This article is an opinion piece and reflects the personal views and experiences of the author. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of Baller Alert, its staff, or affiliates. All individuals are encouraged to form their own perspectives and engage in respectful dialogue.
If you have ever set five alarms just to snooze all five, you already know this story. There’s a new app on the scene aiming to end that cycle for good, and it’s coming from a name that actually has credibility behind it. Marco Arment, the indie developer behind popular apps like Overcast and Instapaper who also served as Tumblr’s former chief technology officer, just launched a new reminders app called Unforgetful, built specifically for people who cannot stop hitting snooze. The idea sounds simple on the surface. Build something that makes it genuinely hard to ignore your own to do list. But the bigger question circling this launch is whether the world actually needed another reminders app in the first place, or if this is just one more download competing for space on an already crowded home screen.
Here’s the thing though, Unforgetful isn’t trying to be flashy or reinvent the wheel completely. The app works directly with your existing Apple Reminders database, so it’s designed for people who simply don’t like how Apple’s built in Reminders app looks, functions, or organizes tasks. Arment himself didn’t hold back on why he built it. He explained that while Siri has always been solid at creating tasks inside Reminders, the actual Reminders app never fit how his brain works, from the way it looks to how it’s organized, and he admitted he simply never opened it. That’s a relatable confession for anyone who has ever downloaded a to do list app with big intentions, only to abandon it two weeks later.
The real selling point isn’t the interface though, it’s the psychology behind how the app forces accountability. Notifications inside Unforgetful will always repeat, even if you miss them or accidentally dismiss them, until the actual task gets completed and deleted. That one feature alone solves a very specific and very common problem. Arment pointed out that in the standard Reminders app, he’d sometimes accidentally dismiss a reminder instead of snoozing it, which meant the task disappeared entirely and never got done. Anyone who has fat fingered a notification off their lock screen mid rush knows exactly how that feels.
The snooze mechanic itself got a glow up too. Snoozing has been redesigned so the intervals scale the longer you keep pushing a task back, but the app is built to avoid overwhelming you with a pile of stacked notifications all at once, which is the kind of pressure that tends to make people freeze and do nothing at all. That’s a smart bit of behavioral design, honestly. Most productivity apps either nag too little or nag so much you mute them completely. This one is trying to find the middle lane where the reminder actually lands instead of getting buried.
What makes Unforgetful stand out from the sea of productivity apps already flooding the App Store is how little it tries to do. There are no tags, no multiple views, no complicated organizational systems to learn, and Arment is upfront that if you need those more advanced features, Apple’s own Reminders app is still the better option. In a market obsessed with adding more features, shipping something intentionally stripped down is its own kind of statement. And because it plugs directly into your existing Reminders data, you don’t have to explicitly train Siri to use the new app, and if you ever decide Unforgetful isn’t for you, there’s no messy export process since everything was already living in Apple’s system the whole time.
Now to the real question everybody’s asking: Do we actually need this. The productivity app space is oversaturated, and most people already have at least one to do list app collecting digital dust on a home screen somewhere. But the honest answer is that most of those apps fail for the exact reason Arment described. They don’t match how a specific person’s brain actually works, so the app gets downloaded, used for a week, and forgotten. Unforgetful isn’t pitching itself as the app for everybody. It’s built for people who are addicted to snoozing reminders or who need more consistent nudges to stay on track, and Arment himself acknowledges that for some users, this level of persistence could feel like overkill.That’s actually the more interesting story here. This isn’t another app claiming to fix everyone’s productivity problems. It’s a tool built for a very specific type of person, the chronic snoozer, the one who sets the alarm and immediately negotiates with themselves about five more minutes. For that person, an app that refuses to let a task disappear quietly might be exactly the accountability system they’ve been missing. For everyone else, it might just be another icon they never tap.
The app is priced at $19.99 a year and runs on both Mac and iOS, which puts it in a reasonable range if it actually solves a habit that’s been costing you real time and real deadlines. Whether it earns a permanent spot on your home screen or gets deleted in a week probably says less about the app itself and more about how honest you’re willing to be about your own snooze button problem.
