Sprint Review (41)

[sambouwer]

Hey all! I hope you are ready for another update from the Anytype team members right after a bunch of big releases on iOS, Android and Desktop. Remember that Release Train we mentioned in Sprint Review 37? It is rolling!

Please take note, these are not the release notes for the next update, but rather a list of items the teams have worked on and are working on. Release notes will be posted in the Latest News & Announcements/Release Notes category. As part of the Release Train, the next release is again planned for the the end of the month.

As another general note: this sprint review was more of a reflection than an outlook to the upcoming weeks because of the synced releases.

Process Improvements

A good start is made to integrate the Discourse community (this forum) with the internal bug tracker. This will eventually be fully integrated to have feedback right in the topics on the forum when a bug is updated in the bug tracker.

Product Updates

Desktop

Because most of the time was spent on preparing for the 0.28.0 release and fixing a lot of bugs, there was not much shared on specific progress, other than a list of topics the team is still working on:

• Relations as Objects
• Kanban improvements
• Web clipper
• Decluttering
• Editor polishing

Razor explicitly mentioned that he was very happy with the outcome of the Nightly Testers program so far. He got a lot of feedback and could therefore squash a lot of bugs .

iOS

• The Set list view is updated to show Relations in/on the Objects
• Quick actions for Relation values are added, so when you are opening a Relation, you can directly call, send an email or open a link from the Relation card.
• Bookmark refinements
  • Deleted Bookmark Objects now show correctly like other references to deleted Objects
  • A beautiful loading state animation is visible after creating new Bookmark Object so you have something to watch while your content is being loaded
  • You can open your Bookmark as an Object
    • Change “Source” Relation if the URL needs to be updated
    • You can reload Object content to fetch new content if the website was updated
• Underline markup was added
• Link markup & URL actions (similar to Relation actions, see above)
  • Remove link
  • Copy link
  • Open link
• You no longer have to wait until you are at your laptop or desktop to create a new Set: you can create a new Set right on your iOS device!
• When creating a new Object of Type “Note” the step to name the Object is skipped because that is not relevant for a Note.

Android

• Quick actions for Relation values are added, so when you are opening a Relation, you can directly call, send an email or open a link from the Relation card.
• Bookmark refinements
  • Deleted Bookmark Objects now show correctly like other references to deleted Objects
  • A beautiful loading state animation is visible after creating new Bookmark Object so you have something to watch while your content is being loaded
  • You can open your Bookmark as an Object
    • Change “Source” Relation if the URL needs to be updated
    • You can reload Object content to fetch new content if the website was updated
• Underline markup was added
• Link markup & URL actions (similar to Relation actions, see above)
  • Remove link
  • Copy link
  • Open link
• New markup link-to UX (in progress)
  • Select text, click button to create link: choose from existing Objects, create a new Object, or URL (with prompt to insert from clipboard if applicable)
• Media sharing (in progress)
  • Allows users to choose from installed apps to open file (for example, PDF)

Backend/Middelware

• Middleware issues being resolved but it is taking longer than expected
• The team will present the current state and outlook of the infrastructure and data structure of Anytype’s backend (middleware) in a few weeks. The presentation will be for internal communication at first, but it is the plan to share this at a later stage with the community [@ignatovv is that correct AND to be shared? It was not explicitly mentioned in the sprint review meeting]

Growth

For more information about what analytics Anytype uses, you can check this post here

• The number of monthly active users (MAU) was stagnating for a few months but is now going up again!
  • The number of returning users, retention of active users, and influx of new users has never been higher
  • The team did a small test in which new users were given reusable invite codes (up to 5 times), which caused a big increase in conversion from invites to active users. This provides a foundation to pursue a more formal referral program in a few months time - stay tuned for more info
  • Tables and Bookmarks are most often used Blocks after Text
  • Percentage of new users creating Blocks & Objects in Anytype is going up (as a measure for active users)

Community/Communication

We are launching a Web 3.0 experimental project. We want to assure users that we keep in mind interoperability, composability and transparency that are critical properties of any Web 3.0 project. Still it’s a very hard task, because we want to be offline-first, have collaboration and be able to openly link data from other systems. We believe that it is still doable and will push hard to please our “web 3” fans soon.

[qualquertipo]

@sambouwer

Relations as Objects

Exciting!

Can anyone from the AT team elaborate on this?

[valentin]

@sambouwer

We are launching a Web 3.0 experimental project.

Can you expand on this? I‘m not sure what this refers to.

[richhie]

@sambouwer

Percentage of new users creating Blocks & Objects in Anytype is going up (as a measure for active users)

@sambouwer

Tables and Bookmarks are most often used Blocks after Text

Hi isn’t anytype end to end encrypted? How are you guys able to know what users are using the most?
Sorry, I mean no offence just curious to know

[sambouwer]

Only meta data for these kinds of metrics is shared with Anytype as far as I know. So Anytype cannot read the contents of those blocks. I hope someone from the Anytype team can confirm my understanding.

[danijelcamdzic]

Is Anytype Android team working on adding features to simple tables such as mentioning objects, changing background color and such? I know it’s available on Desktop although I’m not sure about the iOS status?

[Jeroen]

I think they are working on having all versions (desktop, IOS, android) have the same features.

[sambouwer]

Feature parity (having all features available on all platforms) is a goal with substantial priority. Since a few releases, they try to release new features or improvements on mobile and desktop simultaneously. Certain features are more useful to develop on Desktop first to make sure all bug and issue are resolved before developing for and releasing on mobile. (so you are correct, @Jeroen )

See also this topic as an attempt to list what you can expect on each platform. If you spot mistakes, let me know!

Platform feature parity (overview)

Please note that this overview is outdated and will no longer be updated! Please check the official feature list here: In another post it was suggested that all features should be available on all platforms. While that is a valid feature request, Anytype is still being developed and therefore not all features will be available on each platform at the same time for several reasons (see comments in this post): Feel free to add features to the table below with the following in mind: I don’t…

[Charlotte]

@richhie

Hi isn’t anytype end to end encrypted? How are you guys able to know what users are using the most?
Sorry, I mean no offence just curious to know

Hey, of course - no offence taken

All content you create is E2E encrypted, meaning that we cannot access, read, edit, or block you from your data. More precisely, we can’t understand anything about your data even if we look at it on our backup node - not what type of object it is, what is contained within it, nor which relations it has, etc. We can only see that you have a tree of encrypted messages connected with each other via IDs.

This is a bit different from our analytics, which is event-based. Basically, each new feature/function we introduce is tagged as an ‘event’ so our analytics knows what to count. Account creation is an event, as is block creation, Type creation, or Object creation. The same applies for table block creation or bookmark block creation.

Each time these features are used, it will show up in our analytics. There was no data created or exchanged, but rather an event took place in the app. You can check here for a more detailed description of what we’re able to track: https://doc.anytype.io/d/what-trackers-does-anytype-use**

We chose to implement analytics as part of our alpha program to help us understand the impact of our work and to give us a compass to improve the product. Right now we are working on making this more transparent by updating our privacy policy and docs.

With our public launch, who chooses to remain in the alpha program can continue to opt into these analytics while testing pre-release features and helping us improve the product - everyone else will be free to opt out.

Hope that helps to clarify, please let me know in case of any questions!

Edit: Also, when using ‘You’ I don’t mean ‘you as an individual’ - upon registering for the app your account information is linked to an Anytype ID that is basically a long string of numbers & letters…nothing that can personally identify you

[AntonKent]

Hi Valentin. Yes, sure. There are very different ideas behind the “web3” term, but fundamentally Web3 is about “ownability” and “composability”.

Here at Anytype we want to achieve (1) data composability, (2) transparency and (3) “sovereignty”. First means we want to be able to link/export data from Anytype into other platforms, and link/import data inside Anytype easily. Second means that our software should be more open, and critical stuff like infrastructure and data storage should be more transparent. Data sovereignty usually means that user is able to migrate to his/other data storage providers. I know that sounds really vague now, but soon we will post more specific info about our vision and approaches.

Thanks for your interest! We will keep you and the community updated on that stuff.

[GooRusa]

A privacy focused product should mean analytics are opt in, not opt out.

[kerbless]

I get your point, opt-in sounds better, but in my opinion what it’s important when it comes to privacy is my data, not how I use the app that manages it. So I don’t agree when you say that a privacy focused product should mean analytics are opt in.
All content inside AnyType is E2E encrypted and that’s the most important thing.

That said, if you feel like having analytics off by default is a “feature” you need, feel free to create a topic when AnyType will be publicly launched, maybe enough community members will agree and the team will consider your suggestion.

[_Aria]

For Alpha users, in the onboarding call (at least the one I had), we were told that given this is was a closed Alpha, they would track analytics (top level events, NOT anything linked to the user/their content). This was so they can get a better idea of what is being used, how often etc. Which makes sense when they are pushing out new features etc.

We were told that once it is released to the public, it would be removed (but I imagine like every other program, you can opt in/out for top level analytics)