Dear community,
Today I am very happy to announce that the release 1.2 is finally out! Our previous release had been two months ago, which is quite a long time frame given the many features we still want to implement. However, to make Xayn ready for the future product roadmap, we had to refactor many lines of code at this stage. You know what they say in engineering: If you don't have to refactor regularly, you probably were over-engineering it in the first place. Xayn is now more stable, performant and also ready for new features to come (read until the end to find out news about the upcoming web version!). Thanks a lot for all your patience and continued support :)
Besides all the changes happening under the hood, this release covers some core features that were highly requested by our community. These include Tabs, The Widget, as well as getting ready to become a standard browser! Also, there were several bug fixes, of course. We also updated our categorisation capabilities on the Home Screen. Now, when you dislike an article shown to you, you can specify a lot more detailed why this article was not right for you. This helps your AI to understand your preferences even better!
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With the new release, you can finally have multiple tabs open within the app. This productivity feature was highly requested by many and is also an important requirement to become a mobile browser. To create a new tab, simply click on the tabs symbol right next to the search bar. Tabs can be managed in the navigation menu on the bottom of the app. There, you'll find an overview over all tabs open and will also be able to close some individually, or as a whole.
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While the widget concept is still a bit newer for iOS users, Android users love and cherish widgets for a long time already. That's why it has been requested by so many and therefore, Xayn now comes with a search widget, too! So independent of your operating device, you'll now find Xayn's widget in both iOS and Android's widget panel. Simply set up the widget with a few clicks, and getting even quicker access to the web. The widget is full on-device privacy, of course. So make sure to get the widget now!
Happy searching
Leif
So as mentioned already, we had to refactor many lines of code in order to make Xayn ready for the future. This includes our web version, privacy-preserving account management, device synchronisation, as well as many other productivity features.
What can I expect from the next release?
For release 1.3.0, we will finally be giving you a Reader Mode, full-fledged adblocking, and we will also introduce Deep Search to our search engine.
And what about Web Search?
So when will you be able to start searching via xayn.com? Very, very soon, promise! While we started out in providing a search app (this had to do with the fact that the majority of search is already undertaken from mobile), we've set up our codebase as universal as possible from the start: Xayn is largely written in Rust and Flutter. This has the advantage that we can pull everything – both app and later on web – from one code-base. This is a huge plus as we don't have to re-write the entire code for this other product, nor have to worry about feature parity later on. However, the web version has to be adjusted in large parts in design and general UX changes. That's just a process that takes time and a lot of testing, so I kindly ask you to stay patient a bit longer and get excited! We will soon also release a web preview on our social media channels Twitter and LinkedIn.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these updates and make sure you'll download or update to the new version today! If you have questions or further feature requests, you can contact me under support@xayn.com.
Photo by Tran Mau Tri Tam on Unsplash
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