Originally I had intended to have some kind of beta out for WordFlow by the end of the year. Since this post is coming on the 1st of March 2026, clearly that didn’t happen.
Once I missed New Years, I wanted to get it out earlier in the year, hopefully January, or at very latest early February. Just last week I was certain I’d be ready to have the beta at the end of next week. March 5th is a semi-special day for me. It’s the date I opened my business, and also be complete coincidence the date that I closed its doors.
Alas, dates are arbitrary and I didn’t make it in time.
Why the delays?
There are a lot of reasons, the biggest is that I’m learning as I go and I just don’t have a good sense of how long some things take. Some of the features that I thought would be really involved came together almost immediately, while others *cough*texteditor*cough* took much more time and had more set backs than I ever would have guessed. That’s the case right now as I work to integrate collaboration and iCloud features.
Of course, a lot of this is arbitrary in its own right. I do have a functioning app, there’s no real reason I couldn’t send this out and say “ta-da, closed beta is out!” aside from an internal bar of quality I want to hit. There are features that I have had to force myself to push back because they aren’t actually needed for WordFlow to be WordFlow, but there ARE a lot of features that need full implementation in order to have the app make sense to even test.
There’s also a practical aspect to this: Even for beta testers, even for close friends, if I put out a product that is incomplete or buggy, they just won’t be inclined to use it. If they don’t use it, they can’t test it, and if WordFlow isn’t being tested, it can’t be improved and made ready for wide release.
So when is the beta?
Given the Fibonacci nature of my missed internal deadlines… I dunno, March 10th? It really all depends on how the rest of iCloud integration goes, and of course how much time I will have to work on it over the next week. It could very well slip again, but each time I miss an internal deadline, it reduces from being months behind, to weeks, and now we’re down to days. At some point, very soon, this app is going to be ready for the select few in the closed beta, and someone other than me can finally have WordFlow set up on their devices.
– Erich
WordFlow Blog 