We coudn’t believe it when we saw the calendar event coming up this week, but sure enough: today marks the first full year of Bear.

We’ll spare you the epic memoir (for now?), but Bear really has come a long way in that short time. We launched the beta on Product Hunt last summer, gained over 2,000 upvotes, scored a ‘Product of the Month’ badge, and picked up over 40,000 (!) beta testers.

After a bunch of beta releases and a ton of great feedback from you, we launched Bear 1.0 for iPad, iPhone, and Mac on November 1, 2016. Then we kept going.

In the past year, Bear made App Store Editor’s Choice, won App of the Year 2016, and was honored with a 2017 Apple Design Award. You’ve downloaded it millions of times — yes, millions! We also released 18 updates and shipped some pretty great stuff, such as:

We’ve seen people from nearly every industry either start using Bear or switch to it. The press likes Bear too, as we were lucky enough to get great mentions by The Verge (twice!), Mac Stories, The Next Web (2), Life Hacker, New York Times, El Pais, The Guardian, Forbes, and the list goes on.

We got to meet Tim Cook!

The Shiny Frog/Bear team met Tim Cook in Florence, Italy

This may not be directly Bear related, but we had to include it! Earlier this year, we got to meet Tim Cook at the Apple Store in Florence, Italy. It was such an honor, and he even signed our ADA!

Tim Cook signed our 2017 Apple Design Award!

Thanks everyone

Bear began as an internal labor of love, an attempt to solve a shared problem of the Shiny Frog team. We cannot express how amazing it feels to put something like this out into the world, then discover that millions of you liked our ideas.

We have a lot more in store for Bear. We’re always listening to your feedback, and we have a great plan for Bear going forward. Let us know if you have thoughts or questions on Twitter at @BearNotesApp or in our subreddit, and stay in the know by subscribing to our infrequent newsletter at bear-writer.com.

Thanks again for everything, and stay tuned. We have another great update right around the corner. 😎