Over a decade ago, it called a simple to-do list app Clear was released to much fanfare for the way it leveraged the smartphone’s touch interface to create a new kind of app: one without buttons and menus and instead operated through gestures and swipes. Now the developer of Clear is debuting the next generation of the app — Clean 2 — a new version rebuilt from the ground up, but one that still relies heavily on gestures to navigate and interact with app elements. What is radical about Clear this time is not how it works, but how it makes money. In a sea of subscription-based apps, Clear is dropping its price tag to free and will monetize through a rotating daily store where users can reward themselves for doing things with paid cosmetics — namely things like new icons applications, color themes, sound packs, offer packs and fonts.
Clear developer Phill Ryu explains that consumers’ initial love for Clear came from the feeling that it was the first app that could “only happen on the phone”—that is, smartphones with touchscreens. At the time of its initial release, we asked Ryu if the world was ready for an app without buttons, and he demonstrated the ease with which even small children could navigate an iPad via touch. It was natural and intuitive, he had said.
More than ten years later, Ryu expected smartphone apps to have evolved more than they have. But unfortunately, Clear’s use of gestures didn’t become the new status quo. If anything, Ryu believes the state of smartphone apps has gotten worse, not better.
“[They’re] more complex, more crowded,” he tells TechCrunch of today’s apps. Plus, they have “all this desperate monetization stuff, like holding you hostage to basic features unless you sign up,” Ryu adds. Clear offers a specific vision of how to-do lists should work, and as a stand-alone app, it doesn’t need to deliver incremental ROIs or answer to investors.
“It feels a little punk compared to the average App Store app,” notes Ryu about Clear’s lack of subscriptions. “That’s all it takes to be a punk these days,” he adds with a laugh.
Image Credits: Imminent
Despite its age, Clear has retained a core following that prefers scannable to-dos over more traditional to-do list apps like Apple’s Notes or Microsoft’s To Do, for example. Amazingly, Clear still has around 70,000 monthly active users and around 20,000 who use it daily.
“Not huge,” admits Ryu, “but it’s interestingly active for an application that’s been largely static for 10 years,” he says.
The app itself comes from Ryu’s company Imminent, the developer of the popular mobile game Heads Up!, and other smart apps like the addictive web browser Web Roulette launched earlier this year. Impinging acquired the rights to Clear from the app’s two other original developers Realmac software and Milen Dzhumerov in 2007 and had been teasing the reboot of the to-do list app for years. But for most of that time, the app was just updated on TestFlight, not the public App Store.
The original team was somewhat “burnt out” on Clear, Ryu explains, after being overloaded with projects like porting Clear to Mac or adding iCloud Sync. The new Clear 2 lacks these features either, aiming to simply tap into its core customer base of iPhone users for monetization purposes.
Image Credits: Imminent
The new version is completely rebuilt in Swift, we’re told, but it’s not designed to be cutting-edge. There’s no AI assistant, for example.
“Maybe in the future, we’ll have some fun idea for the AI project, but I think it’s unlikely for Clear because we’ve put so much work into making Clear a very quiet and pristine place, just for you and your thoughts…we’re almost pampering it this with some kind of sacred reverence,” says Ryu.
Clear 2 provides a slate of gestures to use for common tasks, such as using a back button or bulk drag and drop. You can also drag and drop items between lists, swipe to schedule reminders, screenshot to share lists, and swipe to archive lists.
Taking a cue from buying games for free – or one of Ryu’s favorite “comfortable” games “Animal Crossing” – the store will rotate daily to feature different perks.
“There’s always been something really, legitimately good about free-to-play and that whole idea, right, and it’s more the people who milked it to death that gave it a bad name,” suggests Ryu.
No longer a $5 download, Clear 2 is free with the option to purchase cosmetic features via in-app purchases at a flat rate of $2.99 each.
