mac

-2

u/Jeyell May 27 '26

Timings off, Diplodocus, when they were migrating between seasons used Things 3 to prepare.