This last year, in the interest of pursuing our goal of funding the development of Open Source apps, we made a major change to the way we take payments in AppCenter. You can read the full story here, but the short version is that we gave developers a way to ask again when users decide to try their app for free without being annoying or restrictive. No naggy pop-ups, no trial versions, just a gentle reminder to fund the development of your favorite apps when you update them.

AppCenter apps can now be viewed online at appcenter.elementary.io

We also improved the way we share our favorite apps with other people by creating a web portal for viewing the apps in AppCenter. Cassidy has a great write up here about the process if you want to read more.

Content warnings in AppCenter

As we grow our platform, we’re also thinking about how people can curate the kind of content that they and their loved ones are exposed to when browsing AppCenter. While we have lofty plans for more fine-grained controls in the future, we started out by introducing a simple content warning for apps that may contain explicit or sensitive content. You can read more about that here.

And of course, Cassidy has kept up the AppCenter Spotlight series by highlighting interesting new apps and interviewing the developers behind them. This year he interviewed Artem Anufrij, the developer behind 10 AppCenter apps, showcased the Mastodon app Tootle, and got the story behind the privacy-focused Write.as among others.

elementary OS

In February, we started talking a bit about Juno, the code name for elementary OS 5. We announced that we’d be jumping a few version numbers, and received a surprising amount of feedback about that change. The short story is that in prior releases we had used versions like 0.2, 0.3, etc to communicate the in-development nature of the product. But in its current state, we feel like elementary OS is a complete realization of our initial vision and ready to stand on its own as a mature operating system. We also announced at this time that our development efforts were completely focused on releasing Juno and that Loki (the previous release) was going into maintenance mode. As of now, developers can push updates to their apps in Loki if they choose to, but in general Loki only receives security and stability updates from the Ubuntu archives.

We followed up at the end of the month with the first set of screenshots showing off our progress. This post highlighted improved panel coloring with a new translucent light mode and animations for system indicator icons.

How neat is that?

We also talked about improvements to System Settings, a redesign of the album view in Music, the dark style in Photos, new color schemes in Terminal, Night Light, Improvements to HiDPI support and more.

In March, we introduced the new shortcut overlay, more improvements to System Settings, Location Services, and improvements for AppCenter and Code.

The new shortcut overlay makes discovering powerful shortcuts easier

Then in April, we talked about some of our progress working with upstreams on making notifications better on Open Source desktops, under-the-hood improvements in Files, and even more work on System Settings and Code.

Each month Juno saw major improvements and redesigns for System Settings

In May, we took a slight detour to talk about some of the big visual changes that we made in Juno. One of the most significant of these was our new expanded and refined color palette.

We also detailed some of the icon changes we’d been working on and new features in our system stylesheet as well new wallpapers we’d be including.

Some of the changes to file type icons in Juno

Then, finally Juno went public beta in July. Instead of using this time to recap the work we’d been doing, we talked about who the beta process is for and how to be an effective participant in it. We made a call to app developers and translators and talked a bit about bug tracker etiquette.

Speaking of beta, Cassidy took some time to write about our “purpleprint” beta wallpaper and the history behind it. You can read that here.

Then in September, we released the 2nd public beta with over 200 bug fixes since that July release. We detailed fixes, new features, and improvements to our platform for app developers. And of course, we talked about even more improvements for System Settings, including the new Housekeeping feature.

A new stylesheet feature made these fancy colored sliders in Photos possible

And then in mid-October, Cassidy announced the release of elementary OS 5 Juno. His release notes are a massive 30-minute read with details of every improvement we made during the cycle. This covers updated apps, new desktop features, look and feel changes, all that work on more System Settings, platform improvements for developers, etc. Juno was a huge upgrade representing a really solid year of consistent work.