Later

The problem

Later started with my wife. She wasn’t disorganized. She had a system: alarm labels, sticky notes, reminders scattered across four apps, and a mental checklist that never turned off. The system worked, but only because she never stopped working.

Task apps charge rent on your attention. Every list you maintain, every project hierarchy you configure, every overdue badge, it all adds to the load it’s supposed to remove.

The decisions

Capture had to beat memory. If writing something down takes longer than trying to remember it, the app has already lost. I designed capture as the entire front door: open, type, done. Sorting happens later, when you have attention to spare, without a project picker or due-date modal interrupting input.

Speech capture follows the same rule. Hold the mic and talk the way you talk, even if that means three errands in one breath. Later transcribes live and sorts on the way in: each errand becomes its own task, “7 PM tomorrow” becomes a reminder without a date picker, and tasks land on the right boards, including a board created from the ramble.

I started from first principles instead of a feature-parity checklist against Todoist and Things. Every screen had to reduce mental effort. That test killed features I’d already designed and mocked in full when they made the app heavier than the problem it solved.

I built the app in native SwiftUI with Claude Code and Cursor as daily tools. The app is MVVM with a repository layer, so the data model could evolve without rewriting views. That decision paid for itself every time the product changed shape mid-beta, and working in the same file tree kept design and implementation together.

What shipped

I shipped the iOS app, the visual identity, thelaterapp.com, App Store assets, and the launch campaign. Across all of it, the design stays quiet, spare, and focused on capture.

Outcome

Later has been live on the App Store since July 2026. My wife now uses it instead of the sticky notes.

Download Later on the App Store ↗