January 04, 2021 · 4 min read

Devblog: Our plans for Flow in 2021

Hello everyone! 👋🏻 It has been a while since we last talked about the future development of Flow. And with the turn of the year, it seems to be a suitable time to take a look ahead. We want to be open with you and let you participate in our decisions.

First off, we’ve never really told you much about ourselves before. We’d like to catch up on that. My life partner, Lea, and I, Leif, are the founders of our own small developer studio in Germany called Yugen. Together with our friend and software developer, Stefan, who to this day regularly sacrifices his free time for Flow, we started developing Flow in 2017 after graduating from University. The project quickly became our passion and until a few weeks ago Flow was not monetized at all. With that said, 2021 has only just begun and we are looking forward to the release of Flow for iOS and hopefully many new great features for both macOS and iOS.

Organizational changes this year

As you could have already read in our blog post for Christmas, we will hopefully be able to hire a part-time developer in the coming year. It would be our first employee and a new member of our team, which is why we’re really looking forward to this opportunity.

In addition, we plan to write a blog post every month about our current development progress and interesting topics related to the pomodoro technique and productivity in general from now on. We also want to communicate and share more with you on Twitter, involve you in some of our decisions, and let you vote on new features.

Development of Flow in 2021 and beyond

Just to give you an idea of how we will move forward with the development in 2021: Here’s a rough overview of some of our bigger milestones in the years ahead. Minor updates, features and improvements are not mentioned here, as we usually opt for these at shorter notice.

Flow macOS: Update incl. option to set a session title / task
Flow iOS: Release incl. all basic features
Flow macOS: Update incl. customize global keyboard shortcuts
Flow iOS: Update incl. iCloud sync and statistical graphs
Flow iOS: Update incl. Pro features
Port to iPadOS and watchOS

The development of Flow can be a rough ride at times. There are ups and downs, sometimes we achieve our goals faster than expected, sometimes it takes significantly longer, and sometimes our plans change completely. For us, however, this uncertainty is part of the fun of owning our own business and it’s simply part of learning and improving over time. We truly love what we do, even if we’re sometimes missing some motivation and would rather play a game or binge our favorite show.

As you might know, we usually don’t set any specific deadlines for ourselves. We continue to find out what we can and can’t do. In the end, we’re essentially still only two. From answering support mails on a daily basis to maintaining the website, blog and social media to planning, designing, developing and testing new features of Flow; there’s always enough to fill our day. And then there are also our less fun but necessary business duties as well as other projects and apps that we work on. So it might take some time, but we’re slowly but surely getting there.

What changes are you looking forward to the most? What features are you missing? What are your personal goals and plans for 2021?

We appreciate your patience, understanding, great feedback and encouraging words. This dream called Flow wouldn’t be here today without folks like you believing in us. Thank you!

We wish you happiness, health, love, and success in 2021!
Lea and Leif