Au Revoir 2025
Some three years ago I started working on Finalist, ironically to help me stay on top of my business... building apps.
It's hard to see how we got from there to here:
- Many thousands of people use Finalist daily to manage their time
- There are over 700 people participating in the latest beta
- 500 passionate finalistas are in the Discord dissecting the latest updates
- Over a thousand people have joined the December 30-Day Challenge, and are still at it
2025 was a big year for Finalist: I launched version 3, a huge update inspired by many of you reading this. It was picked by Apple as App of the Day and it ended the year with an amazing write-up by Daring Fireball. Instead of using my submitted ad copy, Gruber wrote his own take. He called it "auteur software", an app with a distinctive vision, idiomatically native to the platform. There aren't enough blush emojis for this paragraph...
Some of the other kind comments I've received just this past week:
"WHERE HAS THIS APP BEEN ALL MY LIFE!"
"Slaven this is fantastic! Thank you so much for making it! I've used a lot of ToDo apps in the past including Todoist, Tasks, OmniFocus, Obsidian, and NotePlan. But Finalist fits me much much better!"
"This app is amazing. It fits into my personal workflow and mind map really well and I’m so excited to have found it. Thanks for sharing this with the world!"
What's Next
2026 is already taking shape. I'm going through all your feedback to address bugs and suggestions, and improve small details in various parts of the app. You will also see more HealthKit integrations (optional, of course), and ways to make planning and organizing less of a dark art.
Thank You
Building Finalist has been truly rewarding. Every email, every App Store review, every time someone tells me Finalist helped them focus on what actually matters, it makes the work meaningful. I'm not a great marketer nor a TikTok creator, so if you know someone who misses their Leuchtturm or Franklin Covey, send them to finalist.works.
Here's to 2026.
-- Slaven