Changelog
What's new, plainly told
Groovy ships small, often, and with a changelog written for humans. Latest: v2.4 "Lamplight" — calmer evenings and a kinder curfew.
How we version: Groovy ships in small releases with names instead of numbers-you-can't-pronounce. Every entry below is the full change, not a highlights reel — including the fixes that only matter to twelve people, because those twelve people wrote to us. Releases land on both platforms within a few days of each other; the date shown is the iOS rollout unless noted.
- Calmer evenings. Wind-down now begins with a lamp-dim animation and a two-line plan for tomorrow instead of a checklist. Testing with the beta group cut evening app-closing time noticeably; the point of the evening is to end it.
- Kinder curfews. Phone curfew can now run in "lantern mode" — one allowed app (calls, maps, your e-reader) while everything else stays dark. Curfew is a fence, not a cage.
- Bedtime trends. A soft fortnight view replaces the binary "on/off target" night mark. Sleep is weather; the trend is the climate.
- Fixed. A bug where the Tuesday energy spike mislabelled itself as Monday on devices set to Welsh regional formats. Diolch to the three testers who spotted it.
- Fixed. Focus sessions no longer drop the parked-distractions list if the app is backgrounded during a phone call.
- Adaptive reminders. Nudges now move themselves. A reminder you act on within ten minutes, three mornings running, is promoted; one you systematically swipe away is demoted to a single weekly mention. The notification tray is a place worth visiting again.
- One-nudge rule made literal. A missed ritual now generates exactly one gentle follow-up per day, system-wide, no exceptions. Previously two implementations disagreed; both were wrong in opposite directions.
- Actionable notifications. Tick a ritual, start a focus session or defer to tomorrow directly from the notification on both platforms.
- Fixed. Widgets on the home screen now refresh on schedule change instead of waiting for the next app open.
- Rest days, planned. Habits can now carry planned rest days marked as diamonds rather than gaps. Adherence maths now respects them, so a Sunday-off reading habit shows its true shape.
- Seam marks. Streaks repaired by a recovery rep now show a small seam in the count — 21 with a seam reads as what it is: twenty-one honest days including the wobble.
- Hidden-streak mode. For people who find counters tyrannising: the ledger and recovery engine run, the display shows only the current week.
- Fixed. Month-view dots no longer blur on Android tablets; the review's "one change" field now survives a keyboard-caused rotation, which it previously did not, to the annoyance of at least one of our own reviewers.
- Focus windows. The energy curve now proposes a daily focus window and offers to schedule sessions inside it automatically. You can accept, edit or tell it to stop asking; it stops asking.
- Parking triage. The end-of-session parking list gained a ninety-second triage: do, diary, or drop. Most parked items are drops, and now the app helps you notice that.
- Study mode. A 50/10 session variant with spaced recall prompts, built with a group of A-level and university testers.
- Fixed. Bluetooth headphones no longer cause the session timer to double-count a second at reconnect. It was one second. It felt longer.
- 120+ rituals. The ritual library arrives: tested five-to-thirty-minute rituals with time estimates, best-fit slots and written fallbacks. Free tier carries a starter set of twenty; Plus unlocks the shelf.
- Custom rituals. Build your own from scratch or remix any library entry — steps, fallbacks, anchors and slots are all editable.
- Seasonal sets. The first two seasonal collections ship with the library: "Dark Mornings" and "Exam Season", written with testers who actually live both.
- Design refresh. The soft-data look — rounded bars, calmer rings, one accent per time of day — becomes the system it was always pretending to be.
- Recovery reps, scheduled. The never-miss-twice engine stops being a principle and becomes a feature: after one miss, tomorrow's fallback is queued to the top of the day automatically, with a one-line explanation of why.
- Miss reasoning. A two-tap "why" on any missed dot — late, travelling, forgot, chose not to — feeds the weekly review. Choosing not to is a valid answer; the ledger records it without commentary.
- Streak seams. Streaks repaired by a recovery rep show a small seam. Previewed here by popular demand from the beta group; generalised in v2.2.
- Fixed. Time-zone changes mid-day no longer double-schedule the evening ritual. Frequent flyers, we heard you.
- Wind-down rituals. The evening sequence — screens off, stretch, read, plan tomorrow — becomes a first-class routine type with its own tone and pacing.
- Phone curfews. Scheduled dimming and notification holding, the predecessor of lantern mode.
- Morning handoff. The morning report now opens with yesterday's one-line plan, so the day starts already oriented.
- Widgets. Today and Focus widgets arrive for the home screen on both platforms — the day's three rituals, or the running ring, without opening the app.
- Export. One-tap portable export of your full record lands in Settings. It was always the plan; it took three weeks to make the file format something a human could actually read.
- Accessibility pass. Dynamic type respected across the ledger and review screens; VoiceOver and TalkBack labels audited element by element. The dots now announce as "done, missed, rest day" rather than, in one memorable pre-release case, "button, button, button".
- Fixed. The recovery-rep banner no longer reappears after ticking it, which it did with a persistence that could only be called motivational.
- Focus quiet windows. Sessions gain automatic do-not-disturb, the single most requested feature from the first fortnight of public release.
- Parking list. Distractions noted mid-session land in a list instead of your working memory. Triage arrives later, in v2.1; for now it is simply a shelf.
- Fixed. Streak counts no longer double-tick when a ritual is completed from both the notification and the app within the same minute.
- Fixed. Welsh regional formats no longer shift the week's first day for the energy curve's labels only, which produced charts that were technically bilingual and practically unhinged.
- The loop. Routines with fallbacks, three habits with never-miss-twice, focus sessions with quiet hours, the weekly review that changes one thing. Everything we still consider the app's spine shipped on day one.
- On-device only. No account required, no analytics pipeline, insights computed on the phone. That hasn't changed and won't.
- Free core. One routine, three habits, sessions and reviews — free forever, stated then, held since. The pricing page repeats the promise because the App Store review guidelines suggested a subscription screen might want a free tier visible before install; ours has been visible from day one, in the same place, at the same zero.
- The name. v1.0 also settled the pronunciation argument in the studio (British, three syllables, groovy as in groove) and shipped the sunrise mark you now see in the header — drawn as vector on a Tuesday, unchanged since.
The deletions changelog
Every release notes ships with additions; this one keeps a standing record of what we removed, because subtractions are the harder discipline and the better story. Removed in the betas: a points economy (users optimized points, not evenings), a "don't break the chain" alarm that escalated (it taught people to dread the app), three flavours of shareable streak cards (they manufactured comparison), a mood emoji-diary (the check-in already carried the signal with less performance), and a colour-blind-hostile red/green ledger that originally shipped because nobody on the team was colour-blind — a beta tester was, and the dots you see today are the redesign.
Removed after public launch: a "perfect week" badge in v1.2 (perfection is a bad teacher), notification digest emails in v2.0 (nobody read them; the app is the digest), and an onboarding questionnaire's fifth question in v1.1 — nobody could answer it truthfully, so its answer was invented by everyone, which made it worse than useless. Removed in v2.4: the binary on/off bedtime mark, retired in favour of the fortnight trend after the beta group convinced us that sleep is weather, not attendance.
The standing rule for future deletions is written on the studio wall: if a feature needs a notification to survive, it deserves to die. So far the rule has claimed four features and saved none, which we consider excellent hit rate.
Older betas (2025) were tested privately with 200 households across the UK and Ireland and are summarised here for completeness: three of them — "Anchor", "Recovery rep" and "Parking" — survived into v1.0 essentially unchanged. The other nine did not, and the changelog of things we deleted is the one we're proudest of.
Read the changelog from the inside next time
Every release note lands in the app the day it ships.
