This dog eats your homework (I USED to use it constantly)

Updated review.

tl;dr: Thanks to the major work-losing incident described here, Im firing Wunderlist for one of its major competitors after relying upon and trusting it for years. I now think of it like Cleopatra or Salome: beautiful but deadly.

Full story:
I cant stand to lose work. Can. Not. Stand. It. Theres no reason in this day of cloud-enabled everything to lose much of anything, unless its unambiguously operator error (as in taking a sledgehammer to your hard drive before backing it up). If software eats your work more than once, FIRE IT—and if youre so inclined, leave a pointed review.

Ive taken a few days to calm down, so Ill describe in detail how I lost my work (both to make this review useful, and so that I seem sane).

One flaw that helped lead to the incident: I appreciate that Wunderlist syncs frequently when youre connected to the Internet, but its hyperagressive about it (meaning way too frequent). Ergo, it syncs WHILE youre doing different things with a single task, like moving it from one list to another while changing the due date (etc.), and it routinely forgets one of the changes as its sending the other to the cloud. Because I use it so heavily, this is not a rare experience. It wastes time and is annoying, but forgivable.

I came to the point where I needed to do a LOT of such task organization. Again, this is because I used Wunderlist so heavily. (Maybe this is all punishment for me being a fan.) I was offline at the time, and spent more than an hour putting tasks into the right list, carefully setting due dates (lots of work, considering their not-so-great UI for doing so), updating quite a few text/notes/subtasks, marking some completed, deleting duplicates, and adding new ones. In short, lots of intricate work.

As soon as I reconnected… BOOM. App crash. (Did I mention that the Mac app crashes frequently? It does.)

I re-opened it (duh) then… BOOM NUMBER TWO. All that work was utterly lost. The app pulled the remote data down, ignored the fact that it was older than the local data, and overwrote everything I had done while offline. Thank goodness I have a sturdy heart.

Lets just say, this was… an unpleasant moment.

I learned in this ordeal that Wunderlist does NOT keep a local backup. WHAT THE WHAT?! Is it not 2016? Sync issues are going to happen and they should be recoverable!

To sum up: use Wunderlist at your own risk. You and your team WILL lose data and work at some point—its just a matter of how much and how often. (Especially if youre ever on a plane and Wunderlist-ing while disconnected for a while.)

6Wunderkinder must pay more attention to safeguards and common edge cases. But heck, even if they do, Im probably never coming back.

My earlier 5-star review used to read:
I dont often rave about software, but Wunderlists functionality while simple is truly elegant. It has hit the Goldilocks niche in features (not too many, not too few). It does what it does very well. Its beautifully simple and easy to use, but keeps me on track. The cross-device sync is key and I love the e-mail reminder capability (it has native OSX and iOS notifications that are great, but sometimes I need that extra push). I really really wish the 6Wunderkinder people would make a mail app. (Seriously!)

Flengord about Wunderlist: To-Do List & Tasks