It means nothing gets written down without also being ranked. Every task you capture goes straight to a triangle, and you swipe it into one of three lanes: red for Now, amber for Soon, green for Later.
A flat list treats a dentist appointment and buying socks the same way. Triage refuses to. Ordo won't let a task sit in the intake queue unsorted — the badge on the Triage tab keeps count until you've dealt with it.
All 63 language-and-region combinations Apple's speech recognition supports on iPhone — 34 languages in total. Among them: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malay, Japanese, Korean, and both Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese.
The dictation language is a setting inside Ordo, separate from your phone's system language, so you can capture a task in your own language on an English phone. The picker is searchable — including by the language's own name — and remembers the last few you used.
Wherever your language supports it — and Ordo prefers offline by default. Languages your device can transcribe on its own are marked "Works offline" in the picker, and the chip on the capture screen shows a phone icon rather than a globe when you're in that mode.
Some languages can only be transcribed with help from Apple's servers. Ordo will not send audio anywhere unless you switch on "Use Apple's servers when needed" yourself. That setting is off when you install the app.
No. The capture screen has two buttons — Speak and Type. Tapping Type turns the microphone into a text panel, and everything downstream is identical. You can decline the microphone and speech permissions entirely and still use the whole app.
Usually you don't have to. Ordo notices when you stop talking and closes the recording about two seconds later. Tapping the microphone again stops it immediately.
Either way the transcript is shown to you before anything is saved, so if it misheard you, you can start over or switch to typing. The rings around the microphone move with your actual voice level, so you can tell it's hearing you rather than finding out afterwards.
Drag the bubble towards a corner. Up is red (Now). Down-right is amber (Soon) — the everyday default, sitting right under your thumb. Down-left is green (Later).
The corner you're aiming at charges up as you go, the bubble squashes in the direction of travel, colour floods the glass, and a stamp lands once you've committed. Let go and it rushes to the corner and pops into a spray of droplets. A quick flick counts as much as a full drag. If you'd rather not drag at all, tapping a corner assigns it directly.
Yes. Long-press any task on the board to move it to another lane, or open it and pick a lane there. You can also send it back to the intake queue to triage it fresh.
Yes — on iOS 26 and later, throughout. The task bubbles, the navigation rail, the microphone, the chips and every panel are real Liquid Glass that refracts what sits behind them and reacts to touch.
Ordo also runs on iOS 18, where Liquid Glass doesn't exist. There it draws the same surfaces itself: a layered blur material, a top-lit rim that reads as curvature, and the slow iridescent sweep around each bubble. You get the same app either way; a newer iPhone just renders the glass for real rather than approximating it.
It's your load. The triangle fills in proportion to how many tasks are in each lane, red on top, so the balance of your day is one glance rather than a scroll. A top-heavy triangle means most of your board is red — which usually means it wasn't really triaged.
The same shape is the app's icon, and a small version sits in the navigation rail so you can see the board's state from any screen.
Reminders are ordinary iOS notifications scheduled on your device, and red-lane tasks are sent as time-sensitive so they can break through a Focus. Amber and green are ordinary notifications.
That said, delivery depends on your notification settings, Focus modes and Low Power Mode. Please don't make Ordo the only thing standing between you and medication, a medical appointment or a legal deadline — keep a second alarm for those.
Ordo is free, and the free version is a complete app: voice and text capture, all three lanes, reminders, and the board. The free board holds 6 live tasks at a time.
Ordo Pro removes the cap and adds repeating tasks, the Pulse overview, and three extra colour palettes. It is $2.99/month or $19.99/year with a 7-day free trial — both renew automatically until you cancel, which you can do any time in Settings. There is also a $34.99 lifetime option that is a single payment and never renews. No ads on any tier.
Pulse is the Ordo Pro overview: how much you cleared today and this week, a fourteen-day trail broken down by lane, the typical time work sits in each lane before you finish it, and how old your oldest open task is.
It's the honest counterpart to the board. The board says what's waiting; Pulse says what you actually do.
Give a task a reminder time and set it to repeat daily, on weekdays, weekly or monthly. When you complete it, it doesn't disappear — it rolls forward to its next occurrence and stays in the same lane. If it was overdue, it skips ahead to the next occurrence in the future rather than firing a backlog of alerts. Each completion is still counted in Pulse. Repeating tasks are part of Ordo Pro.
No. Ordo has no server and does not use iCloud or CloudKit sync, so each install keeps its own board, stored in a single file on the device. That is also the reason there's nothing of yours on anybody's server.
Ordo 1.0 is iPhone-only, so there is no second device to sync with yet.
Your tasks never leave the device — no server, no account, no analytics, no third-party SDKs. Audio is never written to disk, and with offline dictation it never leaves the phone at all.
The one exception: if you opt into "Use Apple's servers when needed" and pick a language that requires it, audio goes to Apple for transcription under Apple's privacy policy. It never goes to us — there is no "us" to send it to. Full detail is in the Privacy Policy.
Delete the app. Every task lives in a single file on your device, so it goes with it. There are no server-side copies to ask us to remove — and no backup either, so export anything you want to keep first.
Open Settings inside Ordo and tap Restore purchase, or use the same link on the paywall. As long as you're signed in with the Apple Account that bought it, the unlock comes straight back. There's no account to sign into and nothing to pay again.
Email muddermister@gmail.com. It helps to say which iPhone and iOS version you're on, and — if it's a dictation problem — which language you had selected and whether the chip showed a phone or a globe.