Astrid

» see astrid.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

astrid was a todo list app started in 2008 by tim su and jon paris in san francisco. it ran on android first, with an iphone version and a web client added later. it was open source. the mascot was a green octopus the company called the squid. the priority model was simple: every task had four priority levels and a due date. the rest of the ui got out of the way.

yahoo acquired astrid on 1 may 2013. the deal was an acquihire. the same announcement that confirmed the buyout also told users they had 90 days to export their data and find another todo app. the service went dark on 5 august 2013. yahoo never shipped an astrid replacement, and the team was absorbed into mail and search projects that did not survive the marissa mayer era either.

i was an engineer in 2013, which means i had cycled through more todo apps than i wanted to admit. astrid was an option in the open-source android camp, and the cult around it was real, but the app i actually kept was something else. astrid landed mostly in english-language android forums and on hacker news. the shutdown notice spread through those channels and barely registered outside.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

astrid hit android at a useful moment. the play store was small in 2008 and the bar for a useful native android app was low. an open-source todo with a clean ui filled a real gap. it cleared a million installs faster than most paid productivity apps of the era. by 2011 it had a premium tier, a web sync layer, and a small but loud user base who treated it as default the way other people treat their wallpaper.

~ the slide ~

the cracks were familiar. server costs went up. revenue from a paid sync layer was modest. the founders looked at the math and started taking acquisition meetings. yahoo offered a deal. the open-source code stayed on github but the hosted service was the part the users actually relied on, and the hosted service had an end date attached.

~ what replaced it ~

the open-source codebase was forked. tasks.org, an active fork, still ships on android with the original astrid task model under the hood. it is the closest thing to a continuous lineage. the cult astrid built moved on to todoist, wunderlist (itself dead later), any.do, things 3, and a long tail of subscription todo apps. nobody reproduced the squid.

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