Agreed. No visible changes after the assurance from Emily. The updates via blog and social media are in frequent and do not provide insight into what comes next ? Ive read about software considered feature complete and bug free. When you review comments and request in the forums, there is an opportunity to enhance functionality. Is the platform, slowly being abandoned ? Asking you users to stick around and support your endeavours (also paying more), needs to be rewarded by showing some level of commitment.

+1

I came here today to post about a problem with the software that's bothering me.

That said, however, Remember the Milk is a great product at its current level of features. It never loses my data. I use it all day every day on my phone and the web, it does 99% of everything I need successfully and reliably.

I would be SO happy if while yes, development was abandoned, yet still the service was maintained in good working order.

I fear, however, that bit rot will accrue and it'll start getting more and more unreliable.

Meaning, there's a difference between new features and bug fixes (positive change) and maintaining the status quo (vs degradation). I would be very happy with maintaining the status quo.

And it does feel to me today 05/25/2024 (happy Memorial Day) as solid and reliable as 5 years ago.

And Andrew often replies to my posts here.

So I am hopeful for a well-maintained service going forward in the future.

(Bump)

I have moved to a different task manager right after "Emily's speech", wasn't hoping for a change of owners' approach for any second, I've seen similar Toodledo's agony, and here is exactly the same scenario. No matter how good RTM is, it's abandoned since long time and will sooner than later become not that reliable as some users still hope it will forever be. My subscription expires in one month, and after many years I will not renew it for sure. And no, I wasn't hoping for spectacular improvements or features - fixing simple bugs or implementing even the easiest users' suggestions would be enough to convince me that RTM is still breathing, but I'm done waiting, or better to say, done being naive. All the best.

The long term issue all platforms face is being written for/with outdated tech. Let's just talk a feature avail w most of the competition - attaching media to tasks.. RTM is a text based system. Ea task takes only a little bit of space so there's not much hardware. The ability to add media would require profound changes at every level.

The disk space required for one task would grow exponentially as soon as the feature went live. The cost of just the additional hardware & internet bandwidth and their management for these files could be substantial.

They can't afford it with the small # of clients they have - and clients won't pay more so they can buy it. Then there's still the software and database rewrite and testing and they are falling further behind without it.

This math answers all new development questions unless something changes their cash flow.

Credit where credit's due:

I could not load tasks from 11pm-12am on 07/01/2024. I tried various interventions til 11:40pm (update browser, different browser, mobile). Then I submitted a ticket. I am a pro user.

20 min later, Emily got back to me saying the problem was resolved.

And it was.

Thank you Emily and RTM team for still being great.

... and yet they have nothing to say in response to this thread. Happy to take the [increased] subs but provide nothing in return.

My last 5 days with Pro, and with RTM in general. I was curious if I would see any response from RTM in this thread, but yet again, no surprises at all.

Indeed, very disappointing. I've been through this story with many different applications.

I will add a task to look for an RTM replacement . . . .

It’s does appear that this thread will eventually close without a response from Emily & team.

#abandonware ?

Feels like. So here we are again, in our tiny RTM mourning club.

It really is a shame. RTM still is the best todo app, but it feels like wasted effort to maintain my system here. Feels like any other day the plug might be pulled. Damn, I think about the old days. Hey, just for fun: open the blog and scroll down reeeeaaaally long. Then you will see, what RTM has once been.

The devs (if there are any) might do so as well.

7 weeks since last visiting this thread - still no response from RTM ? Shameful.

Has anybody in this thread built/designed something with MilkScipt. It's super powerful. Perhaps we can ideate on something together.

Looking at LinkedIn, it seems the technical co-founder has been working at other companies in addition to his work on RTM already for the last few years, which would explain (not justify) some of the development drought.

It really is a shame that this wonderful product might be abandoned. After trending on social media, I tried TickTick for the last few days - just to realize that it is basically a copy of RTM with some additional features tacked on, an arguably slightly prettier UI for 2024, but a lot less reliable in many functionality aspects. Just shows how awesome RTM has already been all these years.

I don't even think that RTM needs that many additional features, just being maintained a bit more actively. Hoping for the best here.

Through coincidence or maybe a planned strategy it seems adding milkscript as the last real feature was smart. Letting users develop the app on their own while in-house development slowed down, keep us in the app longer

Since someone asked if anyone has used milkscript:
A few I made https://github.com/cblupodev/rememberthemilk that solved some long held annoyances I've had with the system

(bump)

Disappointing that no one from the development has responded here after multiple requests for an update to the platform. As a user this is concerning to say the least.

I had been using RTM for years and years, probably something like 10 years or more, I can't remember exactly how long. I was a pro member for most of that time. While I used RTM, I loved it. Whenever I would have a problem, Andrew or someone on his team, would look into the problem and ultimately it would be resolved.

At a certain point, thought, I felt like the progress had slowed to the point that I was worried how long they would continue to be in business. The hundreds and hundreds of RTM tasks kept my entire life, and my job organized and that was too important to me to worry about the system becoming abandoned at some point. I tried to think about the future and that this is a small company with a small group of people running it. To this day, I was never able to find another task management system that worked as well as this one.

Eventually, I made the switch to Todoist and it works. They constantly update their software and add new features all the time. Honestly, I don't use most of the new features and I still miss RTM because the way it worked fit perfectly with what I needed. I doubt that I'll ever find something that I enjoy as much as I enjoyed RTM. But I feel much better about the future now, because Todoist is not going anywhere and is supported by a huge development team. That being said, I have had issues with Todoist too and had to submit a handful of tickets over the last couple of years. The turnaround time for Todoist tickets is measured is weeks instead of days like RTM. And I feel like my issues are not important to them, especially if one of their technicians can't replicate my issue. At one point, I was told that I had to live with the problem because they can't replicate it, and they don't have time to try and figure out exactly what was causing my problem since their customer base is so big,

Ultimately, all my problems with Todoist were resolved, but at least one of them took almost a year to be fixed by some random version update.

So, long story short, I still check back with RTM and see how it's going every once in a while. I miss RTM and how their tasks worked, but I've moved on. I sometimes wish I had never changed to another system, but I no longer worry about the future and that was worth the switch, in my opinion.

For me personally the lack of development isn't so much of an issue, other than 1 or 2 minor things (like uris not opening external apps properly) the product is more or less feature complete for my needs. That being said the product is clearly in maintenance mode and the lack of communication about the plans around support make me feel increasingly worried that one day I'm just going to log into a "we are shutting down you have 1 week to export your stuff" notification. If the team could give some sort of reassurance on their support plans I would probs have no issue staying however as it stands today I think I would likely port my content to todoist come my next pro-renewal.

So what now, Emily, Andrew? Still no "official" statement?

Oh, btw: cblupo, you're my hero for your task-duplicate.js! Thanks for that!

Hmm. I rely completely on RTM, and have done for years. Now I'm worried. Is it now, as someone said above, 'abandonware'?

I feel it is important to draw distinctions here. RTM is clearly not abandonware, the devs do respond to bug reports and do actively fix stuff. I think it would be fairer to say that (at least from observation, I have no idea what the devs are planning) RTM is currently in maintenance mode; that is they actively fix stuff but aren't developing new features or overhauling anything. Essentially if RTM fully meets your needs then you are fine. If you are waiting for additional features they aren't likely to be coming. As mentioned above, for me personally RTM is feature complete for my workflow, my only fear/concern is on the uncertainty of how long they will continue to support RTM for and how much notice they will give if they do eventually decide the time has come to terminate the service.

This thread started with reference to a note sent, almost 12 months ago ...

"I'm really sorry for the lack of communication on our end about the Remember The Milk service in general. This one's my fault, and is something we're working to fix right now. You can expect more frequent updates on the blog (and social media, if you're following us there).

I also hear you that we're slow on feature updates and improvements. We've had some big updates (e.g., MilkScript), but I totally appreciate that there are other areas of our apps that people would like to see given some love too. :) We're working to change this -- I realize these are just words, but I'm hoping through our actions that we'll be able to earn your trust back."

So, what's changed ?

Still no engagement with this community, no updates being provided, no roadmap or indication re: the future of RTM.

Anyone from the RTM team to contribute to this discussion ?

Maybe they are off developing "Remember the Soya"?

I feel the same as gowerc from his comments about 6 weeks ago. I feel more and more that one day RTM will just be shutting down, without much notice. A few weeks ago, the web interface was down. The status page showed it was working, but a bunch of people on the forums were asking what was going on. Eventually after about 12 or so hours someone from RTM did come on and say it was fixed (and they also wrongly said the status page showed the problem, which it did not).

I couldn't stop thinking that an outage like this at a well-maintained service would at least garner some comments from the staff saying they were looking into it. Also, RTM eventually confirmed there was problem, but I was shocked to see how few people were on the forums asking about it.

I just really got the feeling that this service is losing customers and the staff have moved on to other things. This is almost like passive income for them now.

Around the same time another service I really liked and had a bunch of data in was acquired and told its users it was shutting down in 14 days and all data on the platform would be deleted.

I made the decision to try ToDoist again but could not get into it. TickTick is what I settled on, and while it has some improvements over RTM, the lack of hotkeys is a real pain. I don't want to leave RTM but I feel this service is dying and I may as well transition away now without any time constraints.

I think it unlikely that RTM would just shut down. It has too much value. More likely the business would be sold. It certainly appears to be a passive income for the owners, who must be delighted to reaping the financial rewards whilst offering little in return. From this perspective I feel that users are being taken for a ride. Neither of the two original founders have much of a web footprint or social media presence. Omar appears to have moved on and Emily keeps a low profile, all of which suggests they're happy to take the money (who wouldn't) whilst maintaining a skeleton staff to keep the ship afloat. It's not really a serious long term business strategy. I've moved on and my pro membership will lapse in the new year.

Yup, seems to be in a holding pattern for sure. I really prefer remember the milk but have moved back to Todoist just because their service pretty much never goes down and they are clear about priorities and what is going on, they even have a list of bug fixes etc for their releases.

RTM used to be great, it is still pretty solid but lacks of new features. From my point of view, it's sadly slowly dying.

If you wanna try something else, give a Godspeed (godspeedapp.com) try. Pretty rock solid keyboard todo-list - with fresh attitude from the developer.