Hello again.
If you're reading this, you probably installed Gamesome a long time ago and forgot it was still on your phone. Or you found the project in some old thread and wondered whether anyone was still behind it. Someone is. It's me, same person who wrote the first version, and I'd like to explain where I went and what happens next.
Where I went
Gamesome started as a student project. I built it because I wanted it to exist, and because I had the kind of free time you only have when your main obligation is showing up to lectures. That time ran out the way it does for everyone. I started working. Life filled in around the edges. Somewhere in there my mental health went through a long bad stretch, and during that period I wasn't shipping anything, for Gamesome or otherwise.
There was also the inbox. A free app attracts a particular kind of message: demands for features that were technically impossible, complaints written as though someone were owed a refund, and very little recognition that this was a student's side project given away for nothing. Any one of those messages was minor. Arriving steadily during a period when I had nothing spare to give, they turned opening the inbox into something I avoided. Eventually I stopped opening it at all.
There was no dramatic ending. I never wrote a goodbye post, never archived the repo, never put up a notice. The updates just stopped, and then enough time passed that starting again felt harder than leaving it alone. Ten years of that adds up.
Then the door closed properly. I missed a domain renewal, and it was picked up by someone else within days. By the time I noticed, it wasn't coming back at a price I was willing to pay. The backend went with it. To be clear about what that was: a read cache the app fetched from, not a store of anything personal, so nothing of yours is sitting in a stranger's hands. Could I rebuild it? Yes. I'm not going to, because that means maintaining code written ten years ago against assumptions I no longer agree with. Starting over is the cleaner option. So for a good part of those ten years, even the version of me who wanted to return couldn't have simply picked up where I left off.
I'm saying this plainly because I'd rather be honest about it than invent a tidier story. If you were waiting on a fix or an answer during those years and got nothing back, that's on me.
Where I'm going
I'm working on Gamesome again. Not as a nostalgia gesture, and not as a one-off patch before it goes quiet again. I want to actually develop it.
The current focus is v3. I'm rebuilding rather than patching, because a frontend written in 2015 carries ten years of assumptions that no longer hold, and unpicking them one at a time would take longer than starting clean.
Three commitments I want on the record:
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Gamesome will be free, permanently.
The old version showed ads and charged $2 to remove them. That's gone. v3 has no ads to pay your way out of, no subscription, and no paid tier of any kind. I have a job. Gamesome doesn't need to pay for itself, and honestly it never really did.
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I'm planning to open source it once v3 is ready.
I haven't opened the current code because it isn't in a state I'd want anyone to inherit, and half-finished public code tends to attract expectations I can't meet yet. Once v3 is stable, I intend to put it out under an open licence so the project doesn't depend on one person's free time and mental health ever again. That last part matters to me.
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v3 won't depend on infrastructure only I control.
Losing that domain taught me the obvious lesson: an app that phones home to a server one person pays for has an expiry date attached to that person. v3 is being built so it keeps working without me. No mandatory account, no single server whose lapsed renewal takes the whole thing down. If I disappear again, the app on your phone should carry on regardless.
What I'd ask of you
Patience, mostly. I'm one person doing this outside of work hours, so progress will come in irregular bursts rather than a steady release schedule. I'd rather under-promise here than repeat the pattern of going silent after making commitments I couldn't keep.
Beyond that: tell me what you actually used. Ten years is long enough that my sense of what matters in this app is badly out of date, and I'd rather build v3 around what people need now than around what I assumed in 2015. Bug reports, feature requests, and blunt opinions are all welcome, and I'll read them.
But I want to set the expectation early this time: development will be opinionated. I'm deciding what Gamesome is and what it isn't, and v3 won't be assembled from a pile of individual wishes. Trying to serve every request is what wore me down before, and it produces a muddled app on top of that. So if there's a feature you can't do without and it doesn't fit what I'm building, use a different launcher. There are good ones, and I mean that without any resentment. I'd rather you have something you're happy with than stay and be disappointed in mine.
Thanks for still being here. Let's see where this goes.
— the developer, Gamesome