I’m not sure what you’re on about, but Apple’s own description of Reminders on the App Store sounds exactly like a GTD app:
- "You can use it for all of life's to-dos, including grocery lists, projects at work, or anything else you want to track."
- "Today, Scheduled, Flagged, All, Assigned to Me, and Completed"
- "... based on tags, dates, times, locations, flags, and priorities."
- "It's a powerful way to visualize tasks, or even make simple kanban boards."
Just because it’s called "Reminders" doesn’t mean that’s all it is—or all it should be. The app has evolved well beyond a simple “reminder” tool. Boxing it in like that and ignoring its flaws just limits its potential.
Anyways, the actual issue here is that:
- A parent Reminder can be assigned a due date, time, and recurrence.
- Creating subtasks under that Reminder should allow them to inherit the parent’s settings by default.
- There could be a simple toggle in the parent Reminder settings:
- Subtasks refresh with each recurrence
- Subtasks remain completed across recurrences (for project-based tracking)
Currently, subtasks don’t refresh when the parent Reminder recurs. Instead, they function like a one-time checklist, which makes no sense when paired with a repeating task.
However, if you assign a date/time to a subtask, it appears separately in the Today or Scheduled views, cluttering your lists with duplicates. You see both the parent Reminder AND each individually scheduled subtask. Why would a subtask need to show up as its own Reminder when it already belongs to a recurring Reminder?
Here is a usage example. Imagine you create a Reminder to clean your kitchen every Sunday, with subtasks like:
- Wipe countertops
- Mop the floor
- Take out trash
If the Reminder repeats weekly, you’d expect the subtasks to reset with it, right? Instead, once they’re checked off, they stay checked—making the feature useless for actual recurring task management.
Reminders has the potential to be a good, native GTD tool that comes with every iOS device. The argument that Reminders is "not a GTD app" doesn’t hold up when the app is already marketed with task management features like tagging, sorting, priority levels, and kanban board-style visualization. It’s more than just a basic reminders app.
