Not going to bother apologizing for the long delay in blog posts, apologies get old for everyone. Just gonna say what's imminent, whats coming, and what's coming a bit later.

Imminent

Updated watch app - The watch app has finally been updated to support watchOS 2, 3, and 4. Support for watchOS 1 has been dropped. This is mainly just a technical transition, don't expect huge changes. You'll still need your phone to use the app. Stand alone features will come later. That said, the new watch app has complication support, should be snappier and more reliable, and should provide the iOS app with a performance boost since it no longer needs to do nearly as much work to keep the watch app up to date. This should be in beta later this week.

Help article update - I've used Desk.com for support tickets and support articles for years, and if you don't have anything nice to say. A few months ago I switched to Front for support tickets, what a relief. Today I've switched the support articles over to Helpdocs.io, another relief. There's still a lot of work to do on the articles, but they've all had a once over, some old ones thrown on the burn pile, and now they look like they were created this century.

Maintenance - Continued maintenance on the v2.9.x version of Downcast. A lot of problems have been corrected recently in the v2.9.x version and will continue until v3 is released.

Coming soon

Server side feed aggregation - Refreshing feeds is a huge resource hog. It burns CPU, RAM, and battery life. Moving this process server-side will save your battery, make Downcast snappier in general, and prevent a lot of sporadic crashes that are a result of memory pressure. Downcast will still refresh password protected and private feeds on your device, so the functionality won't disappear entirely, it'll just have much less of a presence. This is far along in development. At this point I'm just ironing out some performance issues, trying not to spend too much on servers.

Push notifications - Server side aggregation makes this possible, and required. It's been a long missing feature of Downcast and I can't wait to get this done.

Sync system replacement - This is another resource hog right now due to the type of iCloud syncing we're currently using. The replacement will be far more reliable and far less resource consuming. Between moving feed refreshing to the server and replacing the sync system, you should notice a significant improvement in both performance and battery life.

Coming a bit later

V3 - If Duke Nukem Forever™ was a podcast app. As much as I want to just wrap this up, server side aggregation and replacing the sync system have to come first. Refreshing on the device and the current sync system are the two biggest sources of problems and customer support for Downcast. I don't want Downcast to inherit any of the problems v2.x has by not addressing these two things first.

Apple TV app & Web presence - Hope to round things out with these two. Again, server side aggregation and a new sync system make these much easier.