It's been several months of really hard work and a ton of focus by a new engineering team, but today we're really excited to announce the relaunch of Anthology with v3.0.0 on iOS and Android!
What's New In This v3.0.0?
If you had downloaded our previous beta build then you'll already be familiar with our application. But we learned a lot from the beta, mostly what not to do, haha. We realized heading into 2023 that the backend and system architecture we had built the foundation on would just not work in the long term. There were constantly engineering hurdles we had to jump through, endless bugs with things like notifications, and terribly slow speeds and lag - all impacted the end user experience.
So instead of continuing down that road, in February we decided to completely rebuild our systems here to support a more scalable model. But it involved us having to rebuild the application from scratch, which is what took so long.
Not everything is here yet, and there are some things we had to put on the side for now to get back to at a later date, but for now here's what you can expect with the new version of Anthology:
- Signing Up / In - we've removed all third party sign in options for the time being and are focusing on just signing up through email and password. We will look to add in "Sign in with..." functionality in the future. Instead, we now added support for signing in with your username once you've made an account. This is something we never had during the beta (small, but much welcomed change)
- Portfolios - Portfolios are just as elegant and beautiful as they were in the past. Add as many photos as you wish to any number of Portfolios on your account. All for free
- Social - Social is largely the same. Search, Following, Notifications are all still here in the mix. For the time being, Search discoverability is a randomized generation, but we will be adding in better search functionality in the future. What is new though, is we've included Keywords and Categories into our search results. So now, you can find Portfolios based on a category or keyword that you might want to look for
- Explore - the Explore map is back in action, with some slight changes to the way the quick view cards were designed and handled. There are some small issues we've been dealing with that our team is working to resolve in future versions having to do with icons that disappear too quickly from the map.
- Flash Challenges - the biggest overhaul that we made along the way. We've fully embraced the #AlwaysDarkMode movement and brought the designs for Flash Challenges in line with the rest of the application. You'll now see your own photo submission each day (in the beta, you could not see or vote for your own). We've also created new My Stats cards that reference your Flash Challenge streaks and photos submitted so you can share them with your friends or on social media
Important Notes for Existing Users of the Beta
If you have previously created an account with us, then here are some things that you will have to do:
- We strongly recommend that you completely delete the old application and redownload the latest version from the app store. This will ensure that you receive the permissions prompts for receiving Notifications in this new build.
- You will need to update your password using the Forgot Password workflow on the sign in screen. Don't want to get too technical here, but we are using a different algorithm for storing and securing passwords than the beta build, so your old passwords will give you a warning that they're incorrect.
- You will need to go to your profile page and Edit Profile to rewrite your Full Name. During the data migration phase, we were not able to carry over the data for Full Names, so you just have to update this
For new users of the app, you do not need to worry about performing any of the tasks above.
What's To Come Moving Forward ➡️
We're going to be taking a much more strategic and engaged approach to changes and updates moving forward once we finalize some of the things that we're still working on. First, here's what's still being worked on now:
- Fixing small bugs and making the overall user experience stable across all features
- Bringing back the flipping animations to Portfolios
Beyond this, we'll be working with you directly, the users of Anthology, to best determine what features to work on and prioritize. And we'll be doing them in a focused and efficient manner. We have some ideas that we're looking forward to sharing with you, but for now, let's begin by growing the userbase and the database of images and portfolios on Anthology. We welcome you.
