Apr 27, 2020 · 2 min read

A look ahead: Our future plans for Flow

Hello everyone. 👋🏻 Since many of you were asking us about our future plans for Flow and what our roadmap might be, we thought it would be a good idea to start a proper devblog. So to start this blog off, let’s talk about future plans for Flow.

Flow is a passion project for us. We use Flow ourselves nearly every day. And we love interacting with you guys and seeing all of your fantastic feedback. We’ve gotten a lot of messages from people from all around the world sharing their love and support with us. We are truly honored so many people enjoy Flow. Thank you!

And we want to continue our work with your feedback, suggestions and ideas in mind. We want to make Flow even better. There is a long list of features for Flow macOS which will be implemented step by step while keeping the interface and experience minimalistic. You can find a detailed list of planned features on our roadmap. Here is a short excerpt of some features we are currently working on:

⏱ More Customization
📝 Tasks
🚫 Block Websites
📊 More Statistics
☁️ iCloud Sync
✨ And more…

Alongside these improvements to Flow for macOS we are currently also developing a mobile version for iOS 13+ which can already be tested. For becoming a beta tester, we only need your full name and your email address used for your Apple ID. You’ll get an invitation within a few days. If you’re interested in becoming a beta tester, let us know.

Even though we plan to implement PRO-features at some point, the experience and usage of the focus timer will remain free to use. Until now, we’re only able to work part-time on Flow. Offering a paid option is a chance for us to make the development self-sufficient and a way for us to be able to invest more time into the project. And since we love working on Flow, we would be happy to do it more often.

We are not perfect. There will be bugs sometimes. Our minimalistic approach probably doesn’t fit everyone. We make mistakes and we constantly try and fail. But we don’t fail to try. We truly want to make Flow the best focus timer experience for you. Your feedback is important to us. We listen to you.

15 Comments

Joel on May 9, 2020 at 12:36 am

Do you guys have an API?
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- Lea on May 12, 2020 at 4:57 pm
  
  Thanks for your question, Joel! Flow does not have a public API yet.
  Reply
Olga on May 12, 2020 at 2:23 pm

Thank you for your work! It would be really better to have more customization – for example, possibility to have a long break after 6 or 8 flows, break time 8 minutes.
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- Lea on May 12, 2020 at 5:04 pm
  
  Thank you, Olga! We’re already working on implementing custom duration options as well as custom amount of flows before a long break. ☺️ You can have a look at our list of planned features on our roadmap.
  Reply
Alvaro L. on May 18, 2020 at 12:43 am

I would really love to have Slack integration, specially to pause notifications while I’m in a Flow. Thank you very much for your work! The app looks and works great!
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- Lea on May 23, 2020 at 9:09 am
  
  Thanks for letting us know, Alvaro. We’ll think about it! 🙂
  Reply
Stefan on May 19, 2020 at 9:14 pm

The attraction to MacOS Flow is the minimal and clean experience. It does one thing and does it well already. In contrast to the voices asking for Slack integration, an api, and other custom features, I would caution against bloating the software. The lack of bloat is what has drawn these people in the first place. Avoid chasing the impossibility of an infinitely customizable experience. Users should accept the constrains and limited customization of the software as an expression of the rigidity and discipline of the pomodoro technique.

Given the free price of the software, how long can development continue? How long does it need to continue? Is there a long term plan for critical maintenance? Can new features (bloat) be grouped into a separate, perhaps paid app?
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- Lea on May 23, 2020 at 9:05 am
  
  Thank you, Stefan! We agree with you. Flow’s greatest strength is its simplicity and clean experience. To make everyone happy and at the same time keep the app slim and simple, we plan to implement an optional paid Pro upgrade. The Pro version will provide advanced features for those who are interested in a more feature-rich timer. Nevertheless, we always keep our minimalistic approach when developing new features.
  Reply
- Juan on August 21, 2020 at 10:17 pm
  
  Very well said. A lot of other pomodoro apps suffer from having too many features which became a turn-off for me. I needed something simple that looked nice and worked well–this app easily met that criteria.
  Reply
Jing on May 28, 2020 at 7:17 pm

Awesome app. Love the minimalistic UI. Would love to see functionality around pausing / skipping pomodoros and breaks. Especially when you have calls and meetings, you can’t perfectly fit them into 25min blocks. Keep up the good work!
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- Lea on June 5, 2020 at 3:46 pm
  
  Thank you, Jing! You can already pause pomodoros and breaks whenever you want. For now, you can only skip those at the beginning. But we’ll be implementing a general skip button in an upcoming update. Hope this was helpful to you. ☺️
  Reply
Miguel on June 4, 2020 at 4:48 pm

Great app! I would love to be able to name flows, so I can see after a day of work that I’ve done “6 work flows” en “2 learning programming flows”, for example.
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- Lea on June 5, 2020 at 3:55 pm
  
  Thanks, Miguel! 🙂 This is something we plan to implement as well. So stay tuned.
  Reply
c on June 17, 2020 at 1:50 pm

Awesome app!!!
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Oleksii on June 19, 2020 at 10:31 pm

Thanks for the app. It’s simple and very helpful. I’m always forgot to do break when programming. With Flow I don’t forgot to do rest, stand up do some stretching, drink a water etc.

It will be great to add “autostart list” – when you open application from this list Flow start automatically 🙂
Reply