Warning: This post is a spiritual successor of our release 0.2.0 post. Please read that first, and this one later.

We released version 0.2.0, our biggest version release to date, and with it came the moment to discuss Ampersand: where it is and where it will be.

How it came to be

First off, let’s make it clear that version 0.2.0 is special in the sense that it may not have been what it is without the help of some contributors who noticed the app and lent a hand to me on Codeberg, and for that the community has to thank them personally — so, please go give a thanks you to Fulmine (or PALS, you may know him because of some work he did around PluralKit stuff) and Weather Collective.

I also want to personally give my public thank you to all as some of you may know,the other seasoned developers in the scene who personally reached out and gave me a shoulder to cry on.

This month of development was literal fire, in the sense that we developers almost didn’t go one day without committing something to Ampersand, which means a ton of time was spent implementing stuff and fixing bugs.

We did want Ampersand to finally feel like home, a welcoming place for you to exist, to track, to be comfortable with — without ever worrying about the app crashing on you or for us to pull the plug. 0.2.0 is right at home in our hearts, in the sense that you may literally need this one version and nothing else, and if we ever were to go away you’d still have a great time tracking with all the stuff we added.

And you’d be amazed by how much we included, especially in regards to customization. I really really love how Ampersand can feel yours, probably even more than any other app did.

What’s in store next

Let’s talk about the future, shall we?

Our next release, 0.2.1, will be a quality-of-life release, and it will be centered around bringing in some bug fixes and addressing some leftover areas of friction that were unaddressed either because we didn’t notice in our internal testing, or because we did notice but we didn’t make it in time for 0.2.0.

Keep in mind that, while the public release wasn’t exactly rushed, it was heavily felt, especially because we did have time-sensitive issues to account for (such as the Octocon imports - who’s going to import from Octocon if we shipped that feature after that service’s closure?) and also because we were already working on this before the events of last month, and our share of problems only got worse after those.

So, while 0.2.0 was huge, 0.2.1 will probably be “the true one”, in the sense that it goes that little extra mile to make it all feel smooth, polished, and fixed, if that wasn’t already the case (I mean, I am sure some of you went from 0.1.11 which was a dumpster fire to 0.2.0 and immediately felt the difference, you’d probably look at the next point release and… not notice it was doing more stuff right.)

But what happens after that?

0.2.1 will be released (and sent for review in Google Play) this Saturday night, Central European time, so it will land one week after 0.2.0. (No exact time because we are humans!)

After 0.2.1, I will not release anything else for a while.

We do have plans to keep on developing Ampersand, but we still need to discuss a stable internal calendar and a stable way to release stuff that doesn’t require anyone to rush at no point in the development cycle.

To that effort, from here on out, if you used the CI builds to get the shiny new things first, please go migrate to the stable version now. The CI builds that will follow the 0.2.1 release will be infrequent and also way more broken that what you saw in the last months — after all, they are bleeding edge and intended to use for us developers and our dear testers.

Closing this chapter

While I am honestly feeling better than I ever did about the application, I cannot but mourn the loss of the other applications and services that surrounded us in the last months. Make no mistake, I was an user of those too; and I hope Ampersand can be a match to what they were to you, if you feel like I do.

I know that the community is also welcoming new projects, and I hope for you the users to find what suits you best, even if that is not Ampersand.