Marco Arment launches Unforgetful for serial snoozers

Marco Arment — the indie developer behind Overcast and Instapaper, and Tumblr’s former chief technology officer — has released a new iOS and Mac app called Unforgetful, built as an alternative to Apple’s Reminders for people who don’t get along with it. The app works with a user’s existing Reminders database rather than replacing it outright.

In a Friday announcement, Arment explained his frustration with Apple’s app: “Siri, for all of its faults, has always been very good at creating tasks in Apple’s Reminders app… The Reminders app, though, doesn’t fit me at all. I don’t like how it looks, how it works, or how it’s organized. Hell, I don’t even like its icon. There’s nothing about it I like. So I never open it.” He pointed to specific problems, like how snoozing worked, times he’d accidentally dismissed a reminder instead of snoozing it and lost it entirely, and reminders set without a time that never triggered a notification — and so never got done.

Unforgetful is designed to make tasks harder to lose. Notifications keep repeating — even if missed or dismissed — until a task is actually completed and deleted, and snooze intervals scale the longer a task keeps getting pushed back, though the app avoids piling up multiple notifications at once, since that could make someone freeze and do nothing. The app deliberately skips tags, multiple views, and other organizational tools; for those, Apple’s Reminders remains the better choice, Arment says. Because Unforgetful works with a user’s existing Apple Reminders data, switching just means turning off Reminders notifications and turning on Unforgetful’s instead — with no need to export data back if it doesn’t work out.

The app also includes its own in-app microphone for voice reminders and a full set of widgets for the Lock Screen and Control Center. Unforgetful costs $19.99 per year and works across both Mac and iOS.

Why it matters

Unforgetful is a bet that even a crowded to-do-app market has room for a narrower, more opinionated tool — one that piggybacks on Apple’s own Reminders data instead of asking users to migrate away from it.