Wunderlist is completely rebuilt in a bid to become ‘the home of the world’s lists’

On the surface, today’s update to popular to-do list app Wunderlist is pretty straightforward, but it’s what the update points towards for developer 6Wunderkinder that’s most interesting here.

Wunderlist 3.0 boasts a nice new look, improved speed and a headline new feature: public lists. Any list you’ve created can be shared with the world by clicking a ‘Publish’ button. You may wonder why you’d want to share your to-do lists with strangers, but 6Wunderkinder has bigger plans for what Wunderlist can be, and this is only the beginning.

The idea, says 6Wunderkinder’s Chief Design Officer Benedikt Lehnert, is for Wunderlist to become a platform – “the home of the world’s lists.” Whether that’s ‘how-to’ instructional lists, recommended reading, top 10 lists of songs; 6Wunderkinder wants you to share them here.

This isn’t the first time that the Berlin-based company has tried to turn its polished and popular (more than 8 million registered users) to-do app into a platform. Wunderkit launched in January 2012 but didn’t really click with users and it was killed off just nine months later. The new vision for Wunderlist is more modest but seems more achievable. After all, lists are everywhere these days – everything is being BuzzFeed-ified – so why not build a platform around them?

At the moment, WunderList is still very much optimized for traditional to-do lists, but features are planned that will support use in other contexts, as well as tools for discovering and exploring different kinds of public lists. This will be crucial to the success of Wunderlist as a platform.

If you just want to use Wunderlist in the traditional way, you’ll find that the new version is faster and boasts real-time syncing thanks to a complete re-write of the software. While 6Wunderkinder’s business customers probably won’t all leap to share public lists right away, stability and speed will clearly be a priority for any productivity service they use. The company isn’t saying how many paid accounts it currently has but says that “tens of thousands of businesses” are using Wunderlist Pro.

The updated Wunderlist is available now for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android, Kindle Fire, Chrome, and the Web. Windows and Windows Phone 8 versions are promised “soon.”

➤ Wunderlist