Development pace (roadmap for 2025?)

Talk
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1

After using Anytype for over a year, my initial enthusiasm is wearing off. I knew from the first moment the software is in beta, but that was also part of the excitement – seeing something so full of potential also gradually materialize. A year later the potential is still there, but it’s transforming into frustration/impatience.

In one of the past Town hall sessions it was said that the Any team includes 40 people, but given the pace of development I doubt even 10 people are working full-time directly on the software. Not that the numbers matter, but the lingering question is what can we expect of Anytype in the foreseeable future.

Phrased differently: how long do you expect before the top 10 feature requests are included as part of the software? Given that none of them are even on the roadmap for 2024, and gauging by the pace of development over the past year, I’m starting to think this can easily require waiting until late 2026, even 2027.

How off do you think I am? When do you guess we’ll have formulas, transclusions, block toggling, tabs, recurring objects, publish-to-web, notifications and RTL-language support?

2

You can see the teams here: https://community.anytype.io/g

If they are actively full-time working… well, hard to say, don’t know… but noticed some are full-time and even sometimes at weekends.

4

There will be an Anytype community event where you can ask your question: Anytype Community Events · Events Calendar

Personally, I have some concerns that I’ll keep to myself, I’ll just note that the public roadmap is full of drafts and backlogs from previous Qs: Anytype Feature Roadmap 🪩 · GitHub views/1

5

These remarks are very close to this discussion (which focuses on lighter issues than these big requests) :

7

Yep ! I can speak for this too ! Had some answers on WE !!! I even worried about the responder’s work / life balance :wink:

But having a bunch of over-involved devs is not a good sign… no one runs a sprint over the distance of a marathon. I understood that the team managed to raise funds, enough to keep a good sized team running for 2 years at least… I would be okay to pay if I saw features that I find basic being included… but in the current state, it ain’t happening sadly.

8

Although I might be impatient, I want to make it clear that I have nothing against the team. They’ve built a fantastic piece of software. I’ve seen team members working improbable hours, fixing problems and answering questions on days they shouldn’t, and those efforts truly deserve applause.

When I started using Anytype, I realized within an hour that it couldn’t do what I needed. The problem I was trying to address requires using formulas, notifications, transclusions, and RTL-language support—features that weren’t available then and still aren’t now. Still, something about the ethos of Anytype resonated with me and I decided to try it out. It was relatively easy to learn, and I quickly built a small PKM to aid in my studies. For over a year, Anytype served me well, and I’m again immensely grateful for it.

I began just after the transition from alpha to beta. I knew there would be quirks and that patience would be required. Sure enough, with each update, old bugs are resolved and new features are introduced. Anytype remains exciting with immense potential. However, my question and concern is about the expected timeframe for realizing that potential the community sees as well. The exact number of full-time programmers is secondary, just like it’s perfectly fine to work on features the community doesn’t value as highly.

9

I realized that the Notion alternatives like Anytypes that I want to use (local first, privacy oriented, opensource) are in early stage of development and most of them have been in development for 3+ years. All of them don’t have formulas, which is the main advantage of Notion for me.
I also realized that most of the time I used them on my laptop/desktop but there are some cases when I need to use the mobile app and some of the alternatives don’t have such or their mobile apps are limited and/or not so convenient to use.

For example, I can’t even imagine creating a type with template in Anytype app. The best-case scenario is to capture a link, a though or copy a text and after that to make it “pretty” in the correct category. I’ve started recently using simple note-taking apps on my phone because I need speed and simplicity.

For now, I can’t find how to use all-in-one app in every scenario. I’ll continue to use Anytype when I am at home. In my work, or when I am on the move, I prefer using Google Keep, OneNote (not so convenient but i used it in the past) or Twos - I found it yesterday, which is a surprisingly viable alternative (with AI and simple browser clipper). I am using such simple notetaking app just for quick capture, to do list, and quick tagging. I’ll test some more apps and I’ll choose on of them.

I need a browser-based version of the note-taking app on my business laptop which is locked. I need an uncomplicated way to collect my personal daily notes with predefine date with calendar view.

10

Hey @sofalakatino, thank you very much for sharing your concerns and initiating this discussion! :raised_hands:

We appreciate your feedback and continued support of Anytype despite your frustration with the pace of development and the absence of certain highly requested features.

We understand this has become a significant pain point for many of our earliest and most loyal adopters, and our current product focus may not appeal so much to them. All valid points, however, it’s relevant to the context of this discussion to mention that many early users did not stick with Anytype precisely because it lacked a vital aspect of our mission vision: basic collaboration.

It’d also be a shame not to highlight the absolute heaps of work our teams have put in over the past year. Just to name a few:

  • Anysync, our own encrypted sync infrastructure, which massively improved sync performance and stability.
  • Addition of Multi-spaces, Experiences, and local-only mode.
  • Relations as Objects, Files as Objects, new version history.
  • Introduction of Multiplayer, Shared-Spaces and other collaboration features.

This list goes on…

We fully recognize the importance of the top voted features like formulas, transclusions, block toggling, publish-to-web, notifications, and proper RTL-language support. Just not to mince words here; we have every intention of implementing these.

While most of them aren’t currently on our 2024 roadmap, we plan to update it soon and assess how they align with our focus on multiplayer development, which, needless to say, is our biggest priority at the moment.

I feel like we’ve made no secret about that in the years up until now. Collaboration has always been a central part of our product vision, but it took us some time to collectively advance these projects to where they are now.

So, all things considered (at the risk of being slightly redundant); our primary focus remains in the coming months on collaboration features and striving for basic quality. This includes optimizing and upgrading existing features, simplifying the UI, improving navigation, and making the app as intuitive as possible. We believe these efforts will deliver the most value to both current and future users.

If certain requests become mission-critical for the Community, we will adjust our roadmap and prioritize their implementation. We are committed to meeting your essential needs and fully recognize their necessity in the overall quality and user experience of Anytype.

However, to manage expectations realistically, many of the specific features mentioned in the comments above are unlikely to be implemented before 2025, and due to changes in development scheduling, our current 2024 roadmap is sorely in need of an update.

We are here to listen, so thanks again for kicking off this topic and doing your part to steer us in the right direction. Please join us for our upcoming town hall where you can ask questions, share your thoughts, and receive further clarity about our plans! :pray::heartpulse:

12

Just to say: it is a pleasure to see the Anytype team respond so directly to the community’s concerns and be so transparent with the current focus and direction of the product.

I have many similar concerns as those outlined by others above, but this kind of transparency and honesty is a big part (not the only one, the product is the main thing!) of what is making me stick with Anytype :blue_heart:

13

I have to say that I am also disappointed in the lack of attention to important UX issues, many of which I think would not require that much attention.

In my opinion Anytype should focus on doing what they do now - which is by definition adequate for existing users - well, before launching ambitious new features for new users.

The absence of inline sets - a core feature of the product - in mobile is a clear example, and this isn’t apparently on the roadmap.

Spending time refining UX issues would vastly improve quality of life with the product.

Examples:

  • Ability to flip through lists without closing the current opened item - this is so simple to fix and would make the product so much more useful

  • Undo is so unreliable that it’s nearly useless, often undoing the wrong action and not reliably redoing them. This is a serious data loss issue, as it is often hard to tell what has been undone, and it can be impossible to recover accidental changes without functional undo.

  • No way to select more than one block / paragraph in mobile - making the app basically useless for notes that I might have to share with someone.

14

You can select more than one block on mobile by long pressing (not too long).

15

Oh that’s helpful, thank you.

I would imagine this limitation has to do with the text field library and block structure. It’s pretty strange tho.

16

Hello! It’s Anton - co-founder of anytype is here. It is sad to hear that your enthusiasm is wearing off.

I’ll try to answer:
Yes, our team is quite big, with 30 full-time members and 10 part-time contractors, and they are all doing great. You can see it on our GitHub. I think the problem here is a mismatch of expectations. We have pretty hard tech underneath, native mobile clients, and a lot of complexity. For example, on the desktop client, only two engineers are working; two people are on the Android app, and three are on iOS. Many people work on what powers anytype it’s tech, and it takes time to get it right.

I cannot encourage you to wait, as it is still very early. First, we need to finish all core aspects of our tech, then focus on improving the UX, before we work on other major features.

To answer you precisely, the current top 10 feature requests are:

Calendar / Timeline View - v1 is here, and a widget with the calendar is also coming.

These four are planned for this year:

  • Apply Template to an Existing Object
  • Make “toggle” a feature of every block
  • Inline LaTeX Addition
  • Notifications

We don’t plan to add tabs, but we do plan to implement split-screen and multi-column navigation this year.

  • Add Tabs

These are hard to make with our current tech, and you can expect them next year:

  • Derived Relations (Formulas)
  • Automatic Bi-directional Linking + Rollups
  • Add Block Linking & Synced / Embedded Blocks

We have no plans for whiteboard and canvas features:

  • Whiteboards / Canvas

I would not judge the pace of development based on previous years, as most of that time was spent building basic platform components like our sync engine, local-first database, payments, and many other small but important things.

Our current plan is to finish major platform features this year and start improving the UX - it really clunky now. Afterward, you can expect more features at a better pace. If this does not meet your expectations, it might be better to try another software product and come back at the end of 2025. It is painful to say this, but this is the reality. I am super grateful to you for giving us a chance and sharing your feedback with us. We are working days and nights to make our vision a reality.

17

Thanks @anton .
it’s nice to get a response from the team, especially from a co-founder.
It’s even more than that: it’s important because the lack of feedback is one of the issues raised.

And good new for the UX part!
A few well-integrated, pleasant-to-use features make you want to wait longer than a tedious user experience with lots of features that aren’t pleasant to use.
That’s what makes the difference between reactions:
“It’s great, can’t wait for the next feature” :heart_eyes:
vs
“And… here’s another impractical or unusable feature.” :expressionless:

A big thought for the FRONT teams who are struggling to make this dream interface!

18

Thank you for the reply, and also that written earlier by @Angelo

I want to reiterate my respect for Anytype’s many achievements. I use the software daily, and it excels at what it does. While the discussion revolves around missing features, I’m happy to acknowledge how much can already be done with the existing set of features.

While it’s very encouraging to hear about five new features in the upcoming six months, there’s a pang of disappointment reading that formulas/calculations, by far the most popular request, are delayed until next year.

I’m also curious about the roadmap’s backlog. What is the status of handwritten notes and publish-to-web? Will either or both be implemented in 2024 or 2025? Additionally, RTL-language support on desktop has been repeatedly brushed off. Will this be on the 2025 roadmap, or remain in a non-committal backlog?

I understand this is a lot to manage for only seven developers, who at the same time are also addressing numerous QoL and UX issues (e.g., set filtering workflow, grid cell wrap, formatting in text relations, etc.). As more users join and more use cases emerge, new feature requests will undoubtedly increase. One day users might end up complaining about feature bloat.

For now, though, I’m left with the realization that it won’t be until 2026 that I’ll be able to use Anytype for what brought me here in 2023. Until then, I’ll continue paying Notion and Obsidian for the features Anytype will eventually offer. Anytype, despite lacking in features, is still by far my favorite. Perhaps the 3-year co-creator membership might have been premature on my part, but I tell myself that it’s part of what’s needed for Anytype to continue growing and thriving in 2026 and beyond.

Thank you for your ongoing efforts. They already show, and I hope 2025 will be Anytype’s transformative year allowing for a general-public breakthrough.

19

@Angelo & @anton thank you both for the indepth reply and I can see both sides of the coin.

On one side there is all the back-end stuff that users hardly see while using the app but take a huge amount of work and on the other side are shiny new features that everyone loves to see added.

I think the main reason for disappointment is indeed different expectations. Part of this problem is the roadmap that for this year, is really lacking behind and needs updating. I also think setting “deadlines” for a huge project as Anytype might do more wrong then right.

Perhaps take the Obsidian approach, which shows a list of planned features and active features. Both show no release date which means no public release date people are setting expectations for.

Another reason I think for the disappointment might be that multiplayer came before a lot of core functionality and UX improvements where added. Which feels backwards (at least to me it does).

Either way, everyone can see the huge amount of work you people have already put into creating Anytype! Again, thanks for that hard work.

20

Great to hear this honest assessment. I’m really looking forward to seeing the progress over the next few years. In the meantime I’ll probably be going back and forth between Notion and Anytype.

I understand people are upset about multiplayer before basic UX fixes, however I also understand that this is such fundamental feature to the core tech that implementing a basic version of it early was important.

21

I really like this transparency from the anytype team. Although I recognize that there are some missing features - and that I also want to see them one day -, this current gap is extremely understandable (technically analyzing anytype), because the encrypted, decentralized and local technology underlying the application with its entire UI , is very complex, but it is also a historic achievement for digital freedom advocates to see it working today.

In relation to similar services: Obsidian is very simple with the features developed by the team itself. What saves this gap are the plugins, but this opens up a rather scary security hole (and the general quality of the plugins, such as their support for updates, is also an issue to be taken into consideration). Notion is the basic formula: no E2E encryption, paper promises of data protection, and fully centralized.

I’m grateful for the comments I was able to read here, it’s good to know what others think and also want to see on anytype, and also the team patiently speaking out with us.

22

I was happy to see the roadmap was updated a couple of days ago, and I just finished watching the last “town hall” session.

So, what happened? None of the four features that you listed as “planned for this year” are on the roadmap, and it was suggested the development priorities are very different. Or am I missing something?

And since I’m writing again I will repeat myself: is there an ETA for RTL-language support?

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They are not listed, but will be added.