Drindal is a native task manager — Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android — built on a single codebase with Compose Multiplatform. No web version exists. That was a clear decision from the start, one I think a lot of software still gets wrong in 2026.
Let's go back to 1999. If I'd built a task manager back then, my options looked like this: write it in C++ or Visual Basic as a native Windows app — the only real platform that mattered — and distribute it on disks, in boxes, through stores like Office Depot. Found a bug? Fix it in the next version, which people buy again, on another disk, in another box.
So instead, a lot of us built web apps. CGI scripts, one per URL, usually in Perl before Java servlets, ASP, and PHP showed up. Every click meant a full page reload as the backend script rewrote the HTML. Clunky, but it solved the actual problem: distribution and updates. Push a change to the server and every user has it instantly. No disks required.
Through the early 2000s, as more logic moved into JavaScript running in the browser, web apps got genuinely powerful — and by 2005 or so, they'd become the default. There wasn't really another option that covered every platform without the disk-and-box treatment.
But it's not 2005 anymore.
The iPhone and Android changed the equation again in the late 2000s. I could write Drindal in Objective-C and ship a real app — no disks, fast updates — but it only ran on iPhone. Android meant rewriting it in Java. Desktop meant maintaining a web app on the side, or yet another native build in C++ or VB. Four platforms, four codebases (or three plus a browser tab), all diverging over time.
So the web app stuck around, not because it was the best experience, but because — same as 2005 — it was the only thing that touched every platform without multiplying your engineering team.
That excuse doesn't hold anymore either.
Frameworks like Compose Multiplatform and Flutter let you build once and deploy natively to iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS from a single codebase. That's the piece that was missing in 1999 and still mostly missing in 2010. It's not missing now.
Drindal is built this way, and the difference shows up in ordinary use. It's fast — no spinner while a page reloads, no lag between tapping something and seeing it happen. On desktop, it's not a tab competing for space with fifteen other tabs; it's an app with its own icon, its own window, that I can shrink down to a single column and keep out of the way without losing it. Updates ship through the normal deployment pipeline and just show up — nobody has to "install an update." Drindal even runs a local MCP interface, so an agent like Claude Desktop can answer questions about my tasks without a network round-trip.
None of that is available to something running inside a browser tab, because a browser is itself an app. It was built to display documents, not to manage other applications the way an OS does. Asking it to do both is why we end up with a graveyard of tabs instead of a dock full of tools.
To be fair, this isn't a blanket argument against web apps. There are real cases where they win: a store checkout, a one-off bill payment, anything where the entire value is "show up once, do a thing, leave." Zero install friction matters there, and so does the fact that a browser tab doesn't ask anything of the user's home screen. I don't want to install an app for every store I buy something from.
But a task manager isn't a checkout page. It's something you open dozens of times a day, keep running in the background, and want to feel instant every single time. That's a different category of software, and it deserves a different answer than "just build a website."
If I can build once and ship natively everywhere my users already are, I don't have a good reason to make them open a browser tab instead. The honest reasons left for defaulting to a web app are habit and inertia — not the user's experience.
Drindal is available on all the app stores. If you've been working in a browser tab for your task list, give our native app a shot — I think you'll feel the difference in the first five minutes.