Love your app and service. I use it every single day and am a long time subscriber. I work in tech as a product leader, and I’d like to plant a seed in your mind that y’all should aim for the first version of Bear 2 released in December.
I’ve read the following posts — Panda development has been happening since October 2020 with a LOT of new features and scope planned. Your most avid users (the ones who actually post on your forum) are starting to churn on reddit because they’re frustrated with the lack of updates. I’m specifically looking for the new tables feature to be added and then Bear would be perfect for me.
I understand these migrations can take quite a long time. But there is real time cost to not shipping. To my understanding, there’s been 2+ years of development work that has not reached any of your subscribers. Imagine if you could ship a much more paired down version of the new Bear, but you get it in customer’s hands in 6 months instead of 2 years. That means those customers are happy for 1.5 years longer, even if there are fewer features initially.
Bear 2.0 for your most avid users for a Christmas release would be a huge milestone and would make a huge difference for your customers and business! You could even make it an opt-in beta for your most avid users to reduce risk and pilot on an actual day to day basis (instead of just a trial without their actual real notes). You don’t have to share an ETA, but please consider it!.
I am anxiously waiting for Bear2 as well don’t get wrong (Hebrew support in my case), but unfortunately, 9 women can’t bear a baby in 1 month (more engineering quotes from the same book - The Mythical Man-Month)
Put another way - they aren’t just building more features as time goes by, and can’t just cut somewhere and have less features in less time…
To provide a counterpoint. Bear is one of the most stable apps I’ve ever seen. And it’s a HUGE selling point for an app that can basically hold your life inside it. I am as annoyed with the slow development as everybody else (and I have, in fact, abandoned Bear for the time being) but for those who still use it, creating any instability with the move to Bear 2.0 would be a huge deal.
Agree with stability being an overall good, but the fastest path to stability is to get people to start using it.
The mythical man month book has created more harm than good. I agree that 9 women can bear a baby in 1 month, but it’s also not worth working on an app for 2 years before putting it in front of customers as a general philosophy or rule.
I for now just need synchronization and an iOS/iPad OS app to switch to version 2. it is long overdue. Too long. I am already looking for alternatives, because I really need and want a TOC, tables and in-note wiki links on all my devices. The bear UI is still the best, but the wait is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo long.
Subscribers are not paying for Bear 2.0. Subscribers are paying for the existing Bear 1.X which continues to work just as well as it has the entire time we’ve been subscribers.
You may think that you are paying towards future versions, and you can think that if you want, but in reality the only way you would be doing that is if there was some sort of crowd-funding programme.
You are not owed Bear 2.0. It will arrive when it arrives. If it’s not perfect for you right now, then you may need to find something else.
Coming late to this but had to add that this isn’t a logical fallacy at all. I’m totally owed Bear 2.0 because I subscribe to Bear. If I bought Bear outright as a piece of software then no, I’d take your argument. The entire point of subscriptions is that they support future development. At least, that’s how developers sell the idea of subscriptions, no?
In addition, Bear hasn’t been updated for nine months. That’s absurd.
I’d be curious to know how long you’ve been using Bear. When the team added the ability to encrypt notes in 2019, they totally messed it up. It was an unmitigated disaster. Many users lost notes permanently. Bear may be a pretty piece of software but it’s no more stable than any other piece of software…