Why Doesn't AnyType Prioritize Development Speed?

Talk
1

Anytype’s users deserve an explanation as to why things take as long as they do. I understand that the team is small–but then, the TOP priority, without exception, should be to focus on expanding the team. I speak for myself and most users, I’m sure, when I say that I would not mind if updates stopped altogether for a while if that’s what it would take for the team to focus all their efforts on getting investors and hiring more team members so that the speed of things can improve (I know that’s not something the entire team needs to be involved with, I am merely trying to prove a point).

I have NO greater criticism-- and have heard no greater criticism–about Anytype than the speed at which it develops. The team is friendly, visionary, and active in the community. The app is BEAUTIFUL and fast and secure. The community is organized and in love with the app.

–But none of that matters if the development speed is this slow. Three years ago, a simple bug was reported on the ascending order not working properly in tags. That has only recently been fixed… I AM glad it’s fixed, but that should have been resolved within a few weeks maximum.

I LOVE this app. I would MARRY this app if I could! But I have seen people abandon it for worse alternatives SIMPLY because of the speed of development, and I can’t fault them for leaving. And it’s heartbreaking, because the worst part is that they don’t even want to leave. No one’s stopped using Anytype unless they have done it begrudgingly, and it is precisely, and only, and always because of this issue. I believe in this team and this product–and I have the vast majority of my life info in Anytype to prove it (no worries, there’s consistent backups being made), but I need to see the team do something about this.

This is far too big of an issue to sweep under the rug, and there is not a SINGLE good reason to have neglected it this long. If it is because you cannot find people that meet the company’s vision and culture, then do more interviews and do something about the marketing. If it’s a funding issue, there are SO many ways to get funding, and so many people who are willing to chip in. If it’s because it’s your first time running a company and you don’t know how to fix this, there are human consultants, as well as AI resources (ChatGPT). (Also, have you considered Acquisition.com? Their WHOLE THING is scaling companies. I can’t recommend them enough, and I’m sure you’ve come across the Hormozis’ content already. Acquisition.com. Acquisition.com. Acquisition.com. I can’t repeat it enough, it’s the first thing I think of when I think of how to solve this issue).

Mind you, I don’t know much of anything about business, but I know that there has to be a solution here. I’m not here to yell at anyone, I’m not here to point fingers and insult and hate and linger on the issue–I don’t intend to punish the pure-intentioned people who have made my life so much more enjoyable through this app, I just want an explanation and then to see dedication towards fixing this issue. I’m sure the team has gotten tired of hearing about this, too, and I’m sure they would love to use a better version of the app themselves, too, and I’m sure they want more income faster, too–so do something. NO one wins here. No one. It’s okay if there’s a flaw in the business model or the business structure, it’s okay if you’ve messed up along the way, it’s okay if you’re confused, but at least address it.

You underestimate how much people love and believe in this product, and the resources you have access to. This isn’t from a person to a company, this is from one passionate person to a group of well-intentioned people: Do something about this. All your blessings are waiting for you to just DO something about this. 700,000 people are waiting for you to do something about this–and most of them aren’t here with pitchforks in hand, just a frustrated sadness they want gone.

I look forward to your response.

@Filip @anton

2

I totally agree with the main point about extreme delay of development/bug-fixing for those bugs reported some months or even years ago and have just been fixed lately

I wonder what the circumstances are that lead to this scenario, a new complicated feature is being developed that consumes much of the team’s time and effort that may take weeks to add while something that I guess may take a maximum of a one full day to get fixed gets ignored.

Also, another point to be added, I feel that the team’s roadmap and users’ needs and wants aren’t aligned together. Don’t get me wrong, those new features and UI/UX updates that were added over the latest couple of updates are overwhelmingly welcomed, they made the app way more better and easier to use. I actually finally ditched both Obsidian and Notion, and now only use Anytype for everything in my life. But from time to time I feel like “why is this not developed/fixed for months/years now although way too many users expressed how frustrating it is? Why something not being asked by the community to be added gets added and focused on?”.

3

Welcome, Hexara! I’m happy to hear about your migration. I’m still using Notion, but only for its timeline feature for project management—which, according to Razor, will be rolled out on Anytype this summer! After that, I’m all in.

And yeah, I’m really not sure why either. Even something as simple as reordering tags—I asked for that like 2-3 years ago when I found Anytype for the first time, and it’s still not here. My best guess really is just that they get overwhelmed and can only mentally afford to focus on the next biggest update rather than the ‘smaller things’—which, I can see the logic there, but still, scaling should become the top priority then, instead of delaying the smaller things altogether this much. It limits the functionality for the users quite a bit. Speaking for myself here, I have many ideas for how I want to design my Anytype, but I’ve had to hold off on those ideas for years now. I keep telling myself it won’t be much longer before X feature arrives, but it’s been such a long wait.

4

Could you please stop mentioning me in topics like this please? Thank you.

5

Sure thing

6

I am no developer or anything closely related to software production however, from my time following development of different apps and games I can say the following;

  • More money and more teammembers does not equal higher development speed!
  • Higher development speed does not equal quality updates!

If it was this simple then products from google, apple and microsoft should be next level perfect! :face_savoring_food:

You can say a lot about the team and development of Anytype and their choices however while they work incredible hard and make huge progress, which often is behind the scenes without direct visual changes for us end users.

Being the smaller team Anytype is hiring 1 or 2 new people could completely change the dynamic and workflow of the entire team for the worse. This is always a delicate balance to guard. So sadly, it is not as simple as trowing more people and money against the product.

7

Those apps can’t be part of this discussion, because the situations are far too different to compare. They were established a while ago, and their objectives now are just to maintain and slightly improve—that is not the stage Anytype is at. Anytype’s objective is to catch up to Notion. For example, Notion has had the timeline feature for years now; got calendar capabilities that Anytype is still replicating; It’s got the ability to do basic things like reordering tags; It’s got AI capabilities; Synced blocks, roll up properties, formulas, date alerts, stats features (like a progress bar, either horizontal or circular; as well as, more recently, graphs). Etc etc. Since these more baseline—by Notion’s standards—features are available, the Notion team was then free to go off and develop other things like Notion calendar and now Notion inbox (both, in my humble opinion, not great additions to their ecosystem—but that’s irrelevant). Notion is comparable to those other companies in that it’s achieved what it has set out to achieve, and now, its objective is also just to maintain itself and minimally improve—JUST often enough for their users not to claim that they’re not doing anything. And that’s about all for Notion.

As for Anytype: if it were just about extra things like a Notion calendar equivalent or whatever, then no one would be complaining, but that’s not the case. In Anytype’s defense, it’s figuring out how to keep things local and yet offer most of the same features as Notion—which I’ll give them props for, BUT the only time that aspect comes into play much is when they’re figuring out how to design something from the ground-up that’s seemingly incompatible with a local-first structure. Something like inviting members or integrating AI—I can understand those taking a while. Easily. But it shouldn’t take this long to just replicate notions features (with an Anytype touch still, but ultimately replicating Notion). It’s not a matter of building everything from scratch, more than half the work is already done there. For Anytype to market itself as the offline alternative of Notion for years now but not have some of their most basic and popular features after several years simply doesn’t make sense. The only explanation I can think of is that, again, they aren’t hiring enough people.

More team members does, in fact, ALWAYS mean higher output—assuming that those members actually have an integral role to play, and that they’re onboarded properly. Bigger companies, unfortunately, do often hire TOO many people when they ‘make it,’ such that people then slip through the cracks and end up doing a bunch of busy work that doesn’t benefit anyone. But that’s not what I’m suggesting Anytype do. I’m just saying that now that they have 700k monthly users, it’s HIGH time they start scaling to keep up with demand. If anything, it should have happened years ago, anyway.

Also, quality of the updates does not have to be sacrificed whatsoever if the RIGHT people are hired. The current team is as productive as they can be, so now it’s time to bring more people like them. Maybe they just need executive assistants so that the top people aren’t getting distracted by a bunch of stuff all the time—I don’t know. And that’s one of the main points here, is that we’re not being given any explanations.

I understand that growing a team can disrupt the dynamic and cause trouble as everyone adjusts—but that is simply the cost of owning and growing a business. It will eventually require more hands on board, so it is the owners’ job to get more hands on board. Just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do. I have full faith that they can do it if they chose to—there is no reason for me not to have that faith.

If anything, though, the Anyteam should be proud of themselves if this is the biggest complaint people have about Anytype. If your main problem is that there just isn’t enough of you around, that’s an easy fix. It would be far far worse if they had a problem with the product itself, though.

9

I’m a developer in a different realm, not near as technical as this platform but I have some sense about me from my experience. As a new user, I get the desire to see Anytype surge in development. Once a few things click, the potential is huge and your mind goes racing with the possibilities.

My understanding after catching up a bit of history is this app is born out of a new protocol that they developed. Right away, this is fundamentally different from any of the competitive apps in this space… correct me if I am wrong (I only dabbled with Notion before here). You could argue they created the foundation of a new era of applications. I won’t regurgitate their mission and philosophy again, but I think it’s a primary factor in why we are all here.

With this understanding, I personally have no problem with the pace.. yeah I might be a bit more anxious if I had been here since alpha. It’s not that my bar is any lower or higher, its just on a different page. I cannot in good faith pick them apart and compare the pieces with others, considering the foundation, there is no comparison. I hope as popularity grows, people will learn the context and the journey it took to get to this point.. not to quell feedback and criticisms but perhaps to think about them in a different way.

10

The foundation is different, yes–but the features largely overlap with Notion. Anytype could’ve delivered those much earlier, had it had sufficient resources–and that is dependent on its prioritization of the issue. A groundbreaking idea doesn’t count for anything if it isn’t executed, and then if it isn’t executed at a fast enough speed with the necessary resources. Users abandon platforms when they find another that offers everything plus more, faster–and we live in an age where that is easier than ever before, as the barrier to entry becomes lower and lower thanks to AI and digital resources.

Just as Notion lost users to Anytype by failing to deliver offline mode and privacy, Anytype faces similar risks. A competitor with better resources could replicate its core functions and outpace it in development speed. Apple itself was competing with a company called Palm early on–but you’ve never even heard of them. And the same things that killed Palm are now killing Anytype: delays in development and poor marketing (though, I haven’t discussed marketing, that’s a whole other topic).

Reviewers of Anytype all say the same things: high praises, but “unusable at this stage, so I will stick to X.” That’s the dominant view. You may be fine with the current pace, but most users aren’t–and user retention depends on the majority. I don’t want Anytype’s legacy to be “visionary–but X did it better and faster.”

Business is a competitive sport. And I want Anytype to win.

11

I don’t know the details of the bug you’re mentioning, but having worked in the software industry my entire career it goes more or less like this:

  • A bug is raised
  • The bug is prioritised which means these questions are asked: does any of the highest paying clients want it fixed? Does anyone on the board of directors want it fixed? Does anyone in the management want it fixed?
    • If the answer is no to all those questions, it will stay in the backlog for longer than you can ever imagine! I’ve seen bugs 10y+ old!
    • If the answer is yes, well then it is compared to other bugs to which the answer was yes.

However don’t forget that Anytype, differently from any other company I’ve worked in, makes the code available to you. Which means that if you really strongly want it fixed, you can fix it yourself! (And if you don’t know how, remember that you can use github copilot, chatgpt, claude, etc).

12

Btw… have you ever thought … why Notion failed to deliver? Why no other app goes into real time sync and colaboration? Ever wondered why Google wave failed, with all the “resources” of google? Every wondered why Logseq is trying to do the same and is 3 years and counting without even an alpha release?

Might be some clue into that. No matter how much resources (which Anytype does not has) you through at the problem, being a pioneer and creating something new isn’t easy or quick.

The question could be … why didn’t Anytype just went with common and standard Server ↔ Client with encryption from the start… but again, they would have to pay the price when going into RTC again.

On the plus side, everyone on open source can benefit from this (I believe that it will be eventually open source). Probably other apps can use Anysync and start new projects and not have to pioneer from zero.

I guess the thanks Anytype get for doing pioneer work and not hide it behind proprietary code and expensive price is … complaints!

13

False equivalences. Again. Notion didn’t “fail” to go local-first because they tried and couldn’t—they simply never set out to. Their main mission was never about privacy or offline access. Same goes for most others—these aren’t failures, they’re deliberate choices. Those companies don’t value what Anytype values, they’ve never tried to built what Anytype is building. So pointing to their absence in this space doesn’t prove that what Anytype is doing is uniquely hard, only that it’s uniquely valued by a subset of users.

Google Wave failed because it was too early. It didn’t get enough users signing up for it because demand was low back then, not because Google lacked the resources. Google therefore found it best not to focus their resources on supplying something with low demand—and rightly so. But times have changed. If a company with real funding and a local-first mission wanted to build what Anytype is building today, it could do so far faster—especially with AI and open-source tooling accelerating everything. Which is the point I quite literally just made above.

Also, the last part is strawman-ing. You’re misrepresenting my position. Don’t do that. The fact that this topic comes up again and again should tell you it’s not just “complaints!”—it’s feedback from committed users who care enough to push for improvement.

Lastly, again, I addressed the “pioneering is hard” argument above, to mandem.

Plenty of kudos to the Anyteam for open-sourcing their code and keeping their costs low, though. Their genuine desire to offer something SO valuable and making it SO accessible is the entire reason that I’m here fighting for Anytype.

14

Anytype introduced memberships relatively recently, but the delays have been around for longer, so client-tier prioritization isn’t the cause, as it might be with bigger companies. Only a lack of resources—team members, funding, expertise, whatever it may be—can be the explanation. (Or it’s simply that they don’t want to, which is too stupid of a thought to entertain).

Public source code exists for coders to contribute code if they want to, not as a realistic option for the average, non-coder user to fix whatever bug is bothering them. Non-coders lack the necessary knowledge to fix anything safely. They would risk breaking the app (on their own devices). The entire point of using an app is that the coding and building parts are done and tested for you.

I would happily offer code and fix certain things up myself if I could, but even with AI, that’s difficult for someone with no experience. I’ve tried tweaking something before, and it took me hours just to grasp all the terms it was using, let alone to be able to have full on back and forth to explain to it what I wanted it to do.

15

No, it is not false equivalences. You can say that “Privacy” isn’t their core business, but Notion is attempting for years to have a “fast offline” client. Logseq is also an “Privacy” app, and clearly you ignored it. Even so, the case for Logseq is different, because it isn’t trying to be P2P, only encrypted RTC.
Capacities just recently got their offline app, also took a lot of time, and honestly, does not feature as much as Anytype or even Logseq.
The choice, like I mentioned in my post, of being simpler standard “Server ↔ Client”, was made, I am sure, not because they didn’t want a fast offline application, but because it is much harder and uncertain to do.

Your topic starts states “Why Doesn’t AnyType Prioritize Development Speed?”, which I clearly don’t understand, in the point that the Anytype staff is working around the clock, in some cases through weekends. So I don’t think Anton is literally telling “type SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWER” to his employees, the only case where Anytype could “prioritize” development speed, is to drop AnySync and make it a standard “Server ↔ Client” platform. No E2EE, and specially no P2P and RTC. That would indeed really speed up development!!!

This topic comes up again and again and again, because I wonder how many users of Anytype, ever worked in developing P2P E2EE RTC apps? People don’t know what that means, or what it entails, and are used to “Webpage online that also has an Electron app”.

Anytype is doing pretty great, especially, since Anytype is doing more for P2P E2EE communication than IPFS does. Should be amazing to know the number of people that share files and data through Anysync vs IPFS. Anytype also has to be careful in how to manage the team. It is trying to be self sufficient, which it also, to me at least, makes some points:

  1. Money isn’t growing in trees and have to be managed
  2. They don’t want to be VC backed completely or forever, as to have some autonomy.
  3. They don’t want to be a one hit wonder and be bought by Notion in a few months (Skiff… sniff :frowning: )

This is my understanding, I could be completely wrong, of course.

In my opinion, Anytype is being developed at crazy fast speed (it would be much slower, if it was me. before every stable release, would be a feature freeze of about 1 month, with just bug testing).
The crucial thing (won’t call it a mistake, as I am not on the inside of the team), was that it prioritized RTC and Chat instead of doing all the features that are now Backlog on the Roadmap.
I am pretty sure, if RTC/Chat/Teams/etc were not prioritized, and single user experience was, all those features like And/Or queries, Transclusion, Tag as Object, Updates across lists/kaban/calendar, etc were already done.

So, TL;DR … Anytype is pretty fast at development for the platform it has… it is just doing other priorities, not just single user note taking ones.

Honestly, I don’t think we need here to be “fighting for Anytype”, I see Anton and the team already pretty engaged and motivated to work and improve Anytype. All we can do to help, and I mean really help, is to report bugs and request features, and discuss ideas.

Finally, don’t take this as a personal attack or something, that is not my point in any way. Also I am sure you have good intentions and simply want more, better, faster and fear that time is running out for Anytype. But I think you are viewing this from a narrow angle of “MORE PEOPLE”, which I think it is incorrect. (at the end of the day, who knows? maybe you are right and I am seeing everything wrong)

16

Golden rule of software development: if a project is late, expanding the team makes it later. Double the impact if the team is working on things that haven’t been done before: no routine tasks to offload onto newbies; no previous experience to inform estimates; no view of what issues are most likely to arise.

True, and comms aren’t very good at the moment (more on that later). But @anton posted on this subject a short while ago and outline the challenges they’re dealing with and how they intend to approach them.

Says who? Development and bug-fixing are two very different priorities. Any team would like the luxury of resources to deal with both simultaneously. Set aside the technical challenges too which @anton referred - this forum is a clamour of competing demands for fixes and new features. I suggested that this would be the case when it was first proposed to use a Discourse forum for all bug reports and feature requests as well as discussion - I’m not claiming the ability to prophesy, but simply speaking from experience.

I don;t think the team is handling communications and user demand very well right now. I don’t know all the reasons why and I think it would help a lot if there was a more structured flow of information about plans, progress and status. I think that one factor is that, when a team recognises that it’s behind where it should be, the natural instinct is to focus inward and push to get back on track, at the cost of keeping the outside world in touch. Not to mention that, when things aren’t ge=reat, it’s no fun to face challenging and unhappy stakeholders.

I don’t think that a constant drip drip drip of posts on the linens of “we all want Anytype to succeed so the team needs to do what I say” helps very much. It’s great to know that people care but these posts contain the implications (maybe unintended) that the team doesn’t acre as much as the poster and/or that the team doesn’t know how to do its job. I’d rather we gave respect for what’s been achieved and assume that the people who achieved it do know what they’re doing.

For context - I managed software development and implementation projects for 40 years before I retired. A number of my assignments were project rescues - take a project that’s run into trouble and find ways to get it back on track. I have no real knowledge of the technical challenges the team is facing, but I gave very real knowledge of the project management challenges.

I do have a couple of concrete suggestions (but note: they’re only suggestions and it’s for the team to decide whether they have any value own these specific circumstances):

  1. Implement some regular and frequent comms updates.In the past there were team members focused on this, but they seem to have gone. I do think someone in the team needs to w=own this activity. £ specifics I would suggest: monthly progress updates to this form in the News section; 2-3 times yearly town halls (they have seemed to work well in the past); and some kind of updated road map, linked from this forum. Keeping customers in the loop goes a long way to help when things are tough.
  2. Separate bug reporting and formal feature requests from this forum. The forum’s a great place to spitball ideas and feature requests, offer help to new users and discuss different ways to get the best from Anytype. But (IMO) including formal bug reporting and FRs here creates more noise than benefit. I know that this would demand time from someone to set it up and manage it, but I think the benefits make it worthwhile.

Apologies for such a long post, and also to anyone who feels I’ve stepped on their toes.

17

Well, there is a link to the roadmap in the top icons on this forum. just missing the “updated” part! :slight_smile:

Agree very much on this. Bug reporting works very well on github with issues. It’s not perfect, but is way better than on discourse.
It also separates from wanting strictly to do bug report or feature requests from just usage support and general talk.

18

Do you think it’s more efficient to bug report on their github to the corresponding repo or just here? The anytype bot says it has been added to their issue tracker which I assume is private.

19

This, I did not know, but can understand when broken down like that… still, though, it’s not a satisfying conclusion. There’s got to be a solution somewhere. There’s got to be something(s) that can speed things up and smooth over the process.

Could you please link that? I saw his update a year ago on the estimated wait time for a bunch of anticipated features, but don’t recall seeing anything addressing the problems and how they plan to approach them.

What alternative do you propose (if any)?

This is the entire summary of what I’ve said and am asking for: communication—specifically, to see why things are taking as long as they are. Many users, myself included, would feel less frustrated if we had a better understanding of the underlying constraints. Clarity would enable empathy.

This part is why I emphasized this:

I know this must suck for them. Very, very much. I know they want to supply the demands. It’s frustrating and disheartening on both our ends.

We have given respect. But these posts won’t stop, because this sentiment won’t die. Until this is adequately addressed, these posts simply won’t be (I’m not threatening. I’m saying that I wasn’t the first and I likely won’t be the last. Simple pattern recognition). The only way out of this is communication. Which, again, has been my point since the start.

Also, I’m not saying they don’t know how to do their job. I’m saying that perhaps there are solutions they have not considered, or resources they did not know existed–not necessarily saying I would know it all, but there’s people in this community whose insights could be valuable to the team. That doesn’t make the team incompetent–that makes them nescient, which everyone in the world is. That’s why having a community at all is important.

I’m also trying to affirm–perhaps poorly so far?–that our intentions aren’t malicious, even if sometimes our frustration spills over. I imagine it’s a nasty feeling, to face someone’s frustration when it also comes with a lot of care–you can’t be fully angry in response, but you’re also still involved in a conflict and therefore want to defend yourself. Very complex situation, perhaps one of the worst ones to be in. I’m sorry to put them in it. It’s almost a toxic thing, and I don’t intend for it to be such… the good news is that we can leave all this behind, though, with just more stable updates and communication (I’m sounding like a broken record at this point, I know).

I second this!

Again, agreed.

I’m not sure what this would look like exactly, but sure to this, too.

No worries–this forum is all for talks like this, and you’re very respectful. I appreciate your response.

I feel I’ve more or less said everything I have to say. This whole topic can be summarized in a few sentences, so with the aim of not being redundant, I won’t be responding to any more comments (except to the answers from ThatGuy to the couple of questions I posed in this comment)–unless they come from the team themselves. Thanks for your input, everyone.

20

IMHO, I think so, Github issues were designed just for that. Its pretty easy to use, and there are more advanced features related to bug reporting that are impossible in the forum. (ex: it is possible to link other issue reports directly, link commits with issues, milestones to next version and see what is still missing to do, etc).

The only project that I am involved with, that does not use Github, is KDE. Even Nixos, with its infinite issues :slight_smile: hehe, uses Github.

Although that said, since Anytype created his “workflow/habit”, it will be almost impossible to change it now, I think. (which is weird, because Anytype actually uses Github pretty well, you can know everything they are doing by following their repositories on Github).

21

It’s in this thread. Short version - they’re having to do some major redesign of the architecture because they’ve run into some blocks, so while that’s going on, they’ll focus in th next 3 months or so on bug fixing and other basics.

GitHub is the obvious place for bug reporting and feature requests. I’m sure there are users here who aren’t familiar with Github but it’s not that hard to use.

Most people outside project management don’t know this. It’s a major cause of repeated and amplified delays. Unless this is recognised, there’s a big temptation to throw bodies at it. The problem is that extra bodies (a) increase management overhead (bigger team = more management work) (b) take time from experienced team members to train/induct new team members (c) add extra cost/time waiting for new team members to become productive and (d) add risk of wasted cost if new team members don;t work out well.

Of course, there are exceptions: it might be possible to package up some non-core work and hand it over to newbies/externals to release key resources; there may be a very specific blockage that a very specific additional resource could unblock’ it might be that the team was seriously under-resourced at the start. But the solution to this last one isn’t to add bodies - it’s to pause and replan based on a better understanding of the problem. Which sounds similar to what @anton was talking about in the linked thread.

This is an interesting one. Stakeholders who are unhappy with a project are almost always unhappy because they want it to succeed (rare cases where a stakeholder really doesn’t, but that’s a different subject :grinning_face:). Emotions often run very high - people can be so convinced that they know what’s wrong and how to fix it that the project team feels attacked. After all, the team knows it has issues. That damages confidence, and then any external criticism, however well meant, feels like an attack.

In those circumstances, it’s a big ask to expect the team to engage with stakeholders, but there’s an obligation on the team leadership there. I’m in danger of sounding like I’m attacking, but I’m not. I’ve been there.