What is going on with the to-do app Things? Is it still under development? Are new features coming? If so, when are they coming? And why does this matter if you're new? Well, first let me tell you what Things is in case you are new. According to Cultured Code, the company that makes things, things is the awardwinning personal task manager that helps you plan your day, manage your projects, and make real progress towards your goals. things is indeed award-winning. It's won an Apple design award, but also many many users love it. So, here we're looking at the App Store page uh for iPhone in the US and 28,000 people have left a rating about things and it has an average rating of 4.8, also an editor's choice award in addition to the Apple Design Award. So people really love things and I think even Apple itself recognizes that things is a fantastic app for those of you using Apple devices. Okay. Um because Apple has been running a demo build on instore devices. So, if you go to an Apple store and you see a MacBook or an iMac, you're going to see that it has things pre-installed and you can check it out and there's like a demo version because it does look so good and just feels so smooth and so integrated in the Apple ecosystem. Personally, I've also been a fan of things for many years. So, for example, here's a video I did six years ago uh back in 2019 um getting started with things in 15 minutes. Okay. So, I've been I've been teaching how to use things for a long time. And in fact, for many years now, I've offered an entire course called Organize Your Life with Things, which over 1,700 people have taken, where you'll learn the ins and outs about the app, but also how to build workflows around it to organize your life, stay organized, get more done. Okay? And I'm also, by the way, using things myself to plan this video. So, if I head over here, you're going to see this is a project I've uh got going on just to keep track of all of the tasks that I need to do to record this video, make the thumbnails, edit the video, and so on. Okay, so things is great and many people love things, but there are some not everything's perfect. Let's put it that way. So, here is uh the the things blog. So, I'm on the the cultured code website. That's the people who make things and on their blog they keep track of what's new in things. Well, the last entry, the latest entry is from September of 2025. So, quite quite a while ago already when I'm recording this video. And there were some minor visual refreshes. Okay, so not that much is new. And we got to scroll back a bit further. What do we see? In May of 2025, the backend synchronization server is all new. And it's even better and faster synchronization, which is really nice, don't get me wrong, but not really a big new feature that's going to make a difference in my productivity or staying organized. We got to go back to October of 2024 for a few bigger new features. Okay. Um, and but really until September of 2024 for some new features like um control center buttons and even these are smaller features. you know, we're going to have to go back quite far. They announced things for Apple Vision Pro back in 2024, which is cool, but personally not that useful to me. And because there haven't been that many new features in the things app for a long time, if you go on Reddit and you go on the things app subreddit and you look at the I think it's one of the top posts, if not the top post of the past year, you're going to find this one where people are debating whether things is complete as it is or needs more features. And the reason that people keep discussing this is because competitor apps like to-d doist, like omnif focus and especially to-d doist, but also other apps like a flow or um you know there for example tick tick is one that a lot of people talk about have lots of new features all the time. Now one of the amazing things about things is that they kept it very simple and therefore um it's opinionated and therefore it really gets out of your way. Okay. But people have very legitimate requests for features that would be very important to to many including myself. So for example, people really would like to see some natural language input, right? Um where you can just say tomorrow I need to do something for work and it automatically gets put in the work area and automat automatically assigned to tomorrow and so on. You can do a little bit of that but not that much in things. uh in things it's not currently possible to add attach files to a task but of course it happens quite often that you need to work on a task and you need to refer to a PDF or a word document or an image with a scan of something and yeah you can keep that somewhere else and maybe if you're really trying get very technical you can even link to where the file lives in another app or on your drive but it's a bit you know it's harder um people want a better calendar integration with things and so there's a lot of things a lot of debate on this okay and if you if you read the conversation you know people feel very strongly about this so what I want to do is talk a little bit about feature requests that um people have for things and let's take a look at what the cultured code team has to say about them so the best source of information for this is X formerly Twitter um we're working with public information here I don't have any private insider information on things at all I have done a collaboration with cultured code in the past, but I really know what you know on this topic, you know, or anyway what you could know if you did a lot of research. So, for example, here's Damian and he's he's writing to cultured code and says, "Look, can we expect location-based reminders anytime soon in things? No plans for that at the moment, but thanks for letting us know you'd like it." This is kind of the standard response by the things team uh on on social media on X. So, location-based reminders, in case you haven't used those before, I like this feature a lot. And even Apple's own reminders app has this. What you can do is set a little reminder on a task and then when you find yourself um with a device on you um in a certain location, when you arrive at that location or when you leave that location, you can get a ping, a push notification that reminds you to do something. So for me, for example, a lot of the time is when I get to the grocery store, which has an ATM machine, remind me to withdraw some cash because I like to have cash around always for emergencies at the very least, right? So it's very handy and in things you can't do that. You can have things remind you of something at a certain time, but not based on a certain location. I think that's such a shame. Hey, but there's no plans for that at the moment, unfortunately. Let's look at some of the other feature requests. Could we have things be able to handle images or attachments to tasks? Well, we don't support that right now. We're not against the idea. So, this is a maybe. I guess it's a maybe. Maybe this feature will come at some point. I would find it very useful. Like I said before, it happens quite often that you need to refer back to something and um in a file to be so handy to pop it into uh the notes field or as an attachment to a task, but doesn't seem like that's coming. What else? natural date parsing. So, I gave that example before. Um, not currently planned, but wouldn't rule it out. Okay, another one, Alarm Kit integration. So, Apple's own reminders app got an integration with this, and so did to-d doist, one of Things's competitor apps, which is a feature where you can't you can set something even more than a timebased reminder. So, if you set an alarm reminder, it's called an urgent reminder. Your phone will literally make an alarm go off at a certain point to remind you to do a certain thing, to work on a certain task, right? Uh you park your car, you got to move it because you're only allowed to have it in the same spot for 2 hours. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, your alarm is going to go off on your iPhone at the right time. Move the car, you know? So, quite a handy feature, but um unfortunately, you know, not planned in the near future. Um and um you know we can ask culture code many things but they they don't like to speculate too much about upcoming features. You know they don't plan to spend time on it at the moment but they might consider it in the future. You know here's another one. Is there a roadmap to create an MCP server model context protocol server so that AI chat bots like chat GPT or clawed or Google Gemini can access your data in things. of course, if you give it permission and stuff, so you can have those AI assistants manage your to-dos or add to-dos for you or and so on. Uh, no plans for that, but we wouldn't rule it out. Okay, so there's a lot of things, a lot of features that we as users of the things app would love to see added to the things app, but just doesn't seem like much is happening. So why is it so quiet and are the developers actually busy? Well, people have asked them about that as well. Let's have a look at what they're saying. Justin said, I don't know Justin, by the way. I don't know these people. Justin says, "With all going on in the software world, is anyone actually still working or shipping anything at Cultured Code, not even mentist is introducing useful AI features." This is a very fair point. To-d doist especially, I'll talk a little bit more about that later in the video. to-d doist has indeed been developing a lot. So, what's going on with things? Well, we're still at it. The the things team says, even if it seems quiet for now. Okay. What else do they have to say? Are any new features coming soon? Well, we have nothing to announce. Okay. Are you doing anything? We are quite busy. So, very interesting. So, they they they are quite busy. They are doing things. uh they kind of have to be you know um because one of the interesting things about things is it's a one-time purchase. Okay, so things is a one-time purchase. You might have to purchase it separately for your your separate Apple devices, but it doesn't have a subscription model. Not at the moment anyway. Um and of course the way that their company is going to make money is only by new people buying things. And so people like me who've been using things for many years, probably paid for a long time ago, and they're not getting recurring revenue, but they've got to fund their development somehow, right? So also shows you that the app continues to be very good because new people must be using it all the time. But at the same time, if you're going to use that business model, at some point you're going to have to release a new feature, right, to make to generate more revenue. So I do believe that they must be working on new things. But what are they? Um, so people have asked about it. I like this one. You must have the world's largest user request database in the world, curated over many, many years. Um, ignoring a new version four of things. things for is there any new feature coming to cheer us all up and don't say uh whatever iOS 27 brings I think this is very funny because one of the things that's happened in the past years indeed is that more or less the things app has just been updated to take advantage of a few minor new features in the new versions of iOS and Mac OS but that's not that exciting um but the things team will point out hey we don't like to pre-announce stuff um but of course you know they they are going to implement new OS features if they exist And another thing I said a couple months ago is work is ongoing. Some of the most important work gets done when it seems quiet. Stuff is happening. Stuff is happening. And I really think it really shows that people love this app, but they do find that it has some limitations. So, let's talk a little bit about one of the competitors, and that's To-Doist. one of the main competitors to things because I want to show you a feature that they added recently that's very interesting that's amazing that a lot of people love and it's the kind of thing that you'd love to see in things as well. So let's have a look at it. Um we are here again on X and here's someone saying things is the best task manager ever made. It's certainly the smoothest task manager if you're using Apple devices and the most frictionless task manager. The most intuitive to use, I would say. Okay, this person says, "I love it. I'm not leaving. But to-d doist has a new feature called ramble, which takes your voice and puts it and turns that into structured tasks. It does make it harder. What are you planning to do? Not much of a response. So, what is this new ramble feature in To-Doist, which is a good illustration of what other apps are up to? Okay, here's a nice little uh here's a nice little sales page for to-doist ramble or uh announcements page. And I think I was on this page at some point, you know. Um, see if we can find myself. There you go. Here's me saying all to-do apps should have this feature, which is true. That's why I said in one of my videos on to-doist ramble, it's true. So, what you do is you just talk to to-d doist and then it takes what you're saying and turns that into structured tasks with the right due date, the right deadline assigned, puts it in the right project and so on. It's very handy. And of course, this is an AI powered feature and it's really amazing. I mean, what you can do is you can just take your phone, for example, I've got right here, and I put a button uh on the bottom right of my phone, and if I just long press that um and unlock, now I can start talking to To-Doist, and To-Doist is going to transcribe what I'm doing into tasks. I mean, I haven't said anything interesting yet, but it will do that. And it's it's an example of innovation, and we'd love to see things continuing to innovate as well. The to-doist team is working on another feature as well that's called automations. This is something that I've had early access to. I haven't made a video for you guys about it yet, but I will. And to-d doist automations is very cool. It's yet another AI powered feature. And what it does is it allows you to connect to-d doist to other apps and make things trigger. So, what's an example for that? For example, um see if I can find one right here. Start a task. When you star an email in Gmail, to-d doist automations can automatically create a task in to-d doist for you to follow up on that email. Very handy workflow. Really, really cool. And it's the kind of thing that I'd love to see in things as well. So, here's the question. Of course, are these sorts of things ever going to happen with things? Are we going to see new features? And when are they coming? Well, we don't know for a fact, but I do believe the Cultured Code folks when they say that they are working on things even if it seems quiet. Here is a blog post on the on the Cultured Code blog back from 2024, so some time ago, and this is when Apple first announced Apple Intelligence, Apple's take on AI, right? And of course, Apple intelligence has been massively delayed by about two years. At the time that I'm recording this, the proper Apple Intelligence and Smarter Siri are supposed to come out sometime in the next few months, maybe even sometime in in in a month or so in beta. Um, and one of the things that the the things folks said even years ago is we're excited for Apple intelligence. Uh, things has laid some groundwork for for for using it already. And one of the things you can do is you can have better conversations with Siri. will tell you more about these features once Apple intelligence enables support for them. This is I think something to really watch. Maybe this is just hope on my part, but I think this this is an interesting direction. So I went over to Perplexity as an AI search engine and I said look what are some things that Cultured Code the makers of things might be able to do with app intents and the upcoming Apple intelligence and smarter Siri. Now what are app intents? Okay, so app intents are very cool. It's something that Apple announced again about two years ago, but that hasn't really come out yet. But it's an API, I think, or or anyway, a a set of tools that apps like Things can connect to, can use to do things on your device, so on your phone or on your laptop or whatever. Um, and this will make it much easier to control things with Siri. Okay? So, that's going to be very helpful. But another thing that could happen is what you could do um is you could basically just talk to you know using theory Siri talk through what's going on in your things app or you could say you know here's a note um you know read this note and turn what's in this note into tasks in things um or maybe uh it could be something like Apple intelligence can suggest actions such as addit to do in things question when it detects a task-like sentence in mail or notes. So when you receive an email for example, maybe it'll be really easy to turn that email into a task in things. And these are the kind of things that is going to have to be developed and tested and stuff. Is this sort of thing coming? I hope so. You know, so when the cultured code folks say that they are working on stuff, I hope that secretly behind the scenes this is the sort of stuff that they are working on. especially since we know that they have some kind of relationship with Apple. Things has been sort of featured in Apple keynotes before or at least shown on screen and it's shown on the laptops and Macs inside Apple stores. Um and so where we're at now is as you saw so many people love things I do as well. Things remains one of the best to-do apps. Certainly if you're on Apple devices it's it's um you know worth considering things trying it out because it is very smooth. It is extremely frictionfree relative to other apps. So other apps like to-d doist might have more features very useful features right and have faster development but things remains very smooth to use. And one of the big problems, of course, with our with our task management systems, with our personal productivity systems, is sometimes if there's too much friction, we stop using them. And a system that you don't use is completely useless. So even though we don't know what new features are coming up in things, I think something will come, it's in the meantime anyway still a fantastic app to use to stay organized and get more done. If you haven't done so already, I highly recommend that you download my free things cheat sheet. And if you really just want to master the app as quickly as possible, enroll in my course, organize your life with things. Thanks very much for watching. Would love to hear your take on things and on what I've said and what we think is going on or what is not going on. Okay, see you in the next video and have a great day. Ciao.