We love hearing about all the ways people use Bear right now, and we often use it in these ways too. We’ve heard from customers who create notes of workout routines in Bear, then sync them to their Apple Watch to use at the gym. 

One way we think of Bear is a place for “flexible notes and beautiful writing.” We like building features to help these and other kinds of use cases, but we also want to be careful not to pack too many features into Bear. It’s a tricky balance, but we try to stay true to our original vision for Bear.

We wanted to start small with Bear and then listen to our audience. We like all of these features, but the simple fact is that features take time and they can also clutter the interface. This is where that balance comes in—we could build a thousand features, but then Bear could look messy, be slow, and take much longer to build. Or we might need to seek out venture capital to grow the team quickly, which is something we absolutely do not want to do. We like being a small, independent team.

Fortunately, we’re working on a huge redesign of the Editor in Bear to support these and other major requests from our customers. Things like tables, preview features, and others are all in the works.

We generally don’t talk about feature before they’re ready. Surprises can happen, and then we could end up letting people down. Development is difficult work, so we try to show, not tell.

That said, we do hope to ship some password protection features in Bear 1.7. We actually tried to get them out in version 1.6 for iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, but they needed more time to polish. Which is a great example of why we usually don’t pre-announce features. :D

We strive for simplicity in our design. Since Bear is an app for writing and collecting ideas, we try to keep features out of the users’ way because your content is the most important thing.

Some of the hard choices we made early on in Bear involve ignoring the concept of folders entirely, and going just with tags for organization. It might require an adjustment for some users, but we believe the flexibility of tags can open quite a few doors.

Also, because of Bear’s strict nature of privacy, some features might be difficult or even impossible for us to implement. For example, your Bear notes remain on your device, we do not upload them to a web service. If you subscribe to Bear Pro, your notes sync between all your devices with Apple’s iCloud. Again, we cannot see any of your notes, tags, or other data. Your devices talk to iCloud and each other, that’s it.

This means that, for now, we can’t do things like online collaboration or let you share a note via a link. Your notes don’t live anywhere online that is publicly accessible, and we like that.

Absolutely. Videos can do _wonders_ for showing users how an apps works and is useful. We’re thrilled about the Big Mac App Store redesign.

We don’t have actual numbers to share for the past month, but in general we’re really happy with the App Store. We’ve won Editor’s Choice awards and were fortunate enough to be featured a few times. It’s really helped to get the word out about Bear around the world, especially in China and Europe.

It certainly helps that much of the industry is moving towards subscriptions. But when we think about it, consumer software has long been sold for a one-time purchase price, yet supported like an ongoing service with regular free updates and customer support. Some subscription prices might be a little off the mark. But when priced right, we think it’s a great way to create a steady income that helps developers make a living, support their apps, and plan for the future.

Understandable, not everyone is happy with subscriptions. When is everyone ever happy? But we thought long about how to price Bear, and we knew we wanted to be in this for the long haul. Even so, we think Bear is incredibly affordable at $15 a year or just USD $1.50 a month, which is less than a cup of coffee.

(Note to the interviewer: Pinboard was originally listed here, but that is not our app or service. We made Delibar, which was a client for services like Pinboard and Delicious. We also have an app called image2icon which is our own app and is still available in App Store  now)

Every app is different because they often exist in industries with unique audiences and circumstances. But in general, Delibar and Pixa did ok to start out, but were also launched into difficult markets. Bookmark management never really took off that well, and photo and asset management has very large players like Adobe and, back then, Apple.

Thankfully, we learned a lot from our work on those apps, much of which we’ve brought to Bear. We don’t want to talk too many details about Bear’s future. But we are listening closely to what our customers want, and we have some great things planned for the next few years.