Welcome to the fourth edition of What’s New with Lingonaut! A monthly wrap-up of all the things that have happened this month with The Lingonaut Project!

15K on Discord and 19K on Reddit!

This is just wild to me. When we started this project, we were around just 50 people. To see our mission resonate with so many people is just humbling. This month, we hit two incredible milestones. We flew past 15,000 members on our Discord server, and as if that wasn’t enough, our Subreddit just crossed the 19,000 member mark!

It’s a privilege to be able to make these announcements so often, and not one I or the rest of the team takes for granted.

That’s over 34,000 people who have decided to join us on this journey. It’s not just a number. It’s a community. It’s thousands of people sharing learning tips, helping each other with tough grammar points, celebrating each other’s progress, and giving us the feedback we need to make Lingonaut better. You are the lifeblood of this project. Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts.

We want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who has joined us on this journey. Your feedback, suggestions, and support are what keep us going! We couldn’t do this without you.

Lingonaut for Android: A New Frontier

For a long time, the question we’ve received more than any other has been “When is Lingonaut coming to Android?” and we’ve always had to say “it’s coming later.” Today, we can finally give you a more concrete answer. We have officially broken ground on Lingonaut for Android!

The goal is to not have the android app be a ‘second class citizen’ to the iOS app, so it is meant to run natively, with all the features of the iOS app and any new features being added in lockstep with the iOS and Web clients.

It’s why we’ve waited so long to get started, rather than shipping a worse ‘lite’ version for android versus the fully featured version for iOS. This way we can take the lessons we learnt during development of Lingonaut for Apple Silicon as outlined below:

This is a monumental undertaking, in size, scope, and cost. It’s essentially a complete rebuild of the app for a new (to us) platform. The journey to bring Lingonaut to iOS was a long and challenging one, and this will be no different. However, we’re not starting from scratch this time. We have the advantage of being able to reuse our existing assets and designs, which will significantly speed up the development process. We’ve learned so much from the iOS development, and we’re bringing all of that knowledge and experience to the Android version.

Being able to share the programming paradigms between Swift/Kotlin and declarative UI design between SwiftUI and JPC is a godsend and having all the cloud infrastructure already designed and ready to be cross-compatible will shave months off the development timeline. It also means we won’t have to compromise by using a cross-platform framework.

But let’s be clear: this is still a massive project. We’re a small team with a big dream, and we’re going to need all the help we can get. Whether it’s by spreading the word, providing feedback, or becoming a patron, every little bit helps. We’re incredibly excited to bring Lingonaut to a whole new audience, and we can’t wait to share our progress with you soon. If you’re an android developer who’s willing to help please open a ticket on the discord server and if you’re able to pledge on Patreon please do to help support the mission and build out the Android app!

Lingonaut for Web: Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Work on the alpha for Lingonaut for Web is progressing at a steady pace. We’re slowly but surely building the web client from the ground up, ensuring a solid foundation for the future. We know how eager many of you are to have a web version of Lingonaut, and we think you’re going to love it.

While it is able to share the cloud stack with Lingonaut for iOS, it’s unfortunately a fundamental departure from the ‘formula’ that works well on phones and tablets, as a web browser doesn’t have as much persistent and designing a web-app (which is really a website) is different from an actual application.

However, the web client will serve a crucial purpose: streak transfers. For us to be able to sidestep Google and Apple guidelines, you’ll have to log in using the web app at least once to transfer your streak from other apps to Lingonaut. Until it’s ready you MUST keep your streak active on your other app so that we can transfer it!

We’ve learned a valuable lesson from our previous beta launches, and we’re applying that wisdom here. We’re not going to rush into a “beta” label this time around. We want to ensure that when we do release the web version, it’s a polished and stable experience for everyone. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we take the time to get it right.

Lingonaut Build 25 for iOS: Our Biggest Update Ever

Get ready for our most substantial update yet! Build 25 for iOS is a massive one, both in terms of features and update size. This is our biggest update ever since the beta launch, packed with new features and improvements that we think you’re going to love.

First up is the new streak management screen. It’s a another cross off the list on the way to being fully featured that lets you see how many days you’ve kept your streak for and how many freezes you’ve used with a zoomed in view of the current week and a calendar view for the full month.

We’re also introducing themes! You’ll now be able to customise the look and feel of Lingonaut to match your mood. Whether you prefer a dark mode for being easier on the eyes, OLED to save battery, ‘Nostaglia’ for a splash of green and white or ‘Starry Night’ which is what our default theme will be called!

Soon you’ll be able to use your lingonite to purchase new themes and patrons will get exclusive themes too as a thank you for their support

In Build 26 and beyond you’ll be able to control audio settings, accessibility and so much more.

We’ve also silently increased the user cap of our TestFlight so that more people can join and get started with helping us squash the bugs, please let us know what you think! Build 25 needs a bit more time in the oven but when it’s ready it’ll be a big jump in functionality.

Taking it to the Streets: The Lingonaut Leaflets!

We’re not just growing online; we’re also expanding our physical presence! We’ve designed and printed a series of leaflets and flyers to help spread the word about Lingonaut in the real world. Our first stop is Dresden!

This is just the beginning of our efforts to build a physical presence. We’re looking forward to visiting more cities and connecting with more of you in person. If you’d like to help us out, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d love to have you on board!

And that’s all for now! September is shaping up to be the biggest month for Lingonaut so far, and I can’t wait to share everything we accomplish by this time next month.