Goldfish Focus

Big one this time. We spent a few weeks chasing every way a video could vanish on you and decided that none of them were acceptable. Recording is now durable in ways it really should have been all along. Your phone can get hot, you can get a phone call partway through, you can pause, you can briefly switch apps to check Slack, and the recording survives all of it. The fix that did the most work here is a small one. We were aggressively cleaning up the original raw recording the moment the timelapse rendered, which felt clever until anything downstream hiccuped and you were left with nothing. So we stopped doing the clever thing. The original now sits on disk until your post is safely on our server, and only then does it go away. Posting is also more honest about what is happening. Before, the composer would dismiss with a friendly checkmark whether or not the post had actually reached the server. Sometimes it had not. Now the post is queued locally before any network call so even if your internet dies the second after you tap Post, the next time you open the app the post finishes uploading on its own. We rebuilt the version check that lives in front of the app so older builds that still have the bugs above cannot keep recording. If you are reading this, congratulations, you are on the build that does not eat your videos. Music in the feed no longer plays the moment you open the app, which we are told was a big personal injury for headphone users on quiet trains. Thank you for your patience.

Bug squashed. Record videos in one take.

This release is all about respecting your focus time. In 1.21 we made sure no recording ever gets dropped during real interruptions. This release tightens what actually counts as an interruption. Text messages, push notifications, and random audio blips from other apps no longer stop your recording. Goldfish now pauses only for the things that actually deserve it: phone calls, Siri, and alarms. A text coming through while you're in the middle of a session stays in the background where it belongs. Storage got a serious diet. If Goldfish had been quietly eating gigabytes on your phone over the last few months, this release reaps three classes of leftover files that were piling up (orphaned uploads, stale trash, and leftover export temp files) and caps the footprint on your device going forward. There's also a new Storage screen in Settings where you can see exactly what Goldfish is using and purge it yourself. Search is friendlier. Typing a query that doesn't match anyone now shows a calm "No results" instead of an alarming "Search failed". The only time you'll see an error is when you're actually offline. Changing your username is less cryptic. If you pick one that's already taken, we'll tell you right as you type it, and the error message is a plain "That username is taken. Try another." instead of a wall of database jargon. A handful of smaller fixes round out the release, including a Moodle login fix that stops Goldfish from intercepting the "open in Moodle" handoff from the web, and a number of behind the scenes tightenings to keep every session safe from start to finish.

This release is all about making sure no recording is ever lost. If a phone call, alarm, or push notification interrupts you mid-session, Goldfish now pauses the recording and holds onto everything you've already captured instead of dropping the video. When the interruption ends, pick up right where you left off — nothing gets silently deleted in the background. Edits are safer too. If your caption or description gets flagged by the content filter, the edit flow now keeps your video safe while you fix the text, rather than forcing you to start over from scratch. Uploads got a lot more resilient. On a flaky connection or in a bad cell zone, Goldfish now retries the upload with proper backoff instead of giving up on the first failure, and your local copy stays on your device until the server confirms the file is fully stored. This closes a nasty edge case where a video could look uploaded but quietly never arrive in the feed. We also tightened how the feed treats session length. Short recordings that previously slipped through a back-navigation loophole no longer make it to the community, so every session you see on the feed now represents a real focus block. A handful of smaller fixes round out the release, including cleaner recovery after mid-recording interruptions, more accurate orientation handling while paused, and better behavior around the pause overlay when you're resuming.

This update is a big one. We completely overhauled how media loads in the app. All videos and images now serve through a dedicated content delivery network, which means your feed loads noticeably faster and playback is smoother across the board. You'll feel the difference most when scrolling through the community feed on slower connections. Music got a major upgrade too. When you add a song to your post, the 25-second clip preview now plays instantly with proper looping so you can find the exact section you want. Songs you pick are saved correctly when editing posts after the fact, something that was quietly broken before. The locked score voting system has been reworked from the ground up. Instead of tapping buttons, you now rate sessions on a clean 1 to 10 slider that feels way more intuitive. Your votes persist properly across every feed context, and if something goes wrong server-side, your vote reverts gracefully instead of getting stuck in a weird state. Captions and comments now expand and collapse like you'd expect from any modern social app. Long captions show a preview with a "more" tap target, so the feed stays clean without cutting off what people actually wrote. We squashed a nasty bug where recording sessions longer than two hours would sometimes lose their duration data entirely, which meant the post would show zero minutes. That's fixed. The app now captures your real study time before any background processing starts, so your stats are always accurate no matter how long you grind. Groups no longer randomly disappear from your groups tab. The root cause was that a failed network refresh was silently replacing your loaded groups with an empty list. Now the app holds onto your existing data if a refresh fails, so your groups stay put even if your connection drops momentarily. A handful of navigation issues are cleaned up. Swiping back from a profile you opened through the calendar or advanced data screens used to accidentally switch your main tab. That doesn't happen anymore. The sign-out flow also works reliably now and actually takes you back to the sign-in screen every time. Duplicate posts from rapid tapping are gone. We added proper guards so hitting the post button twice fast won't create two identical entries. The upload pipeline handles race conditions correctly now. Under the hood, we eliminated every force unwrap in the codebase and removed a significant amount of dead code. The app is more stable and crashes less as a result. All compiler warnings are resolved and the entire codebase has been re-commented for maintainability going forward.

This version was focused on debugging versions 1.0 and 1.1: Post timestamps now load on all posts and always contribute to your stats. Notification badges show accurate counts when switching between categories. Swiping from the camera now returns you to where you came from instead of always going to the same tab. Fixed background color consistency across all pages so swiping and holding no longer reveals the old background. Swipe-to-go-back now works on the Advanced Data screen. Tapping a profile anywhere in the app takes you to their full profile, with a new back button for easy return. Fixed an issue where edit and report buttons could show a blank screen. The app bar no longer covers posts when scrolling to the top.

This version implemented multiple new functionalities in the app. This includes: front camera recording capabilities, tag-able commenting, a robust leaderboard system that is based off of sheer time spent on the time-lapse studying functionality of the app, a minimum recording time of five minutes, and added a more in-depth tutorial upon downloading the app. This version also implemented a lot of general debugging, such as: button functionality when the time lapse video is not paused, side scrolling padding now matches the scroll pace of the user and the bounds of the app, share button now has functionality, private versus public functionalities now work on user pages and groups, back button now works, and tagging to LMS's such as Moodle is now cohesive across pages and assignments.