NetNewsWire 2019 Year in Review

About a year ago, in early 2019, NetNewsWire for Mac was at the “d” (development) level, where it had been for years. For instance, we released NetNewsWire 5.0d8 on January 27.

We shipped the first alpha — feature complete, free of known bugs, but needing testing — by WWDC. NetNewsWire 5.0a1 was released May 31.

We reached beta in August, and then shipped NetNewsWire 5.0 for Mac on August 26.

We continued to ship updates to the Mac app — NetNewsWire 5.0.3, the most recent, shipped October 22.

Maurice started working on the iOS app before we shipped 5.0 of the Mac app — and, on Dec. 22, we shipped a public TestFlight beta of NetNewsWire 5.0 for iOS.

At this writing, four days later, 3,148 people have signed up to help test the iOS app. This is far beyond what we expected, and it’s super-exciting for the team.

* * *

The upshot: in 2019 we made both apps, Mac and iOS, great foundations for our future work. Getting to this point was no small thing — it took years, after all. But we shipped the Mac app, and we’ve gotten the iOS app to nearly-shipping.

I feel great about our pace! I know it can be frustrating for anybody waiting on some one specific thing — especially if it’s support for the syncing service you use — but, in 2019, the NetNewsWire team rocked.

Remember that it’s a group of volunteers who are doing this for love.

P.S. I’ll write another blog post soon-ish on plans for 2020. :)

Update a little while later: Here’s the 2020 roadmap.