Google Tasks reviews

The main reason to stay isn't features, it's the place in the ecosystem: a task born from an email, a deadline in Calendar, a drag-and-drop check-off on desktop. For someone whose day already runs through Gmail and Calendar this is zero friction and a single view — something standalone to-do apps can't match no matter how feature-rich they are.

The strongest new hook is adding tasks by voice through Gemini with one button: capture is now faster than the app itself. This especially grabs people with ADHD and those on the move (driving, walking): the thought gets logged the instant it appears, before it can slip away. It's capture speed, not management, that holds this segment.

Minimalism isn't a gap, it's positioning. Open, jot, check off — no onboarding, projects, or settings. This wins students, busy parents, and everyone who tried 'powerful' planners and quit: they want a list that starts instantly, not a second job maintaining it. It's this audience that gives five stars for the app being 'just what you need and no more'.

Recurring items don't appear in the list until they come due, so a user literally cannot see what's coming over the next week. For anyone running life on a schedule (bills, maintenance, routines) the list stops being a map of the future and becomes a pile of today-only reminders — and they leave for competitors just to get a forward view.

A reminder shows up as an ordinary gentle notification, drowns in the stream of other Android alerts, and is easily swiped away before the task is done. For a to-do app this is fatal: people build trust on being nudged on time, and once the nudge misses they stop relying on it and switch to apps where the reminder is more insistent (Samsung Reminder, Microsoft To Do).

There is no search at all — not across tasks, not across subtasks. While you have few items it's invisible, but it's precisely the heavy users whose lists balloon, making a given entry impossible to find. So the app punishes its most loyal audience: the more you use it, the worse it works.

Google rerouted Keep reminders into Tasks, and users suddenly landed in a poorer app: photo reminders gone, location pinning gone, the familiar single-place flow gone. Migrating breaks an established habit without consent — the most painful kind of change — and it pushes a long-loyal base to look for an exit rather than welcome the 'unified' app.

Tying tasks to a place was removed — and that was a distinct, irreplaceable behavioral use case: the reminder fires not by time but by leaving home or arriving at a store. For these users the feature was the core, and competitors (Samsung) retain them on exactly that. By deleting it, Google voluntarily handed away a segment that won't come back on its own.

Lists can't be shared with a partner, roommate, or colleague — the collaborative use case (shared shopping, household chores, a work team) simply doesn't exist. This cuts out a huge class of tasks that are collaborative by nature, and every such user is forced to keep a second app alongside. The decision makes Tasks a strictly single-player tool by design.

There's no completed-task log: you can't check whether you did yesterday's recurring chore, and you can't see progress. For a user running routines (water, cleaning, meds) this turns the to-do list into pure amnesia — it reminds but never confirms. The segment that cares about discipline and accountability can't build a habit on it.

There's no multi-select: to move a dozen tasks to another day you must open and edit each one individually. This hits the people who actually plan a week and reshuffle it when the plan slips — i.e. the most engaged ones. A basic operation of any planner is missing, and the power user hits the ceiling exactly when they start taking the work seriously.

A widget update made it passive: it doesn't reflect added or checked-off items until you open the app itself, shows only some entries, and lost its subtask indicator. A widget exists precisely for a glance without opening — and now you have to open it. It's a quiet but destructive regression: it breaks the daily micro-ritual the habit rests on.

Users notice that Google Calendar does the same thing and can't see why they'd keep a separate to-do app. This isn't a functional bug but a positioning problem: the product doesn't articulate its distinct value, and part of the audience treats it as a redundant icon. When an app can't answer 'why do I exist', it's easy to delete at the first home-screen cleanup.

Part of the audience openly views the app as abandoned by Google: basic things haven't shipped for years, and the only visible update is a new icon. This creates a behavioral risk: a user won't invest in a tool they don't believe will last, and keeps a backup to-do app on standby in advance. The reputation of neglect deters people even before any actual missing feature.