Version 2.0 of the app

Version 2.0 is the release where the app stopped being a place to fetch a PDF and became a place where the person who uploaded it exists. Contributors now have a public profile with their notes, their followers and their standing on it, reachable from anywhere their name appears. Following somebody does something. The home screen became one feed rather than a set of disconnected tabs.

It is also the release where the parts of a social product that are not fun to build got built. There is reporting and blocking, because a platform that lets students post to each other and has no way to report anything is not a platform anybody should trust their teenager to. Account deletion happens inside the app, immediately, without an email to support and without a form on a website — and the confirmation is a modal you have to read rather than one you can dismiss by tapping beside it.

Links from the website now open the app on the device that has it installed, which required registering the association with both stores rather than just hoping the operating system worked it out. Tapping a notification now takes you to the thing the notification was about, which sounds like it should always have been true and was not: several notification types routed to the home screen regardless of what they were announcing.

One thing worth being straight about: we stopped sending contributor names to an external avatar service to generate placeholder pictures. It was a convenient default that quietly handed a third party a list of our users’ names, one request at a time. Placeholders are now drawn on the device.