History
In 2009, Wunderlist's CEO Christian Reber called on the social network platform XING for business partners to create a new to-do app. Frank Thelen responded and together Reber and Thelen developed first concepts for Wunderlist. The necessary seed funding was granted by High-Tech Gründerfonds and e42 GmbH.[5]
The first version of Wunderlist was launched on November 9, 2010.[6] Initially, the program was created for desktop PCs and platforms such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.[7] In December 2011, the app received approval for the iPhone. Subsequently, the developers released a version prepared for the iPad with the name Wunderlist HD.
In September 2012, the developers announced a shutdown of their service Wunderkit. Instead they wanted to focus on creating a new version of Wunderlist, which was later on released in December 2012 under the name Wunderlist 2. In September 2013, the company announced it had over 5 million users.[8] In July 2014, a new major update was released under the name of Wunderlist 3, with a new real-time sync architecture.[9] Wunderlist reached 10 million users in December 2014.[10]
On June 1, 2015, it was announced that Microsoft had acquired 6Wunderkinder, makers of Wunderlist, for between US$100 million and US$200 million (~$ in ).[11] Following its acquisition of the app, Microsoft announced in April 2017 a preview of To-Do, a multi-platform task management app developed by the Wunderlist team that was intended to eventually replace Wunderlist and incorporate most of its features.[12] As of January 2019, To-Do had not yet reached feature parity with Wunderlist, with its team citing that the service had to be completely re-written to use Microsoft Azure instead of Amazon Web Services.[13]
Frustrated by the perceived lack of roadmap, in September 2019, Reber began to publicly ask Microsoft-related accounts on Twitter whether he could buy Wunderlist back.[14] Shortly afterward, however, Microsoft unveiled updates to To-Do that make it more closely resemble Wunderlist.[15]
In December 2019, Microsoft announced that it would fully shut down Wunderlist as of May 6, 2020.[16]
The team responsible for creating Wunderlist, led by co-founder Christian Reber, created that Superlist app in early 2024.
