Why Sprint Zero is a native app, and why you can feel it
A lot of the apps on your Mac are not really Mac apps. They are websites, wrapped up with a copy of a web browser so they can run in their own window. The common tool for doing this is called Electron, and Notion, Obsidian and many others are built this way.
There are good reasons for it. One team can write the app once and ship it on Mac, Windows, Linux and the web. For a company serving everyone, that is a sensible trade.
For a notes and tasks app you keep open all day, we think the trade goes the other way.
What “native” means here
Sprint Zero is written in Swift, using Apple’s own SwiftUI and AppKit on the Mac and the native text system on iPhone. There are no web views anywhere in the app, and it uses no third-party code libraries. The text you type goes into the same kind of text view that Apple’s own apps use.
What you notice
It is quick to open. There is no browser engine to start first. The window appears and your page is there.
Typing has no lag. Each keystroke goes straight into a native text view and is saved to a local database a moment later. Nothing waits on a network.
It behaves like the rest of your Mac. Text selection, copy and paste, spell checking, undo, tabs, window dragging and keyboard shortcuts all work the way you already expect, because they are the system’s own.
It respects your settings. Light and dark appearance follow the system, and Reduce Motion turns the small animations off.
It stays small. An app that does not carry its own browser needs less memory and less battery for the same job.
We also test it under load. One of our standard checks runs Sprint Zero against a workspace of a thousand pages and more than forty thousand blocks, and measures launch, memory, idle processor use and page switching.
The details that only native gets right
Some of the smallest touches in Sprint Zero come from building on the system directly. Checkboxes look compact but have generous click targets. Hover states appear immediately. Notifications are real system notifications, so clicking one opens the right task. On iPhone there are Home Screen widgets, and Siri and Shortcuts can reach your tasks.
None of these are impossible in a web-based app. They are simply much more work there, so they are often missing.
What it costs us, and you
Being honest about the other side: native means Apple only. There is no Windows, Android or web version of Sprint Zero, and there will not be one that is merely “good enough”. If you need your notes on a work PC, a web-based app like Notion or Todoist will serve you better.
It also means the Mac and iPhone apps are each designed for their own device. The iPhone app is not the Mac app made smaller, which takes longer to build but is nicer to use with a thumb.
Why it matters for a to-do list
You open a list app dozens of times a day, usually for a few seconds. A delay you would forgive in a video editor becomes the whole experience. When the app is there the instant you reach for it, you write things down more often, and that is the entire point of having it.