Five quiet weeks, Fazon, and the cross-app subscription that finally works

It has been five weeks since My Next: Todo, List, and Note went live on the App Store. Most of that stretch has been a deliberate step back from the apps. After the long run of shipping three things at once, more distance felt healthier than diving straight into the next round of features. The apps have been running quietly in the background, picking up users on their own, and my evenings have gone into the things sitting alongside them.

The biggest of those is välkomna.se, a Swedish service for putting together event pages for parties, weddings, graduations, and the other things worth celebrating. It is its own world, with its own users, but it shares the same calm, personal-scale instinct as the My Next family — the goal is a finished, shareable OSA page in a couple of minutes, not a generic site builder. The second is the studio site this Journal sits on. Until recently mynextstudio.com was My Next; now it is the studio, with the My Next family living under /my-next/ alongside whatever else gets built. Both moves were quiet on purpose.

Fazon kicks off

The new thing on the workbench is Fazon (working name). It is a different shape for weight-loss apps: most of them frame engagement as endless, and Fazon explores the inverse — alternating between a free maintenance baseline and time-limited active-phase coaching, walking-first rather than gym-first. The methodology has been on paper since March; in the last four days it became real code.

The shape of those four days, in roughly the order things landed:

It is early. The name will probably change. The methodology may change. But the maintenance Today screen is reading live step and food data on simulator today, which is further than the spec docs from March suggested it would be by mid-May. The page is live at /projects/fazon.

My Next 1.1 and the subscription that took an entitlement service

While Fazon was getting off the ground, the My Next apps picked up version 1.1. Todo got a Show From date that lets a todo appear in an Upcoming section before its due date. List got better Done-section ordering and existing-item suggestions that fire after a short prefix. Note got a small Note Info sheet with created/modified dates and word count. Useful, but not the headline.

The headline is My Next: Extra — one subscription that unlocks Extra across all three apps, at a friendlier price than buying three.

This was originally on the v1.0 plan. It came out because, as I wrote in March, the AI very confidently explained how to set up a single cross-app subscription directly in App Store Connect, and that turned out to be a hallucination. App Store Connect does not let one subscription span multiple apps. The viable path is a small backend that knows which customer holds which entitlement and validates purchases across apps. In March that was on the roadmap; for 1.1 I went and built it.

The shape that ended up shipping:

1. A small hosted entitlement service sits behind the three apps.
2. Each app still has its own per-app Extra subscription and Tip Jar
   — untouched, no migration, no behavioural change.
3. My Next: Extra is offered as a separate option that activates the
   shared entitlement across Todo, List, and Note.
4. If the shared service is ever unreachable, the apps fall back to
   the per-app subscriptions — nothing breaks.

The interesting design constraint was that nothing existing could be taken away. People who already bought a per-app Extra had to keep it working unchanged whether or not the shared service was online. That dictated the fallback — the apps treat the shared entitlement as additive, never as a replacement.

Not everything went cleanly on release day. The Todo build that shipped on 2026-05-14 was missing the RevenueCat keys in its release configuration, which meant Extra simply did not appear on the App Store version of Todo. List and Note shipped with the fix in place; Todo needed a 1.1.1 hotfix the next day to bundle the keys. Embarrassing, but the kind of failure that is much easier to laugh about a day later than it is in the moment. The fix itself was one commit; the test coverage that would have caught it pre-flight is a small follow-up I am writing the spec for now.

The release notes for all three apps are on /my-next/whats-new, with the per-app changelog in the in-app What's New sheet.

What is next

For Fazon: the food-entry capture flow behind the Today screen, then the start of the active-phase coaching loop — phase definition, daily check-ins, end-of-phase summary. For My Next: nothing dramatic; smaller follow-ups will ride along when there is something worth shipping. For välkomna: continued small refinements as the platform picks up real events.

Back to it.