It feels like just yesterday we were looking back on Bear’s first year. Wait, actually it was a year ago… that means Bear just turned two!
We are incredibly humbled and thankful to you for being able to spend another year making Bear an even better places for your notes, writing, and sketching. We were pretty busy this year too!
All the updates
We had a few major updates over the past year with things like autocomplete for tags and linking notes, Siri Shortcuts, ePub export, note archiving, Quick Nav gestures on iOS, and much more. In total, we released 16 updates over the last year that brought new features and improvements across the board.
Our first-ever office and team meeting!
Since Shiny Frog is a remote company, we do not often get to work or hang out face-to-face. That all changed in October when we opened our first office in Dublin, Ireland. Our advisor, Luca Ascani, is co-founder of Talent Garden Dublin, a new coworking campus that had a great bit of space for us.
To celebrate the opening of our first office and the campus, we flew everyone out for a week of in-person collaboration, Dublin sight-seeing, and even a bit of friendly competition on the Nintendo Switch. For our fellow gamers: we played Towerfall and Mario Kart, and it was a blast.
Sharing our experience
In April of this year, we were also honored to be invited to Apple Academy in Naples, Italy. Apple Academy is a sort of regional bootcamp Apple hosts for aspiring developers. We gave a presentation about our experience as developers and designers, and it was a great time meeting everyone and discussing app development.
We also attended our second World Wide Developer Conference this year. It was another incredible opportunity to meet peers, customers, and more of the Apple community. We learned a lot in Apple’s sessions and are hard at work applying those lessons as you read this. Well, maybe. Depending on when you read this, we might be sleeping. But you get the idea.
🐻❤️🇨🇳
Bear has also taken off in China in amazing ways. We have over a million downloads there now, and daily downloads are steadily approaching those in our other most popular areas like the US and Germany. In fact, China is becoming so big for us that we brought on a new team member, Zowie Huang, to help us manage our efforts there.
Thank you
We say this a lot, because we mean it: thank you for helping us get here. Shiny Frog and Bear would be nothing without your support, and we’re working hard to earn and keep it. Thank you for two great years so far, and we have a lot planned for year three.
Ciao, and happy writing.
– The Bear Team