OmniFocus 2 for iPhone Review

OmniFocus 2.0 for iPhone is a to-do list and task management app that’s built for the person who’s deadly serious about tracking what they need to get done and when. After all, the app for iPhone is $19.99, which is well above what most apps are priced, but OmniFocus has a wealth of features and syncing options to help justify it. Still, it’s a cost that just may be worth it, because this is comprehensive yet still somewhat simple. It's like fishing with grenades.

Calling it a to-do list app feels like underestimating just what OmniFocus can do. Want to create lists of items that are inside of multiple trees of projects? That’s possible. Want to set certain contexts to items that can be tied to specific locations? Absolutely. Want to add text, audio, and photo notes to an item? Certainly. OmniFocus holds few limitations for the person who wants to track everything about what they need to do. There’s Calendars and Reminders integration so that anything added to those can be added to OmmiFocus as well with iOS 7’s Background App Refresh. OmniFocus is large, it contains multitudes. Oh, and all this can be synced up to other versions of Omni apps including the iPad and Mac versions of OmniFocus.

Unfortunately, I found the depth of options available in OmniFocus to be sometimes confusing. Why doesn’t the Inbox show what is due as well as just reminders? Why are only certain contexts and not individual actions available to be tied to a location? Why does an item, when deferred or moved from one subproject to another, still display as “overdue” when it’s not part of that project any more? It’s things like these that make OmniFocus feel perhaps too big for its own britches, as there’s just so much going on that even it has a hard time keeping track of what it's doing.

For the person who wants a to-do list app that does feel comprehensive, that could possibly handle the chaos of one’s life, then OmniFocus 2 may just be worth the top-dollar price. Even without the syncing to other platforms this is a powerful app. But this seems like the kind of app that I would recommend only to those who have found the built-in Reminders or for something Clear to be inadequate. This is the next step, not the diving-in point.