8 posts tagged with "ios"

SHIP LOG: Memento Mori · App Store · 2026-10-01 · Built with Cursor

Memento Mori is live on the App Store — a private life-in-weeks calendar for seeing your 90 years clearly, setting three goals each week, and staying present without handing your data to the cloud.

What it is​

Your life as a grid of 4,680 weeks. The ones you have lived, the one you are in, and the ones still ahead — not to alarm you, to help you choose how to spend this week.

• This Week — three goals: work, friends & family, personal
• Life calendar — mark meaningful weeks, add notes and reflections
• Dreams — a life list you can break into steps
• Memoir — weekly reflections that accumulate as you go
• Home Screen widgets — life progress, goals, and dreams-vs-time without opening the app
• Private by design — data stays on your device; export a backup anytime

Version 1.0 is free — no ads, no IAP.

Why it shipped now​

App Store prep started earlier this summer: Skia calendar, brand-coin widgets, hub pages on Homol Works, then a long stretch of review hardening (widgets, SF Symbols chrome, post-tutorial boot). Today it clears the last gate — it’s actually downloadable.

The Memento Mori home on Homol Works has the screens, the widgets shot, privacy, and support. The App Store listing is where you install it.

Go try it​

Memento Mori on the App Store

If a widget goes stale, a reminder misfires, or something feels wrong for how you reflect — email me from the support page. v1.0 is a beginning, not a victory lap.

The polish build was ready for TestFlight — then Apple closed the approved 1.2.1 marketing train. This week’s story is less “new features” and more “ship the hardening under the next version Apple will accept,” while Android stays parked for the long haul. 1.3.0 is live on the App Store now; the next release is where new games show up.

What happened​

• Hardened the three launch games: invalid Sign Game feedback, plate collection, scenery rotation, review prompts, and host-gone recovery (mostly polish, not screenshot-bait)
• Pinned expo-store-review to 56.0.3 so the iOS archive compiles cleanly against Expo 56.0.9
• Bumped the App Store marketing version to 1.3.0 after Apple closed the approved 1.2.1 train — and that build is live in the App Store
• Left Android parked for quite some time (Play listing assets recorded; no public Android push and no “coming soon” tease)
• Lined up the next version around new games, not more 1.3.0 polish

App Store prep earlier this summer got Memento Mori submission-ready. This week’s pass was smaller and more tactile: harden what happens right after the tutorial, and put native iOS chrome back where custom icons had drifted. Hoping this build clears review so we can finally say it’s live.

What happened​

• Hardened post-tutorial boot so first-run handoff into the main app is less fragile
• Restored iOS chrome via SF Symbols for a more native tab/nav feel — tabs use calendar.badge.clock, calendar, star, book, and chart.bar; settings/FABs use gearshape, magnifyingglass, arrow.up.right, and friends
• Kept the change scoped — no feature sprawl, just reliability and platform fit after the tutorial path

Solo Mode was the reliability win from v1.1 — this week I made it free and moved the one-time purchase behind Play online, so families can try the app offline before deciding to host a multiplayer session.

What happened​

• Bumped to v1.2.0 on TestFlight with Solo Mode free and IAP gated behind Play online
• Confirmed App Store / support pricing copy matches that line: joining and Solo stay free; the one-time host unlock sits behind Play online
• Finished Travel Bingo per-item art across landmarks, businesses, scenery, vehicles, signs, and animals — generated icons and refreshed state plate art
• Travel Bingo tiles moved from small stock emojis to custom illustrated sprites (same board, much clearer at a glance in the car)
• Added plane propeller spin overlays and accessibility fixes; logged new game ideas in the backlog
• Published Backseat Games marketing, privacy, and support pages on Homol Works (App Store URL, hero, and game lineup)
• Refreshed the marketing hero and on-site game descriptions to match the current three-game lineup

After last week's widget readability pass, the focus shifted to submission readiness: a Skia life calendar, a consistent brand coin across widgets and loading states, deep-linked home widgets, and the marketing/privacy/support URLs App Store Connect expects.

What happened​

• Rebuilt the life calendar on Skia — better scroll and zoom for a 4,680-week grid, with the tradeoff of a heavier Skia dependency and canvas-style rendering to maintain instead of a pure View-based layout
• Enriched home-screen widgets (Dreams vs Time, Life Ring, Week Gauge) and replaced skull cutouts with a shared brand coin asset — extract script, CoinSpinner in-app, and widget snapshot wiring
• Dropped the clipped goals widget; home widgets now deep-link into the right in-app tabs and use the coin as the weekly goal completion marker
• Hardened Smart Record AI with clearer error messages, reflection editor improvements, and fallback merge tests
• Locked the iOS build to iPhone-only and added an App Store screenshot / preview prep workflow
• Finalized the App Store screenshot set on Homol Works and an App Preview video for Connect
• Published a Memento Mori app hub on Homol Works with marketing copy and those same screenshots

Backseat Games got a v1.1 delight pass — and Solo Mode so play still works when the relay lobby cannot. Offline-first turned out to be a product feature, not a fallback.

What happened​

• Shipped jingle, SFX, icons, critter motion, and first-run teaching as one release theme
• Added Solo Mode for offline play without a relay lobby
• Useful for App Store demos and real car rides with spotty connectivity
• Update is live on the App Store — Solo Mode and delight assets look right on device
• Visual polish landed across the games (Travel Bingo board + License Plate Game cards)

After the SDK 55 revival, the next problem was not “do widgets render?” — it was “can you read them at a glance?” Trimming the set and using a consistent brand mark beat shipping every layout variant.

What happened​

• Wired shared skull PNGs through the widget snapshot builder for completed goals
• Clarified week/dreams layouts and trimmed the overall widget set
• Fixed TestFlight margin gates for fewer widgets
• Confirmed on device / TestFlight (not simulator-only) — readable at a glance
• App Store v1 docs will cover all layouts in the polished set (not deferring variants out of the write-up)

Home-screen widgets for Memento Mori came back to life on Expo SDK 55 — but not before a stretch of black squares that looked like a React layout bug and were actually an extension packaging problem.

What happened​

• Rebuilt widgets against Expo SDK 55 with expo-widgets patches and EAS multi-target signing
• Black widgets traced to JS bundle copy into ExpoWidgetsTarget.appex, postinstall idempotency, and extension runtime symbols
• Hardened TestFlight / IPA CI gates so widget regressions fail earlier
• Current home-screen set is readable again — life % ring, weekly check-ins, and Dreams vs time — after the black-widget era
• Smart Record is active again (not gated off for release): speak stream-of-consciousness reflections and get a bulleted summary; in final testing ahead of app go-live