[cromka]

Honestly, the less Apple made apps, the better for the ecosystem and the quality of the apps in general. Apple's recent "sherlocked" apps are not good quality at all, but they make it substantially more difficult for 3rd parties to compete with the now default offerings.

[Sir_Twist]

Not a developer, but I feel like Apple improving the defaults has been good for the ecosystem. The Reminders app is an example of this, because as it has gotten better over the years, the baseline for a good iOS to-do app has been raised, without reducing the market.

[Schiendelman]

I agree 100%. I ended up building myself a utility to wrangle my reminders (like keep them from getting missed/lost) instead of using a third-party app.

[coldtea]

Can you describe that utility?

[Schiendelman]

Yeah! I mean I published it on the app store, too. It does three core things: 1) Makes sure every reminder gets a date and time if it doesn't have one 2) Snowplows them ahead of you, so if you go on vacation they're still in the near future 3) Moves reminders out of the way if you accept or create a calendar event conflicting with it

It also preserves ordering when moving things (hence my snowplow approach).

Soon it'll summarize what you did that day so you can feel good about what you get done - that's coming shortly, I'm testing the feature for another few days.

There are a bunch of settings to tweak this - picking what reminder lists to include, setting a time window for when it'll reschedule things, etc.

This should link to it:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reminder-wrangler/id6759400510

[xp84]

Nice try, Claude Code

[coldtea]

Is that meant to be a joke? I've been on HN for over a decade. Closer to ELIZA's era than that of LLMs.

I'm curious because I'm also interested in hacking the Reminders app via its API, to add some features in a side app

[NetMageSCW]

One thing I miss from the Newton was the universal design it had for accessing app data and extending apps that made such add-ons to the built-in apps relatively easy.

[xp84]

Oh 100% a joke, that you were trying to get their prompt so you could get also get the same thing they had vibe-coded

[Schiendelman]

If you try it out, I'm curious what you'd add! I'd be happy to make improvements.

[djfdat]

One issue is: when the Reminders app was simple, making a better reminders app just had to be a little more complex that a single developer could improve upon it and charge for it once and make a living. Now, the bar is so high, that it takes significantly more work/time to make a better app, and thus we have to pay subscription pricing in order to use it.

Instead of: let me buy this app for a few bucks and give it a spin, its now: even if I like this app, do I want to pay for it a few bucks a month for forever?

[SllX]

Generally speaking, Apple should be improving and adding to the base operating system all the time, including new apps. It is better for their users including new users if the phone itself is capable of more out of the box.

Where they fall short though, the App Store is right there. There’s almost always a better alternative for those who value having something better.

[ileonichwiesz]

> There’s almost always a better alternative for those who value having something better.

That alternative comes with a $60/year subscription these days, though.

[SllX]

I don’t know what you’re paying for that you see a $60/year subscription, but if it’s worth the $60/year to you, then you pay it. If it’s not, you don’t.

There are two apps I pay for that replace an app on my phone: $15/year for Overcast replaces Apple Podcasts and & $25/year for Transit replacing the transit function in Apple Maps (which I may be able to drop now that I’m on Google Maps, but I haven’t tried yet, and the app is so damn good I’m not sure I want to). Those are easily two of the absolute best and most used apps on my phone.

But if you don’t want to spend money on another vendor, or there is nothing suitable for the price you want to pay, at least the phone often has something serviceable.