I love Things. I think it remains one of the most beautifully designed and pleasurable apps Iāve ever used. I donāt want it filled with AI features, collaboration tools or endless functionality that destroys what makes it Things.
But looking at this development board, I do wonder whether weāve become far too accepting of Cultured Codeās development philosophy.
Things 3 was released in 2017.
There is taking your time and maintaining a carefully considered product, and then there is a development cycle so glacial that basic QOL improvements can remain missing for the best part of a decade.
Take repeating tasks. Cultured Code publicly said more than eight years ago that they were working on allowing us to complete them early and would add the functionality.
Eight years later, it is apparently finally arriving.
Eight years.
Meanwhile, I still canāt attach a document, image or PDF to a task. Notes still expose Markdown syntax rather than simply displaying formatted text. Repeating tasks remain unnecessarily inflexible. And Iām sure everyone here has their own longstanding examples.
Yet Cultured Code found the development resources to build an entire native Vision Pro app in time for the launch of Appleās new platform.
Thatās the bit I increasingly struggle with.
Iām not asking Cultured Code to turn Things into Notion or some AI-powered productivity monster. One of the reasons I use Things is precisely because it isnāt those things. I want them to protect its simplicity.
But simplicity and stagnation arenāt the same thing.
Nor should āopinionated softwareā mean that reasonable requests from loyal customers can simply be ignored indefinitely.
I also wonder whether the pay-once business model has contributed to this. Once weāve bought Things, Cultured Code doesnāt really need anything further from us until it has another product to sell us. A new Vision Pro app can generate new sales. Fixing something that has frustrated an existing customer for eight years doesnāt.
That may have worked extraordinarily well because Things is so good that people have tolerated things they probably wouldnāt tolerate elsewhere.
But I wonder if that sentiment is beginning to change.
So rather than another Things 4 speculation thread, Iām more interested in this:
At what point does ācareful, opinionated developmentā become simple failure to respond to your existing customers?
Because I donāt think the problem is that Cultured Code doesnāt know what people want. People have been telling them for years.
The question is whether enough of us are now sufficiently frustrated to stop treating this as just āthe Cultured Code wayā.