An Apple Reminders alternative that runs everywhere

Almost nobody leaves Reminders because it is bad. They leave because they hit one of four walls, and all four are structural rather than cosmetic.

• There is no start date. One date field does both jobs — the day you plan to work on something and the day it is due — so anything scheduled early sits in Today going grey, and anything scheduled honestly has no cutoff recorded anywhere. This is the most consistent complaint about Reminders, and it is the thing a second date field fixes outright.
• You cannot finish a list. A list can be deleted, and deleting it takes the history with it. There is no archive and no completed-projects view. If you run projects in Reminders, the only way to clear a finished one is to destroy the record that it happened. That is a data-model difference, not a feature gap.
• There is no layer above lists. Groups of lists exist but do not nest, and a shared list cannot go in a group at all — so the moment you have more than a dozen lists, the sidebar is the organising system.
• No Windows, no Android. Sharing needs an Apple Account on both ends, so you cannot share a list with someone on Android at all. See Apple Reminders on Windows for what iCloud.com does and does not give you.

Reminders wins eight of those rows outright. That is not a rhetorical concession — it is why the honest recommendation for a lot of people is to use both, which is the next section but one.

The same list on every machine you own. The web app runs in any browser on Windows, Linux or ChromeOS, alongside the iPhone app. No account ecosystem to be inside.

Two dates instead of one. A start date decides what today looks like; a deadline records what is actually due. Nothing scheduled early piles up in Today, and nothing due gets lost because you scheduled honestly. See how the two dates work.

Projects that end. A project can be completed — or cancelled, which is not the same as deleted — and the record survives either way. Areas sit above projects for the things that never end, so the sidebar stays short.

Repeats that survive being late. Nth weekday, last day of the month, stop after N occurrences, and repeats anchored to the day you finish rather than the day it was due. Unticking a completed recurring task genuinely undoes it. See recurrence anchor.

This is the section nobody writes, and it is the honest answer for a large share of the people reading this page. Reminders is better than anything else at getting a thought out of your head on an iPhone — say it to Siri while driving, tap it on the Lock Screen, share a link into it from Safari. TaskPocket cannot compete with that and is not trying to.

So: capture in Reminders on the phone, and plan somewhere that exists on the machine you actually work at. Once a day, move what matters across and clear the rest.

Be clear about the cost, because it is real: there is no sync between the two. Moving things across is a manual step, and if you will not do it daily this arrangement quietly becomes two lists you trust equally, which is worse than either one alone.

There is no importer yet, so this is a manual job and worth being honest about the size of it. It is an hour for a normal list and an afternoon for a large one.

1. On a Mac or iPhone, open each list in Reminders and work through it. There is no bulk export from Reminders — Apple provides no export at all — so this is a copy-and-retype job whichever destination you pick.
2. Treat it as a cull rather than a migration. Most people find a third of an old Reminders list is dead, and re-entering something is the cheapest possible review.
3. Map the model as you go: a Reminders list becomes a project if it has an ending, or an area if it does not. A tag usually becomes an area.
4. Set start dates, not deadlines, on the first pass. The deadline field is for things with an external consequence, and most tasks do not have one.