Why are Goals retired?

Every feature no matter how small creates maintenance burden for software companies. You have to keep testing it, make sure it integrates with other features, make sure new releases don't break old features, etc. Therefore software companies only keep features that have business justification. If too few users care about a particular feature, it's likely the burden outweighs the business value, and they have to cut it. The solution for you as a customer is to choose a product that's more focused on the features you care about. Goals is something you're more likely to find in a project management app like clickup.

i dont think keeping this rather simple feature they already built adds that much burden Per your own description it's not simple. If it was so simple, you'd be able to use a label, but you want it to track goals across different projects and then show you a view of your progress vs. goals. That requires additional back-end and front-end objects, which absolutely creates maintenance burden. now i feel bit stuck ... as i want long-term planning, across multiple projects .. and can't do it Honestly you should probably stop looking for the "perfect" app. No mainstream app is going to be able to perfectly cater to every individual's workflow needs. Every app is going to involve some trade-offs for you as an individual. You just have to pick the least bad alternative for you and accept it's trade-offs. If long-term project planning is important to you, Todoist is likely not the right app for you. Todoist will likely continue to focus on minimal task management.

Have you bothered to look at what the “Insights” feature preview does?

no im not affiliated with them, just like the app. yeah it can’t really do complex recurrences and it doesn’t do reminders on days before task so i haven’t fully switched but hoping it comes soon.

Todoist has been like this for years - they're very conservative in what they add. There's so many dumb little papercuts and features that people have been asking for for years that are never implemented. Good or bad, thats the way it is and it probably won't change anytime soon. Check out Griply if you want goals and habits, its really good. The reminders functionality still isn't up to par with Todoist, but overall its going in a good direction and seems more focused on personal users. Todoist is trying to go in the direction of business/enterprise users now and doesn't care as much about personal use.

In your defense I think you are mostly right but you aren't looking at it from the product sense. Todoist is a minimal app where every item is polished that's their product vision. Having a beta feature toggling is against that so they scrap it Now we can argue parts aren't polished and so on but as a whole it very much is

Griply is an interesting app. Very different than most other todo apps including Todoist. It has goals but not projects. It is more about personal growth and attaining something than a work related app. It is a little too esoteric for my wants, but its user base loves it based on Reddit comments. The developers are active on Reddit and respond to comments and suggestions. And they offer a lifetime purchase for those not interested in ongoing payments.

It’s not gone. Developers weren’t happy with it (and weren’t happy with end user response) so they pulled it to retool it. They implied that it will return.