Qlear.
An offline-first task manager built on a single, stubborn idea — your to-do list shouldn't ask for your email.
The to-do app, somehow, became a surveillance product.
Every major task app now wants an account, a subscription, a sync server, an inbox of marketing email, and the right to quietly read your habits in aggregate. Writing down a grocery list has become a transaction.
Even the “minimal” ones tend to ship with analytics SDKs, push ads behind a free tier, or gate basic features. There is a small but real audience of people who would rather use something that does less, asks for nothing, and stays out of their way. Qlear is for them.
Strip the surface. Keep the essentials. Refuse the rest.
The product is intentionally three things — a Today view, a Week view, and a Stats view. Goals live one tap deeper. There is no inbox, no team workspace, no AI assistant, no cross-app integrations. Every feature was weighed against “could the user do without this?” and most lost.
- P1 Local-only storage
Tasks live in on-device storage. No accounts, no servers, no sync layer to maintain or breach. Manual export gives the user a real backup — a file they own.
- P2 Three surfaces, no creep
Today, Week, Stats. Goals are nested under Stats. New features have to displace something existing — additive growth is how to-do apps die.
- P3 Statistics computed locally
Streaks, completion rates, weekly trends — all derived from the local task store at render time. No telemetry round-trip, no “personalised insights” that mean ads.
The choices that shaped the product.
A reinstall is a reset unless the user backed up — and that’s the contract. In return: no leaks, no breaches, no “service unavailable,” no recurring infrastructure cost to recover from a free user base.
Nine considered themes beat infinite user-built ones. The same instinct that made me design the app — restraint over surface area — applies to how it gets personalised.
The core is free, forever. A small donation surface lives in settings for the people who want to fund it. Charging rent on a to-do list is a category mistake.
Android’s local storage APIs, sideloading culture, and tolerance for niche utilities suit the audience. iOS can follow once the shape of the product is settled.
Small numbers, on purpose — and the right ones.
Qlear is live on Google Play with 100+ installs and a content-safe-for-everyone rating. Every install came through organic search — people typing variants of “no ads”,“offline”, “no account” into the store and finding the app that was built for that exact query.
“Drastically improved performance when rendering the task list. Fixed issues on the billing support page. Made numerous other fixes. Thank you all for your support.”— Release notes, v latest
The thesis was that a small but real audience exists for quiet tools — and that the way to find them is to refuse growth tactics that would compromise the product. So far, the data says yes. The pace is patient on purpose.