Most to-do apps have the same failure mode. You open one, full of good intentions, and a few weeks later you’re staring at forty items you’ll never do. That list isn’t a plan anymore. It’s a guilt museum — a place you visit to feel bad, then close.
I got tired of being a curator of my own museum. So I built Topmost.
Today it’s on the App Store, free, on every Apple platform I could ship it to.
One rule
Everything goes on a single stack, and you only ever see the one thing on top.
Add something new and it becomes the top. Resolve the top and the next thing rises. That’s the entire app: one thing at a time, and you can’t hide from it.
There’s no backlog to scroll. No priorities to fiddle with. No “done” pile to admire. The newest thing you added is the thing in front of your face, and the only move is to deal with it or push something even more urgent on top of it.
The constraint is the product
Every decision in Topmost is about making avoidance impossible:
– You can’t reorder. No “I’ll do this later,” no send-to-bottom, no snooze. Those are just polite words for hiding.
– You can’t browse. The items underneath are stacked and obscured — at most a faded count. You never get to scroll your worries like a feed.
– Resolving is just resolving. There’s no “completed vs. deleted,” no status, no checkmark to collect. The item was on top; now it isn’t.
This is a real tradeoff and I made it on purpose. Topmost gives up the dopamine of a trophy case in exchange for something better: the relief of an empty stack.
The empty screen is the whole point
When you clear the last thing, the app goes quiet and — for the only time in the whole experience — shows you a little colour. That empty state is the reward.
Not a streak, not a “12 tasks done today” badge. Just: nothing on top. That’s the whole point. I spent more time on that one screen than on almost anything else.
What shipped
I wanted it to feel native everywhere, so v1 launches on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro from one shared Swift core. Push and pop from widgets, the Lock Screen, Control Center, Siri, the Share sheet, your watch, the Mac menu bar — the “one thing” follows you around so you genuinely can’t dodge it.
A few things I care about:
– No account, no tracking, no analytics. Your stack lives in your private iCloud and nowhere else. The App Store privacy label says Data Not Collected, and I mean it.
– 24 languages at launch, because the app has so little text there was no excuse not to.
Why I’m proud of this one
Topmost is small on purpose. The hard part wasn’t writing the code — it was saying no, over and over, to features that would’ve quietly turned it back into every other list app. Restraint is the feature.
If you’ve ever closed your to-do app feeling worse than when you opened it, this one’s for you.
Get Topmost — free on the App Store →
Want early builds? There’s a public TestFlight beta for future versions.