6Wunderkinder has performed a u-turn and revealed plans to abandon work on its second product, Wunderkit, in order to concentrate on a new version of the original Wunderlist. Dubbed Wunderlist 2, the new release has been promised before the end of the year.
Wunderkit, which was only launched in February, will remain available in beta but will not be subject to any more development work.
Even though it was created purely as a test tool for its later sibling, Wunderlist has been downloaded 5.5 million times and its 3 million registered users have created more than 100 million tasks, making it one of the most popular productivity apps around.
And despite the fanfare which accompanied the initial launch of Wunderkit, 6WK CEO Christian Reber says the decision will allow his team to fully focus on one thing – a product which will reportedly combine the best features of both ‘Kit and ‘List.
He said: “Wunderkit had a successful beta launch, we have acquired more than 400,000 users since we launched in February 2012. However, we couldn’t ignore the overwhelming continued success of Wunderlist. As a startup such impressive active user numbers are what guide your business. With registrations showing no signs of slowing down we have decided to once again give Wunderlist 100 percent of our attention.”
The official announcement of Wunderlist 2 promised that it not be merely another update, but rather a completely new version including a shift from Titanium to all-new native applications across Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android and Web, tied together with a brand new backend technology.
It’s an interesting move on the part of 6WK – it might seem like an about-face, but one common criticism of their two products was that they were so alike, so it makes sense to take all the good stuff from both (hopefully leaving the bad stuff behind) and put it in one place.