What’s Up With Asana on iOS?
The Asana mobile app is maddening. But it doesn't have to be this way.
Our team recently switched from Linear to Asana. You can read more about our frustrations with Linear here.
By and large Asana is...fine. We miss the many helpful keyboard shortcuts from Linear but, as a tool to organize a lot of tasks from disparate projects, it works well enough, and there are enough custom views for each member of the team to visualize their work in ways that are helpful to them. On desktop.
On mobile Asana is almost an entirely different tool.
On desktop I have a number of saved views in My Tasks to help me organize and plan my day, including a Today view that just shows me my tasks due today, and a Tomorrow view that, well, just shows me my tasks due tomorrow. Furthermore, each of these views is grouped and sorted by a priority tag, so the list is sorted from most important to least.
On the iOS app I can see these saved views but they don't retain the above filters and sorts from desktop. So to get a Today view on mobile that only shows today's tasks filtered by priority, even if you're in the aforementioned saved Today view from desktop, one most first add a "tasks due today" filter and then sort by priority.
It would be sort of frustrating if Asana lost these settings every once in a while but, maddeningly, Asana on iOS forgets these settings every day. So every time I open up Asana on mobile for the first time on a given day I have to add back these filters and sorts.
Speaking of sorting, while the mobile app does allow tasks to be sorted (for a day at least) it does not allow for grouping, which is a kind of meta sort that the desktop Asana does allow for.
It's 2025, one would think that a custom list could sync easily between desktop and mobile. Could you imagine if a Gmail label didn't sync between desktop and mobile or, worse, lose its settings every day? That's essentially what's happening with the Asana mobile app.
As I said above, we're mostly making Asana work for us on desktop, but the mobile app has enough daily paper cuts to make us question how much longer we'll stick with it.
What do you think of the Asana app? Let me know in the comments below or on BlueSky.
