Task Management apps are tough to review, because they’re the kind of apps where design takes second place to actual functionality. You could have a wonderfully designed app, with smooth graphics, slick animations and a beautiful layout, but if it doesn’t remind you to pick up breakfast cereal on your way home from work (I’m looking at you, Things), it just won’t cut it. Still, apps that blend the best of design and performance are rare enough that they rate being mentioned. Apps like Todoist and OmniFocus are superbly designed and pack tremendous functionality. A little known player in that field, and subject of this review, is WeDo.
WeDo is a fascinating app – its raison d’étre is to be your one stop shop for reminders, todos, and habit-promoting functionality. The app can be used to track individual tasks, tasks that require your regular attention, as well as tasks you set for yourself to change your lifestyle. The app also supports subtasks, so you can can replicate the functionality of an app like Clear. It packs all this into a simple, clean interface, and is available across platforms – Mac, iOS, Apple Watch, the Web, and Android.
More impressively, it also packs task sharing and chat features. You can create ‘Tribes’, which is the app’s way of denoting groups of your co-workers, or members of your family, with whom you’d like to share tasks. They do need to have an account with WeDo, however, in order to use this functionality. When you enter a task in a Tribe, it gets pushed via the company’s cloud to every member on that Tribe. Every time a task is marked as completed, it gets struck off from everyone’s list. Everyone in the Tribe can use the inbuilt chat feature, to follow up with each other, if needed. By chat, I mean, an actual chat… The chat experience in the app is convincing enough that it doesn’t feel like the function was an afterthought, and was purposefully built in.
But most impressively, all of this is free. This, however, is a bit worrisome. With Todoist’s annual subscription, or OmniFocus’ upfront price, I KNOW I have a reasonable expectation of getting continuous feature updates and bug fixes. WeDo’s entire feature set is free, and while that’s fantastic news for most people, I’ve seen too many apps just disappear or fall by the wayside, because the developers ran out of money to support it. I’m very happy to pay for apps and services, because I feel reassured that the developer is getting paid for her/her work, and has incentive to do even better. WeDo’s business plan baffles me, and while it is a delightful app, I don’t feel comfortable staking my entire task list to an app that doesn’t have a clear revenue model.
That’s not to say that the app isn’t great – it most certainly is. It’s the most fully-featured, free (try saying that over and over again) app in its category, and is very nicely designed. For those of you who are fully immersed in Todoist (like me), or any one of the other task managers around, there really isn’t that much here to draw you away from your pre-existing system. If, however, you’re not yet into GTD, or are just getting started with task managers, or even if you’re looking for a great new app to try out, give WeDo a try. You’ll love the thought that’s gone into the app, and its feature set definitely won’t leave you feeling dissatisfied. The app has an average rating of 4.5 stars on the App Store, for a very good reason.
WeDo is available on the iOS App Store, Google Play and the Mac App Store, for Free.