Microsoft Is Phasing Out A Beloved App And Replacing It With Something That Still Needs Work

 The popular to-do list was purchased by Microsoft in June 2015, raising concerns that it would inevitably be "pushed to the limit" by its new corporate parent in the manner in which several promising applications have gone before.

In April, Microsoft began the process of making those concerns a reality. A direct replacement of Wunderlist, called Microsoft To-Do, was announced and said it plans to "withdraw" from the old application once To-Do is able to subsume enough. The new features for Wunderlist have been few and far between.

There is some controversy here. Wunderlist is an award-winning application with a non-negligible audience and extremely positive user ratings across platforms. Although To-Do is being built by the same team behind Wunderlist, the original is about to come out.

And as it stands now, Microsoft's successor is a more limited experience than the application it is trying to replace.

 To be clear, Microsoft admits that To-Do is still in a preview phase, and Wunderlist remains fully available. No Wunderlist user, including myself, has to make the change right now. But Microsoft is moving in that direction, and considering that To-Do is something that can be downloaded today, the extent to which Wunderlist is dragged is worth noting.

What you need to know about Wunderlist is that it is not just a to-do list application. You can use it to keep track of what you need to buy at the grocery store, for sure, and it's perfectly nice for that. But it is prominent enough to be also a powerful productivity tool. I've personally used it to design articles, dismiss ideas from colleagues and, in general, behave like a simplified note-taking application to Evernote. The way it is able to organize simple and complex tasks at the same time has made it an accessory on many home screens.

To do, as it is now, does not have that level of flexibility. It's fast, looks clean, and you can use it to jot down things, then mark those things as you do. The margins between these types of to-do applications are not huge, so if that's all you need, by all means give it a try.

 If nothing else, Microsoft To-Do looks great.

Beyond the basics, however, Microsoft To-Do is a bit too barebones to be a complete replacement for Wunderlist today. Here are some of the main questions, without particular order:

    There are no subtasks. When you create a to-do item in Wunderlist, you have the ability to create sub-elements within it. So if you have an article called "Grocery List", you can write "Cheese", "Milk", "Bread", and anything else there. Each of the subtasks has small checkboxes next to them, so when you complete one, just hit it. Everything makes sense. If you want to add more detail to a to-do item, however, you will only have one blank space to take notes. You can create your own de facto list of subtasks, but that is a slower and sloppy process. Wunderlist manages to do more while maintaining a blank note-taking space of its own.

    You can not attach files to a to-do item. Continuing along those lines, within each task element in Wunderlist is an option to add files from your computer, phone, Dropbox or whatever you have. If I am presenting an article and I see a good photo that I would like to use, I can put it at the bottom of the article. Once again, To-Do has no such option.
    Does not collaborate with many external services. Wunderlist is quite popular that several third party applications - Dropbox, Slack, Google Calendar, Evernote, etc. - integrate directly with it. To-Do works with Microsoft Outlook, but that's it for now.

    You can not share a to-do list with other people. Not everyone needs this, but Wunderlist has practical options for collaborating on a to-do list with co-workers or family members. You can assign certain tasks to certain people, share comments, and have others download items when they are done. This is key to making Wunderlist work in the office. To-Do is a completely insular experience so far.

    It is more difficult to point out particularly important elements. It is not difficult for a to-do list to become difficult to manage, so having the ability to point out some items within that list as more important than others is very helpful. With Wunderlist, you can "star" such items to make them instantly stand out without releasing them from your list altogether. With To-Do, there is no signaling capability, so to mark something so important you have to put it on a separate list.
    There is no Mac application. To-Do is available on iOS, Android, Windows 10 and the web, but, unlike Wunderlist, it does not have a dedicated application for Apple computers. This is a small complaint but a step back all the same.

There are other minor annoyances beyond that.

To be fair, To-Do has some good ideas behind it. The "My Day" main tab encourages you to pick a few things from your lists to do each day, and a "Smart Suggestions" feature that accompanies scrapes those lists in an attempt to find out which things to focus on first. This can be unpredictable, however: I keep a list of comments I've written, for example, but that's not something I'd like to "tag" as if it were a set of items in a grocery list.

 Microsoft To-Do's "Smart Tips" feature wants to think about what you need to do today on your behalf, but the results can be unpredictable.

That way, To-Do feels a bit tighter on the scope than Wunderlist. This is not entirely unintentional either: Part of the To-Do point is to be more deliberate about "taking the cognitive load" of completing to-do tasks, according to Microsoft marketing manager Simon Chan. The company plans to add things like subtasks and more sharing options in the future, Chan said, but it's not trying to make To-Do do a Wunderlist replacement one by one.

Instead, you want To-Do to be smart enough to eliminate the need for persistent notifications and reminders in the first place. However, that requires a fair amount of faith in Microsoft's learning efforts, and it's not that Wunderlist is incredibly complex in the first place.

Again, for the simplest things, To-Do is fast and functional. Along those lines, Chan said that To-Do users have so far completed a higher percentage of their lists than Wunderlist users. Given that To-Do is now packaged in Office 365 and therefore open to more business users than Wunderlist ever was, the emphasis on staying out of people's way makes sense.

 But that does not make the transition for Wunderlist regular users easier today. There is still a lot of time for To-Do to reach the maximum Microsoft wants - there is no deadline for the application to go out of its preview mode, Chan said, and the company plans to give Wunderlist users "a lot of time "To make the switch even when that day arrives.

For now, however, those who have come to rely on Wunderlist will want to cling to their old standby mode while they can. The worst is the worst, there are always more outstanding alternatives like Todoist.