Sunsetting Tasktic (for now)

A little less than four years ago, my second app Tasktic debuted in the App Store. Sadly, I’m here to report that today I have removed it from sale.

Before explaining the reasoning behind my decision, let me pay my respect:

In many ways, I could say that Tasktic was actually my first true app, and certainly it was my first Swift (version 1.0!) project… It’s actually a quite complex piece of software for a beginner (and certainly I was a beginner - if I’m not still today - in 2014 when I started working on it…), being a Universal app with support for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch that had reliable sync from day one (after multiple rewrites during development… a full month of my life I’ll never get back 🙃) and offered a lot of capabilities that at the time rarely appeared in free task managers, especially when made by a solo developer: a reasonable and customizable GTD approach, optional notifications, both projects and multiple tags, recurring tasks, Siri support (when it was hard & hacky to achieve it), in-app statistics for motivation, a widget and a share extension; the app has always been free, with multiple levels of in-app purchases, and was 100% respectful of users privacy.

To be honest, Tasktic was never a commercial success (in hindsight, maybe refusing on principle to include banner ads in the free version was a bad call), but it was loved by some and noticed in ways I would have never imagined during my many months of hard work developing it: the app received very nice reviews from Users and press, it even showed up in a PRINTED NEWSPAPER (!), Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph (proof), and it was - and I am still shocked, shocked by it - featured among the top 10 products of Product Hunt’s Tech page on Christmas day 2015:

What a journey!

Tasktic is also somehow a victim of my other apps and of the continuous evolution of Swift in its first years: the last major update shipped over 3 years ago and the big 2.0 I’ve poured so many hours into (my guess: over 200… it had themes, habits tracking, a more modern UI and much more) sits 80% completed on my hard drive and never launched in the App Store, again slowed down to a halt by my newest apps (after Tasktic I launched Always There, Walk More, ContactsAMI, GlanceCam and PhotosUpload) and, not insignificantly, by the huge cost of migrating to a new Swift version apparently every time I opened Xcode, something that either you diligently did every time, or became a really big burden if you accumulated technical debt.

Having said all this, it’s very sad - incredibly sad - for me to pull the plug on Tasktic, and I truly hope I’ll be able to resuscitate the project some day in the future.

Most of what I know as a programmer, I have to thank Tasktic for.

But it makes sense to remove it from sale for the time being: the app is out of date, doesn’t fit modern devices right, in a few cases (as far as I know, only for myself and one user) is also crashing on iOS 13 (when in-app statistics are enabled); on top of that, the market has evolved, more modern apps are available and it would be difficult to justify the work necessary to ship version 2. I have a lot on my plate right now, with GlanceCam and the upcoming TameTime, and sooo little time… so, dear Tasktic, goodbye for now 😥.