When Microsoft bought Wunderlist, the company announced that the app would eventually be shut down and that To-Do would take its place. But, as time passed, Microsoft said that Wunderlist would live-on a bit longer but that the plan was to still transition over to To-Do when the app was ready.

As I have often wondered out loud, the transition is taking a lot longer than many anticipated, the messaging about the future of Wunderlist is confusing, and many users didn’t know what to expect or when Wunderlist will actually be shut down. Thanks to a few tweets by Christian Reber, translated by drwindows.de, we now have a better understanding of what happened behind the scenes but still no timeline for the app being turned off.

According to his tweets, the initial plan was to introduce To-Do and stop development of Wunderlist but that hasn’t gone according to plan. The issue? Wunderlist API runs on AWS and is in the process of being ported to Azure but since it needs to include Exchange/Office integration, this port is taking much longer than initially expected.

The project as it stands right now is in some sort of migration-hell that has essentially destroyed the fan-base for Wunderlist thanks to missed deadlines and with To-Do being half-baked; Microsoft has royally botched this acquisition and transition between platforms.

When I was in graduate school, I had a professor tell me that the best way to determine the true length of an IT project is to take your best estimate and multiply it by two. In this case, the one year anniversary of To-Do happens in about four weeks which means we may have another year of this waffling between the two services.

While we wait for Microsoft to get its act together and add features to To-Do that give it parity to other popular task apps, the light is slowly fading on the ability to salvage any of the momentum from acquiring Wunderlist when To-Do is finally ready.

Tagged with To-Do, Wunderlist