Microsoft brings Wunderlist features to its new To Do app

Inevitably when big companies acquire a smaller company or app you will see one of two things. That new app will now have its features bolstered with the rest of the bigger company’s ecosystem and see it grow – or more likely, the technology from the acquired company will simply find its way in other apps of the bigger company and the app itself which was acquired, slowly removed from the market.

This seems to be exactly what is happening to Wunderlist, who was acquired by Microsoft a few years ago and is now been made irrelevant by a new update to Microsoft’s To Do app (to be renamed from To-Do) which includes a whole bunch of features that made Wunderlist so popular.    

For a start, the new To Do app has a lot more of the visual look that Wunderlist provided with customisable backgrounds for each list. It’s not just similarities in the visual area though as To Do also includes a daily planner feature that makes use of the smart lists that you may have used in Wunderlist. The My Day feature will refresh each day with suggestions for what you need to get done that day.

If you’re a fan of Wunderlist, this should all be familiar to you and although Microsoft has not revealed any plans to shut down the application, it’s clear from its current strategy that the app will eventually be made obsolete with their investment elsewhere. Something which has made Wunderlist founder Christian Reber very unhappy as he is offering to buy the app back from Microsoft with the hope of preventing this from happening. It’s inevitable in this big corporate world that we live in that companies will find a way of not only outsmarting their competition but sometimes acquiring it and closing it down completely.

Last Updated: September 10, 2019