Is there a reason you had to reset it without restoring from a backup of it? That info is stored in the full device iCloud backups if you had that turned on for this device and should carry over on a restore, but for now it is local data like that and not backed up separately… (That will come in the next couple months.)
Hi Phil,
Would you consider a kickstarter or subscription to fund the desktop app for syncing? I’m with others here where I can’t imagine changing the way I run my business/organise my life with the old syncing Clear.
I don’t mind subscribing and paying to help fund it, and I bet there’s quite a few of us that would!
Thankfully I knew about the upcoming update so prevented auto updates but I know this won’t last forever.
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James, I just want to second your excellent post. I was one of the people earlier on that mentioned I would gladly pay for a Clear that restored the iCloud sync. Your idea of a Kickstarter is great and I’d pay a subscription in a heartbeat as well.
Phil, any chance this can ever happen? I realize you’re probably relying on store purchases to fund development, yet there are some of us willing to send you money outright. Let us help you do this.
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Honestly it’s less about like, some running cost per person, so much as a huge tech debt situation. The sync code is truly ancient and broke down on people regularly, and the 1.x app codebase is even older.
We were worried about pretty disastrous worst case scenarios like Apple no longer accepting updates for Clear 1.x’s codebase or it no longer building with Xcode. Basically offering it feels like keeping a ticking time bomb live that we can’t afford to support as we feel we should!
When we get to rebuilding next gen sync again, we hope to be much more ready and prepared for it this time. It is really important we don’t rush into it. We kind of did the first time around and it was too much for a small team to bite off at the time, not only in the initial big engineering/design lifts but also ongoing multiple platforms with bespoke designs to keep updated and support. (And yes, in hindsight the business model of 1.x did not pair well without any recurring revenue for longtime service.)
I am really sorry about the overall situation. I’ve thought way too much about how this is in effect kind of like the Mac OS 9 > X transition except with no way to sit it out on OS 9 while OS X matures. (Mac OS 10.0 was missing features, slow, not refined like today etc.) It’s rough, and I wish we were in a place to afford a smoother transition for you all.
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Hey Phil, just spotted this in the email newsletter:
It looks like you can see the lists on desktop by enabling the list as a clear desktop widget??
This may solve all my issues! This is big news! Is that what I think this is!? I wouldn’t need a separate desktop app at all if this is possible!
If this answers my issues of being able to see my lists on my mac’s - I am very excited!
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It is a really great surprise bonus of building modern widgets! To temper your expectations, unfortunately you cannot type into them. But yes, they do mirror your phone’s lists!
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Sort of a half solution; you’ll only get 7 events; add another and the bottom one will vanish. AND you have to quit and reopen Clear on the phone for it to update And you can’t add events on your mac; just your phone.
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The iPad in question as a true gentleman decided to break suddenly without warning me beforehand to allow time for a backup. So it currently resides beautifully in the trash bin indefinitely, as it is not fixable.
Now I have two devices with the same Apple ID, yet Clear doesn’t recognise me, offering no synchronization or the ability to restore previous rewards achieved (like colourful themes, icons and fonts)… the issue is rather disheartening.
I apologise for delay in answering.
I appreciate your excellent work.
Thank you very much for your time
I’ve been using clear for years over all my devices via iCloud sync. I’ve been wondering for the past few days why my list doesn’t update when I add something on my work mac or on my phone…
Now finding out that the new colourful version doesn’t support it just sucks.
I’d rather have the old basic version then have this coloured one without the ability to sync!
I use this to add reminders for my small business on my work iMac that I can action later on from my MacBook Pro or phone…. But now this is useless!
Some of my Mac’s are too old for sonoma so I can’t use the widget idea either…
Does anyone know if iCloud sync will be coming back to the iPhone app?
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Same here, I was using Clear synchronized across multiple Macs and iPhones for years and it suddenly became completely useless. I’ve now completely migrated to Apple Reminders and actually like it much better.
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Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll try it out and see how I like it. May just have to delete clear all together
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I have finally found a worthy replacement to Clear 1.0! It is free, easy to use, multi-platform (web/iOS/Android), AND PROVIDES SYNC!! Check out: Simplenote (simplenote.com)
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Listen, I think it’s wild a modern day app like Clear would ship without backup/sync too, but y’all know Simplenote is a notetaking app, right 
It’s okay as a notetaking app (the publish to web feature is useful), although its tagging/organization system is fairly limited. But it’s for taking notes. Checklists only exist as part of a note and are somewhat restricted; even if you wanted to use a notetaking app to replace Clear, there are other apps that better mimic todo app functionality.
If you really wanted a simple todo replacement with syncing, just search the App Store, it takes about two seconds to find stuff like Pocket Lists and monolist and MinimaList and so on, that are designed to be checklist apps like Clear. But you’re not even going to get reminders or rearranging tasks if you use a really basic Markdown notetaking app.
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We are working on an early-stage prototype – hoping to get something out in the coming months…
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For those of us who want to be able to access clear and our same lists on ipad, obviously long term it has to be icloud sync and done proper. but as a short term solution, cant you implement on ipad the same as you have on mac, a widget that shows your iphone lists?
The Mac widget behavior is a pretty bespoke MacOS feature. Not out of the question Apple may implement it for iPadOS too but they would need to for it to work like that.
I don’t want to talk much about our super early syncing engine scouting before we get further and it feels more solid, but there is some movement happening. (And we wouldn’t be scouting this out now if we didn’t at least think there was some real chance we could tackle it sooner than expected.)
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Its old data
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