A project started during a school break has grown into a task management app used by more than 30,000 people worldwide.
Dongda Li, a Ph.D. student in computer and information science and engineering, is the creator and primary maintainer of Mindwtr, a free and open-source app built around the Getting Things Done method, often called GTD.
Li said he first encountered the GTD methodology around 2022 but spent years without finding an app that fit what he wanted: something that worked consistently across multiple devices and operating systems, functioned offline, kept data in users' hands and didn't require a subscription or mandatory cloud account. During winter break in December 2025, with some free time on his hands, he decided to build it himself.
"At first, it was really just a personal side project," Li said. He was building a tool for his own research, projects and personal tasks. Once he found it useful, he open-sourced it, thinking others might be looking for something similar.
The response came faster than he expected. People began discovering the project, installing it, starring it on GitHub, reporting bugs and contributing code. That pushed Li to expand Mindwtr beyond a developer-focused GitHub repository into a polished consumer app. He brought it to iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux, publishing it through the Apple App Store, Google Play and Microsoft Store. Along the way he had to learn skills beyond programming, including release engineering, app store review processes, cross-platform testing, code signing and user support.
Mindwtr has 2,000 stars on GitHub while remaining free and open source.
Li said the app is no longer shaped only by his own preferences. Users have brought him workflows he never would have encountered on his own, sometimes changing the software's direction entirely. One user with a Pebble Index 01 smart ring built a custom connector to speak thoughts into the ring, sending transcriptions and audio directly into Mindwtr's inbox, reporting roughly 10 captures a day. That feedback led to built-in support for similar capture methods, audio-handling fixes and more restricted credentials so capture devices don't need full access to a user's task data. It also pushed Li toward supporting quick capture from wearables, including a feature that lets Apple Watch users capture tasks by voice or text without pulling out their phone.
Users with different language and regional needs have shaped the app as well. A Persian-speaking user's frustration with repeatedly converting dates from the Jalali calendar to the Gregorian calendar led Li to add Jalali date support and improve Persian localization.
Outside contributors have also added major features, including native iCloud and CloudKit synchronization for iOS and macOS, along with Docker and self-hosting infrastructure. Smaller community contributions, Li said, include translation corrections, release testing and workflow suggestions. One App Store reviewer said they might learn Swift to build a lock-screen widget themselves if Li didn't; he built it first.
Li said the project complements his doctoral research, which focuses on multimodal artificial intelligence and vision-language models, by giving him experience in software architecture, synchronization, localization and product design that his academic work doesn't provide. Mindwtr includes an optional AI assistant. Users can choose their own AI provider or a compatible local model, while the core app remains usable without AI. Li said AI tools have also become part of how he personally develops and maintains the project alongside his research.
Earlier this year, Li spoke at LoFi/37, a local-first web community meetup, about building Mindwtr as a solo developer. His talk, titled "Building a Cross-Platform Local-First GTD App as a Solo Dev," covered sharing a TypeScript core across platforms and supporting synchronization without requiring a Mindwtr-operated central service.
Li said maintaining the app alongside his research and teaching duties takes considerable time but watching a tool he built for himself become something people around the world use and contribute to has made it worthwhile. He noted that some of his friends at Syracuse already use Mindwtr and said he sees students as a natural audience, given how often they juggle coursework, research and personal responsibilities.