This new version of Due looks to be everything people wanted. Here’s the old version next to the new one:
The pricing seems a little high, though. I bought the previous version in late 2017 for $4.99, and this version is $14.99 plus $9.99/year for “Annual Upgrade Pass”. 
I use Due multiple times a day, on Mac and iOS (synced) so I’m likely to purchase it, but it still seems spendy.
MacStories just posted an article about it:
EDIT: And Rosemary Orchard wrote about it for The Sweet Setup:
I’m also impressed with the new Due for Mac and expect to put it to good use.
The pricing seems a little high, though. I bought the previous version in late 2017 for $4.99, and this version is $14.99 plus $9.99/year for “Annual Upgrade Pass”.
I use Due multiple times a day, on Mac and iOS (synced) so I’m likely to purchase it, but it still seems spendy.
It’s worth noting that if you choose not to renew your subscription now or in the future, you’ll continue to have access to all of the features that were introduced while you were a subscriber. For example, my understanding is that if you paid to upgrade today, you would have access to any new features introduced over the next year indefinitely, even if you chose not to renew your subscription.
I find the price is a bit on the high side, though I’ll likely use Due enough to justify the cost. It would also be nice if there were an option to purchase a subscription that covers both macOS and iOS/iPadOS. These two platforms currently need to be upgraded separately.
They informed me the price would just be the sum…
@bowline Thanks for bringing to MPU. I like Due and this looks like a formidable upgrade. Nice facelift.
I am in the process of audit my entire app collection and distilling this down to a reduced set with the understanding that the pricing model is OverDUE for most software developers to keep them as a viable business.
I am old enough to remember the high cost of software until the Apple App store was introduced now the pendulum is starting to move in the other direction.
I was amazed at people ranting and raving on apps that cost $0.99 or FREE proving that you can make all the customers happy all the time so best to reduce your customer base to quality customers.
Sometimes it is pleasurable firing some of your customers to hopefully curtail this rude behavior…but it seems that I digress.
I will be giving DUE its just due to not forget the take out the garbage. I have one job to do and thanks to DUE I won’t %^&* it up.
New Due looks nice.
I’ve got reminders and notifications fatigue, though, and recognize that I probably ignore 99% of the reminders I’ve ever set. I just went through my 10th or so divorce-OmniFocus-then-repent-and-start-over-with-it-again cycle and keep coming back to it because it does all of what I need, despite its horrible design.
I wouldn’t use Due if Todoist had noisy, persistent, repeatable alarms like Due. Thankfully Due is fantastic on iOS (and until today was at least bearable on macOS). Due on the Mac is finally pulling into Reminders-replacement territory.
On iOS I’ve been using Siri to auto-forward reminders to Due, but the API used for that is being deprecated and the replacement is a clunkier, non-Siri-based shortcut, which is a pity. Even with this nice Mac update I’ll still be entering most of my new reminders on the go in iOS, and I’ll miss being able to just speak my reminder to Due from a locked iPhone.
It’s €16,99 in Europe.
While I use Due multiple times per day (every day) on iOS, I’m not so sure about macOS.
Would be nice if they offered a time limited trial…
Yes, that seems to be an oversight. I looked at their blog post announcement and was pleasantly (very) surprised to see that I’m grandfathered in for the new app, so I’m apparently only on the hook for the $10/yr Upgrade Pass. (Over the next three years that will still cost me 6x what I spent on the Mac app in November 2017, but I think that subscription is a low enough price to swallow without having to make an additional one-time $15 purchase.)
EDIT: I just downloaded the update and the app recognized my purchase date, as it told me my ‘feature upgrades’ ended in 2018, a year to the day of my initial purchase.
As the screenshot I posted noted, “For all of our customers who had purchased Due at version 1.5.1—the last version on the App Store, going back all the way to September 2017—we have unlocked all features introduced in 20.1 for free.” I bought my Mac copy in November 2017 so I landed into that category.
Well, that’s interesting. It seems to be inconsistent with the message in Preferences > Upgrade Pass with the macOS update today. Says I need to purchase the pass now to get “5 more features”. Different than the “unlocked all features … for free” in the blog post.
(“Thank you for your purchase” is not accurate either. I bought Due close to 10 years ago.)
Upgrade purchase policy is confusing. I don’t know when I purchased the app. I assume I bought it from the App Store because the App Store isn’t charging me for it. Does that mean I’m grandfathered in for one year of free upgrades?
Also, the app crashes on me when I attempt to switch from Reminders to Alarm view.
So, a good start but needs work! I am happy to see this upgrade because I love Due but haven’t been able to use it on the Mac in some time. I’ll be glad to have it back on the Mac, but it seems today will not be that day.
Check Preferences > Upgrade Pass to see the purchase/end-of-updates date. That’s where @anon41602260 and I made our screenshots.
So I bought Due in 2013, and now I learn my feature upgrades ended in 2014 as far as my account goes in the developer’s eyes. Between 2014 up to the time of the 20.1 release. But if I had bought Due in 2017 then I would get the feature upgrades? The logic escapes me, but I guess longer term customers are less important than (relatively) nearer term customers.
Oh well, it’s academic since it doesn’t matter to me.
I think the logic is along the lines of allowing the extra features in a new version to customers who most recently purchased the app. Usually developers regularly update an app so it’s not difficult to create a one-month or six-month (or whatever) cutoff. You have to have a cutoff somewhere, and it always redounds to the most recent purchasers before an unannounced upgrade.
This case is an outlier as the app was basically ignored for nearly three years and the last update from September 2017 is the version they’re supporting for all features. It’s an odd choice, but the logic is there.
(If I were the dev I’d have come out with a minor UI/bugfix update in January - if only as a fig-leaf update to set as a more typical and acceptable cutoff date for the coming upgrade.)
I’m also grandfathered-in so I’m perfectly happy with their approach.
What surprises me is that this appears to be a perfect candidate for using catalyst or other methods from Apple and basically sharing the majority of the development between versions. So, I’m surprised at the individual pricing and the way my brain currently works is that I’d want it on both platforms, baulk at the independent subscriptions, and find something else.
Having said that, the more likely scenario is that in a year or two I’ll have splurged on Apple Silicon and use the iOS version on there. If they block that route (since they have a nice app already or not all features worked perfectly), I’d find something else in unwarranted disgust.
edit: “perfectly happy” might seem an overstatement given the rest of the post, but I genuinely am happy with the approach and think they are charging sensibly for individual platforms, but not as a family of platforms.
I’m sure that they started on this before Catalyst was announced, and even after it was it was in such sorry, primitive shape they decided not to touch it (like most devs, and like most Apple apps). Catalyst finally has gotten new APIs and capabilities but developers in this situation reasonably had no way of knowing what was coming or when, and chose to code for Mac instead of waiting an extra year to come out with a polished Catalyst app whose frameworks might or might not be capable enough.
I’m really not sure how I feel about it yet.
I agree.
Developers have a problem though: as a consumer I can (and will) look at Apple announcements and form expectations of what I believe should happen. Apple Silicon is a great example since a consumer could reasonably expect to be able to choose to just run the iOS version on their Mac for free when they get a capable machine.
As a developer, I can look at this and think I need to make a decision today that will help my business stay afloat for the next 2 years. Is it best to do maintenance releases until the dust settles, or go all in with a well engineered Mac version. Due devs appear to have chosen the latter, and the app feels great so far. But will the market support it?
Apple gives developers the choice to allow or restrict iPad apps from being used on Apple Silicon machines, and with it being a completely new situation there’s no reasonable expectation to overcome - some apps will run for free, some won’t. In fact I bet a lot of small devs currently with cross-platform apps won’t allow the apps to slot over to ARM Macs at no cost because it would undercut their business model, AKA paying the bills.
The majority of Mac Due users will be on Intel Macs for the first couple of years anyway so the real issue for them will be later on when someone else comes up with an inexpensive Due clone for iPad and allows it to go to ARM Macs for free just to get initial sales. (But even then, devs like Due’s will still have the benefit of double incomes which would help them better compete - either by better coding/support, or offering more competitive pricing.)
This is all pretty speculative at this point, and I doubt that even the most polished Catalyst apps with the current frameworks will work better than a properly coded and designed Mac app. Things may well change in a couple of years, but by then we’ll probably see most quality apps going dual-platform with dreaded subscriptions, and Due would be well prepared, already having a well-designed iPad app (plus subscription) they can use.
Due developers responded promptly to my email bug report. They said my problem with the app crashing is known and they’re working on an update.
That said, I just switched to the Alarms view, and it didn’t crash on me this time. Odd.
And it looks like I’m not eligible for the free years of updates. I haven’t decided whether I’ll upgraded to an annual subscription. On the one hand, none of the current premium features appeal to me. On the other hand, I like to support the developers of apps I like.
And now my Due desktop alarm went off and the app crashed. I’m definitely not paying for an upgrade until I see a stable version!
I had the Mac app disappear on me (the Dock icon saying the app was still running but I couldn’t get the window to reappear) when I tried to resize the window from while it was attached to the drop-down menubar.
I quit, restarted, and changed the Setting to ‘show icon in dock only’ which gave me the floating window I was used to, even more resizable than the previous version. And no crashing/disappearing.
