Marco Arment has launched Unforgetful, a new reminders app designed to make it structurally impossible to lose a task, and built as a direct response to his own lifelong struggles with forgetfulness. The app is available now on iOS and Mac, priced at $19.99 per year.
Arment, the indie developer behind the Overcast podcast app and the read-later service Instapaper, has been public about what drives the product. In his announcement post, he disclosed that he has ADHD, and traced his difficulties with task management back to adolescence, when he was repeatedly told he was ‘lazy’ and ‘wasn’t living up to his potential.’ The app, he writes, is his solution to a problem that pre-dates smartphones by decades.
His frustration with Apple’s own Reminders app is blunt. ‘Siri, for all of its faults, has always been very good at creating tasks in Apple’s Reminders app… The Reminders app, though, doesn’t fit me at all. I don’t like how it looks, how it works, or how it’s organized. Hell, I don’t even like its icon. There’s nothing about it I like. So I never open it.’
Specific failure modes stacked up: snooze intervals that didn’t work for him, accidentally dismissing a reminder and losing it entirely, and the habit of setting reminders without a time, which meant no notification arrived and the task quietly died.
What the Unforgetful Reminders App Actually Does
The core mechanic is persistence. Notifications repeat, regardless of whether you miss or dismiss them, until the task is marked done and deleted. Snooze intervals scale the longer you defer a task, but the app deliberately spaces out notifications when several tasks are due at once, avoiding the paralysis of a sudden pile-up. For recurring tasks, it can skip missed backlogs rather than flooding you with overdue items. Location-based reminders are delayed by a few minutes after arrival, so the nudge reaches you when you’re actually ready to act, not the moment your phone registers a new postcode, according to 9to5Mac’s coverage of the launch.
The app is also, by design, minimal. There are no folders, tags, overdue labels, or organisational layers. As 9to5Mac reports, Arment framed that deliberate absence as a way to avoid making tasks ‘easier to lose or adding judgment.’ For power users who want sub-lists and priority flags, Apple’s own Reminders remains the better tool. Unforgetful is not trying to compete on features; it is trying to compete on follow-through.
Crucially, Unforgetful works with the existing Apple Reminders database rather than replacing it. You continue adding tasks however you already do, including via Siri, without any special instruction to route items to a third-party app. Switching off Apple Reminders notifications and switching on Unforgetful’s is the only setup required. If the app doesn’t suit, the data stays in Apple’s ecosystem. The app also ships with its own in-app microphone for voice entry, plus Lock Screen and Control Centre widgets.
Arment says he has been using Unforgetful himself for several months before release. In his announcement, he writes that it ‘has profoundly improved my life.’ A one-month free trial is available before the $19.99 annual subscription applies. It is published under Overcast Radio, LLC, the legal entity through which Arment operates his apps, and can be found on the App Store.
A Tool That Works With Siri, Not Against It
Arment’s track record as a solo developer gives the launch some weight. His background includes founding Instapaper and running it for more than five years before selling it in April 2013, and founding The Magazine in 2012 before selling that in May 2013. He joined Tumblr at its inception in late 2006 as lead developer, not as CTO as is sometimes reported, and left in September 2010. The snippet describing his Tumblr role as chief technology officer does not match the title he uses on his own site.
Overcast, the podcast app he has run since 2014, turned ten years old in July 2024. At that point, Arment described it as still a one-person operation with no external funding, and noted he had spent the prior 18 months rebuilding most of the app. Unforgetful follows the same model: no team, no investors, a clear personal thesis, and a subscription price that funds ongoing development.
The audience Arment is targeting is not people who forget to set reminders. It is people who set reminders obsessively, snooze them repeatedly, and still end the day with a list that went nowhere. Whether $19.99 a year is worth it comes down to a simple test: how many tasks did you dismiss this week without completing them? If the answer is depressing, Unforgetful is worth a free month to find out.
