Why I won't use TickTick anymore

TickTick could have been the best app for managing one's life with ADHD, but my experience with the lack of quality control and customer support made me regret paying every year.

The subscription ends this July, so I was still using it until it ends (I already cancelled the renewal).

I was also hoping to use the last few months of my subscription to make tutorials about it (seeing how people struggle to use it, especially now as a lot of Todoist users are fleeing after the changes in the Google Calendar integration), but now I'm having second thoughts about making those tutorials, and when I list the bugs below, you'll understand why.

Bare in mind that most of these bugs have been going on for years, and my support tickets are just sitting there unanswered. For reference, I've changed devices quite a bit during the duration of using TickTick (I've been using TickTick for many many years) so it's not a device issue. MacOS, iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, web version, I've gone through them all.

But also, please don't let my experience prevent you from making your own judgement call. If you have zero issues with TickTick, keep using it. With its amazing feature set combined with a good enough user experience, it's one of the best task managers out there, and pricing is fair. 

But some issues are so serious, that not only it can take a while for you to notice, but it will also probably be too late and get you into trouble at work. Especially if you rely ONLY on TickTick  for your task management (thank goodness I NEVER did that, as that's how I confirmed some of these bugs) and if you have terrible memory like I do.

I'm going to start with the most serious bug of the bunch, because this may already have happened to you, but due to its nature, you may have not noticed it yet. And whether you experienced this one or not, this should be a huge warning for all users:

Random tasks disappear (and their subtasks with them) 

My projects are tasks with subtasks. Then I make recurring tasks as routine to check, work and update those projects. Therefore, I internally link the tasks of those projects inside the recurring tasks. 

 

Due to this setup, it's an easy way for me to confirm that I'm not losing my mind and that I didn't just forget to add these tasks in. Because these projects were added weeks or months back, and worked on and updated 6 days a week. My entire Portuguese learning task with subtasks with resources (textbooks, paid courses and their chapters, sections, exams etc) has disappeared. The internal link is still there to its recurring task, but clicking that link opens an empty task that doesn't exist anywhere. 

 

So I try to figure out what's going on:

• Did I mark the whole thing complete accidentally? I check the Completed section, it's not there.
• Did I accidentally delete it? I check the Trash. Not there. I check the Won't Do. Not there. 
• Is it in the list where I had it at least? Nope!
  
• I make a wide search. Nowhere to be found.

Yet, I have the entire outline of the Portuguese subject on paper AND my plain .txt file, with signs of progress.  And I remember using the pomodoro (the pomodoro records show that I did in fact connected it to this now non-existing task) and checking some of its subtasks complete in TickTick just the day before.

 

This happened many times. Also with recurring tasks and even scheduled appointments. Routine tasks that are done daily and started years ago, and there's no way in hell that I just forgot to add them in all this time. I was checking them off daily.  

Now imagine this happening to you with tasks that you don't check in with everyday. 

• Maybe they're work tasks that were sitting in your inbox to be dealt with in your weekly review or tasks to a project that will be due next month. 
• A grocery list that you gathered throughout the week with random items missing when you're already at the store.
  
• An important doctor's appointment that you had to schedule months in advance

Things that your brain is prone to forget but are important at the time they're needed (hence the need for these apps, right? Right?)

 

Thank heavens for pen and paper! 

 

Yes, it's old school, yes it's considered redundant if I was already using a digital task manager, and yes it requires some effort to maintain it and carry it around (get an A7 for on the go, it's smaller than your phone. We are perfectly capable of carrying that mass distraction brick with us, aren't we? So why is a notepad of the same size and much less weight an issue?)

 

But at least everything is where I wrote it. Nothing gets randomly erased from existence. If anything, handwriting it down helps my brain to remember it on its own (notifications, reminders and alarms never worked for me, hence I always had them disabled.)

Now let's go to a bug of a similar nature that will also get you into trouble if you're not paying attention:

Using natural language processing adds the wrong date... sometimes

No, it's not a skill issue. Yes I used the right syntax. 

 

I could be using the exact same syntax to add the exact same date on 2 separate tasks, and one of them might get it right, and the other one won't. It's probably one of the weirdest bugs I've ever encountered. And it happens randomly. 

So please, don't just type in and blindly trust TickTick to translate it to the date you wanted. Check it. And check the reccurence too. 

 

For instance, I will type "every 1st" and sometimes it will get it right (every month on the 1st) but sometimes typing "every 1st" in a task will make it a daily recurrence instead or something random like every week on Tuesday. I swear you can't even make this stuff up!

 

Here are the rest of the bugs, some more annoying than others, some I could live with, but some I refuse to pay another cent for (including the 2 big ones mentioned above):

• Extreme battery drain from background usage on Android, even when disabling the settings to use in background. Checking the list of apps, TickTick is always at the top for most background usage.
• Enabling the pomodoro feature on the phone and running the first pomodoro of the day, causes it to drain even more battery with wakelock issues (keeping the screen awake at all times). I'm someone who constantly forgets where she left her phone, let alone remember to lock it to shut the screen off. It's why we have the Screen Timeout setting. Which works perfectly... until I install TickTick. Uninstall TickTick, then the Screen Timeout works again.
• Sync issues. This has been going on for years and reported by many users ad nauseum. It's kind of strange the one app that uses the most battery on my phone for background usage, can't sync to save its life!
• sometimes I'm unable to drag and drop tasks. I have to restart the app or reload the web version (is that why they introduced the "Link parent task" feature?)
• The Linux app makes the syslog file grow indefinitely in size with errors, causing your hard drive to run out of space quickly. Even after cleaning out the syslog file, I had to uninstall TickTick completely to make it stop filling back up again. This happens within a day of having TickTick installed, on a 1TB drive that is only 50-70GB full under normal circumstances. Never used the app again.
• The web version isn't always much better. On occasion, it will take over whatever RAM I had available and start lagging and crashing the whole browser.
• Habit tracker bugs
• if you disable notifications, but you set some habits to the "morning", "afternoon" etc sections where doing so automatically adds a time to your habit, you will still get TickTick's notification sound at that time (9:00 am, 5:00 pm etc) but you'll have no idea where it came from because there's no notification on your screen. Remove the time from each habit and/or set the habit ringtone and vibration to None from within TickTick to fix it.
• even more sync issues
• checking off a habit that you set to check multiple times a day will occasionally reset its counter to zero (0/7) shortly after it's been checked off. Don't use this for medication! 

This is probably just my bad luck, right? Because I know not everyone has (or at least, noticed) these issues. Although I did find reports on both the Google Play store and the subreddit, especially for the sync issues, disappearing tasks, battery drain, and even for the pomodoro wakelock issue, which they reported that they could only resolve by disabling the pomodoro feature entirely. 

 

Then again, I worked in IT for far too long to have the illusion that it's a "me problem". But dealing with this whole list of bugs certainly made me feel like I'm dealing with a malware disquised as an ADHDer's dream task manager.

 

Again, thank heavens for pen and paper. Because truth be told, the waste of time trying to find solutions, workarounds, and waiting from customer support to give a damn is not my idea of productivity. I certainly didn't spend this much time maintaining my entire system on paper. Go figure.