There were some concerns raised about the speed of development. I would love to address them in this message.
Why does it seem anytype development is slow?
There are a few factors, the first is that what we are building is quite new, it’s not a clone, or just a self-hosted alternative. It’s flexible front-end that uses graph as a data model, meanwhile it’s off-line first and peer-to-peer, it has native mobile clients and is built on top of cutting-edge tech like libp2p and ThreadsDB. Aside from a lot of technological challenges we meet, we need to make the right architectural decisions. It takes a lot of effort and resources to do this well. For example, until now, we have been doing a big refactoring of our data model and business logic to make anytype more efficient and extendable. You couldn’t see this progress, but you will feel it in the product soon, as we are now able to build a whole park of the most wanted features like in-line sets, simple tables, sets by any relations, etc.
The fact is that our previous team size was not on par with the level of ambitions we have. To solve this we doubled our team and now we have enough team members to move faster. Here is a second factor: when you are doubling a team, your pace of development slows downs for a while. It took us some time to increase the team and on-board new people, and we are still in the process.
And as a final fact, there is a war happening right now. Many of our team members are Russians who have left their home country with their children, pets and personal stuff. It took some time for their families to find new places to live, organize routine and get new documents. All of these together could give you a sense that anytype is slow in development, while in-fact its opposite.
What is our focus right now?
Sync reliability, collaboration and scalable infrastructure with the ability to self-host. While for most of our users sync works well, some experience problems which completely ruin the experience. We can’t move forward and open anytype for everyone until that is solved. The big part of our team is focused on the new anytype infrastructure tech which will support multi-party collaboration out of the box, will be error-prone and infinitely scalable. Of course you will be able to self host it. ETA is 6 month. When it’s ready, we plan to open anytype for everyone.
In the meantime the other part of the team is working on the most wanted features like simple tables, kanban view, inline sets, collections, set by any number of relations, new home screen and dozens of small UX improvements. We will start to deliver them in the next releases.
When will we open our API?
We had a plan to open our API and the protocol in 1Q22, however we’ve moved this to the public release date due to architectural transformations. We just don’t want you to give the code which will be incompatible with future versions of anytype. This is the same reason why it’s not open sourced yet.
When will we release a public beta?
This year
How to help?
Please spread good vibes and kind words to support our team who delivers days and nights.
Thank you for your trust and any feedback!
