In 2010 my wife and I wanted a simple app to share lists — groceries, what to pack for the weekend, the everyday things we kept track of together. Apps that could do it existed, but none of them were as simple and as clean as we wanted. In one form or another, I have been working on it ever since.
Twenty years of to-do list apps
The oldest to-do app I can remember using is Kinkless GTD, an add-on for OmniOutliner Pro from around 2006, which eventually became OmniFocus. Later I was an early adopter of Things, drawn to its simplicity and its craft.
None of them supported collaboration.
Listary, 2010–2015
So in 2010 I co-created Listary. It was a very simple list app — items you could check off, and nothing else. No due dates, no priorities, no metadata of any kind. What it added was collaboration: you could keep a list to yourself, or share it with someone and work on it together.
Sync and collaboration were the hard part. There was no CloudKit in 2010 — it would not arrive until 2014 — so the first version worked through Simplenote, and the second through Dropbox's Datastore API. In 2015 Dropbox retired it, and that was the end of Listary.
Todoist, 2012–2022
In 2012 a friend, Gonçalo, CTO of Todoist, asked whether I would join as their first iOS developer. I said yes, and stayed for a decade, growing into Head of Apple Platforms. Ana, who co-created Listary with me, joined too, and is Head of Design.
Ten years inside a to-do app used by many millions of people teaches you things that are hard to learn from the outside. Mostly it taught me what power costs: which capabilities earn their complexity and which do not. Filtering, in particular, became something I could no longer work without.
In 2022, after ten years, I left to take a break.
The gap
I wanted my hands back on code and I wanted to learn SwiftUI, so I started a playground project. Unsurprisingly, a to-do list app.
At the same time, I kept noticing that nothing on the market was quite right for me — including my two favorite apps.
Todoist has kept moving toward teams, and complexity comes with that. It still works great for personal use, but I was no longer using a to-do app as part of a team, and I was carrying complexity I no longer had a use for.
I still admire Things, and its simplicity and craft remain a reference. But it does not offer collaboration, and it does not have the kind of filtering I had come to depend on.
So I took that playground project and turned it into my own answer to all of this.
Lista
The brief in my head was roughly: the simplicity of Things, the power of Todoist, the privacy of Reminders.
Spaces group related lists, and lists break into sections — enough structure for a whole system, and none of it there until you add it. Filters like Starred, Today, or Scheduled apply across everything, inside a space, or within a single list, with nothing to set up first. Any list can be shared — through Messages, Mail, or a link — and everyone on it works together in real time. There is no account: Lista syncs through your own iCloud, which is what makes sharing that simple, and what keeps your data yours, invisible to us.
Lista is for people who want to stay simple without sacrificing power, collaborate in real time with small groups, keep their data private, and find that craft in an app that feels familiar on every Apple platform.
I started it at the end of 2022 and released it on the App Store in March 2026. It is the app I wanted and could not find, and I use it every day.
Lista will keep evolving. What will not change is what it is built on: staying simple as it grows.
Lista is on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.