To-Do App Wunderlist Debuts An API, Early Integrations Of Slack, Sunrise, HipChat And More
Wunderlist, the to-do app based out of Berlin, is now approaching 13 million free and paid accounts. And today it is adding a new feature that it hopes will make the app a lot more useful and more used …
Context & Ripple Effects
In spring 2015 Wunderlist was racing rival to-do apps on collaboration: Any.do had just shipped version 3.0 with collaboration and list sorting, and Wunderlist answered by opening up. The public API turned its roughly 13 million accounts into a surface other tools could write to, starting with chat and calendar apps — Slack, Sunrise, HipChat — rather than competing to-do lists.
That platform posture is what made the company legible as an acquisition target: within weeks Microsoft confirmed it was buying 6Wunderkinder, and the API-era integrations kept paying off afterward when Outlook began pulling Wunderlist tasks and events into its mobile apps. The same openness, though, made the eventual forced migration to Microsoft To Do harder — and left room for the original founder's successor product.
First-order effects
- Developers gain read/write access to Wunderlist tasks, so Slack, Sunrise and HipChat users can create and sync to-dos without leaving those tools — directly countering Any.do's fresh collaboration push.
Second-order effects
- The API-driven footprint makes Wunderlist attractive enough that Microsoft buys it outright a month later, inheriting an ecosystem of third-party integrations it did not build and cannot easily retire without alienating the 13 million accounts.
Third-order effects
- When Microsoft shutters Wunderlist five years on, the API bet shows both sides of platform dependence: users' workflows are portable enough that the founder can start over with Superlist, while the task-management layer migrates into suites and chat hubs — culminating in Slack building its own Lists feature rather than relying on partners like Wunderlist.
The trend: Standalone to-do apps are opening APIs to become platforms, then getting absorbed into productivity suites as chat tools like Slack pull task management in-house.