The Things 3 alternative for when you need to share (and not everyone's on Apple)

Let’s say it plainly: Things 3 is the most beautiful to-do app ever made. The way a task glides away when you check it, the Magic Plus button, the calm typography, the it-just-feels-right of every single tap — it set the bar for what a list should feel like. We’re fans. So this isn’t a takedown. It’s for the one moment you love Things 3 and hit its hard wall: it’s Apple-only, and it doesn’t really share.

What Things 3 gets gloriously right

Most “alternatives” miss whyThings 3 is special, so they copy the wrong things. It isn’t the feature list. It’s the feel:

• Simplicity that’s actually designed. No clutter, no settings maze. You open it and you just know what to do.
• Smoothness. Scrolling, reordering, the check-off — everything is fast and fluid. Nothing janks.
• Microinteractions you can feel. The slide-in add, the satisfying tick, the little haptic. Small touches that make adding and completing a task quietly enjoyable.
• Ease of use. You never read a manual. It gets out of the way and lets you write the list.

None of that is fluff. The reason Things 3 sticks is that using it feels good, so you actually keep using it. That’s the whole game for a list app — and it’s the thing most alternatives forget.

The two walls a household hits

For one person on a Mac and an iPhone, Things 3 is close to perfect. The trouble starts the moment a list needs to belong to more than one of you.

• It’s Apple-only.No Android, no web. The second one person in the house carries a different phone, half the household simply can’t see the list.
• It doesn’t share. Things is built around yourlists. There’s no shared list everyone edits live, no “send a link to the catsitter,” no watching your partner tick something off from the shop.

Neither is really a flaw — Things 3 chose to be the best personalto-do app, and it is. They’re just the two things a shared household list can’t live without.

What a real alternative has to keep

Here’s the trap: most apps that call themselves a Things 3 alternative match the feature list and lose the feel. They bolt on sharing and cross-platform — and they’re slower, busier, and need a manual. That trades away the one thing that made Things worth using. The bar is both: keep the ease — add a thing in a second, tick it and feel it — andadd the two things Things won’t: every device, and real sharing.

Where toldyou.to comes in

We’ll be honest, because we like Things 3 too: toldyou.to is not a Things 3 clone, and we won’t pretend to match its depth for personal planning — areas, Today and Upcoming, repeating tasks, the whole GTD machine. What we took from Things is the part that matters most for a list you share: it should be calm, instant, and a genuine pleasure to tick. Then we built in what a household actually needs:

• Works on any phone or laptop — iPhone, Android, the web. No app store, no “download what?”
• One shared list everyone sees update live, the second it changes.
• Share a link to anyone — the catsitter, grandma, a flatmate — and they tick things off with no account.
• A friendly nudge when something’s genuinely urgent, instead of a seventh “did you get it??”

So — Things 3 or toldyou.to?

• Just you, all-Apple, planning your own day:stay with Things 3. It’s still the best in the world at that.
• A house full of different phones that needs one list everyone uses: that’s the gap we built toldyou.to for.
• Honestly? Plenty of people keep both— Things 3 for their personal day, toldyou.to for the shared stuff. They don’t compete; they do different jobs.