A side step, and one subscription across the apps

It has been a little over a month since v1.0 of Todo, List, and Note went live on the App Store. Most of that time has been a deliberate step back from the apps. After the long stretch of shipping three things at once, a bit of distance felt healthier than pushing straight into the next round of features. The apps have been running quietly in the background, picking up users, and I have spent the bulk of my evenings on a couple of other small projects instead.

The first is välkomna.se — a small Swedish service for putting together event pages for parties, weddings, graduations, and the other things worth celebrating. The idea is to go from a short description of your event to a finished, shareable OSA page in a couple of minutes, without wrestling with a generic site builder. It is its own world with its own users, but it shares the same calm, personal-scale instinct that runs through the My Next apps.

The second is the studio site itself. Until recently there really was no studio — just the My Next family with its own page. As more side projects started landing alongside the apps, it began to make sense to give them a shared home. So mynextstudio.com is now a proper studio site, with the My Next family living under /my-next/ alongside whatever else gets built. It is intentionally low-key, but it is a useful place to see what is being built outside the apps.

Meanwhile, v1.1 of all three apps has just landed on the App Store. The smaller changes are written up on the What's New page, but the one worth talking about here is My Next: Extra. This was originally part of the v1.0 plan — one subscription that unlocks Extra in Todo, List, and Note, at a friendlier price than buying three. It fell out of v1.0 because, as covered in an earlier post, the AI confidently explained how to set it up directly in App Store Connect, and that turned out to be a hallucination. Apple does not let a single subscription span multiple apps. To actually do it you need a small backend that knows which customer has which entitlement, and validates purchases across apps.

For v1.1 I went and built exactly that. There is now a small hosted entitlement service sitting behind the three apps. Each app still has its own per-app Extra subscription and its own Tip Jar, untouched — nothing existing was taken away. On top of that, My Next: Extra is offered as a separate option that activates the shared entitlement across all three. If the shared service is ever unreachable, the apps fall back to the per-app subscriptions, so nothing breaks. It is the kind of feature that is mostly invisible when it works, which is exactly what I wanted from it.

Not everything went cleanly on release day, of course. The Todo build that shipped on May 14 was missing the RevenueCat keys in its release configuration, which meant Extra simply did not appear in Todo. Embarrassing, but caught and fixed within a day — 1.1.1 went out on May 15 with the keys properly bundled. List and Note shipped with the fix already in place. The kind of small failure that is much easier to laugh about a day later than it is in the moment.

That is roughly where things stand. A short break, a side project that is going to keep growing, a tidier home for everything the studio publishes, and finally a cross-app subscription that does what was originally promised. Back to it.