Welcome to one of our first blog posts!
Here at Endlesss we believe that music is an activity we do together that brings us closer. For that reason we care greatly about building amazing creation tools that are fun and accessible whilst also growing a community around bringing people together through music.
Just as our many users share their creative journey in Endlesss, we wish to share ours about Endlesss. With this in mind, we wish to start sharing more information, through these posts, about what we are doing to grow the platform and the team.
A look back on 2020
Firstly, let’s look back at last year. 2020 was the year of challenges for everyone, but we hope that Endlesss was able to at least help brighten the year in some way for you. We have definitely found it a great place ourselves for creative output and for feeling closer to others through the power of music. Close to 2.5 million Rifffs were created in Endlesss with almost 50,000 Jams created and shared! We just want to say thank you to everyone who has joined Endlesss over the last year and helped the Endlesss community grow!
We were able to achieve a lot in 2020. In March we released our iOS app on the App Store and in June we launched our Kickstarter Campaign for Endlesss Studio, the desktop version of our platform. Thank you again to everyone who pledged to this. We had over 800 backers across the tiers and thanks to their support and feedback we were able to deliver and fully launch Endlesss Studio for MacOS earlier in December.
We are extremely grateful for anyone who has purchased Endlesss Studio since launch, and with our Kickstarter backers, really see you all as early adopters of Endlesss and will always be grateful for your support. We have early plans on how we can continue to show our appreciation over time and will announce more details in the near future on this!
An outlook on 2021
As we are now driving forward into 2021 with positivity and hope, we are looking at our product roadmap and want to be open with our community on the decisions, changes and direction we are taking.
One area is the reality of maintaining and progressing both a mobile and desktop offering. Although built off the same tech stack, there are different user needs and platform specific requirements for each, as well as the amount of testing needed to provide a quality product. Right now we are still a small team of just 1 full time and 3 part-time developers! With this in mind, we need to be a bit more realistic with what is achievable, whilst continuing the drive to building up the Endlesss Platform.
Windows Support
We had always planned to stagger the release of Windows and the delivery timeline we shared with our Kickstarter backers took into account that Windows would take a longer time to deliver than MacOS. This is due to MacOS sharing many of the various native APIs and technologies used in the original iOS app, whereas on Windows, these need be fully replaced. Our aim was to deliver an early alpha version of Windows in Feb 2021, a beta version in May 2021 and a full public release in summer 2021.
We're sorry to say that we're not going to be able to meet the Feb alpha release date. In the process of developing Endlesss Studio we discovered that replacing these APIs and technologies would be much more involved and also requires a fair amount of additional refactoring to our codebase to support them.
We could have found short term ways and fixes to work around this to get a Windows build earlier but this would have really compromised the quality, creating something very buggy and quite frankly, we'd rather be a bit late than deliver something unusable!
So we've decided to go in and fix all this before we port to Windows. We apologise to our Windows-based HD backers for this delay. It will take a couple of months longer but the upside is that we will be able to maintain a much quicker pace in future for the whole platform. Also, it's worth pointing out that you will benefit from all the UI/UX and feature improvements that we have made in the MacOS version since launch.
We're now aiming for a late summer public release, working backwards from there for alpha and beta versions, with a plan to set some more accurate dates as we progress with development. We're setting up a special mailing list for our Windows backers to keep you updated with our progress so do sign up for all the latest updates. If you are new to Endlesss but waiting for Windows support, please also sign up to be guaranteed the early adopter offer. We really appreciate your understanding.
This will all be worth it!
Taking Endlesss forward
We also want to continue to grow the Endlesss platform and want to be open with some of the other areas we are looking at growing over the next year: Reinforcing our foundations - As mentioned above, we need to spend some time really focusing on reworking our tech stack to something more workable, flexible and stable so we can keep growing the product and hopefully our team! We achieved a lot last year, which didn’t happen without making some compromises on the way and we need to resolve these before plowing ahead.
Get more of you connected - It has been amazing to see the community grow both in the app and on our Discord server. We want to see this grow further with new ways to collaborate and communicate, whilst consolidating the different platforms we have to make it easier for people to connect.
Extending your workflow - Endlesss Studio has been a great addition to allow users to start integrating Endlesss into their full workflow with external hardware, DAW setups and plug-ins. We want to take this interoperability further across both mobile and desktop making Endlesss really be an extension to anyone’s setup.
Allow you to take things further - With 2.5 Million Rifffs created, that's a lot to manage! We want to make it easier for users to organise and bring back their Rifffs. This will also be the start of supporting a Song mode within Endlesss where users can arrange their Rifffs into full tracks
This isn’t a definitive list and there are many other areas we are looking at and considering whilst also just maintaining the Endlesss ecosystem as our user base grows and platforms/devices change.
Let's keep talking!
We hope this was helpful to get some background on the decisions and timelines we have set but also that it was exciting to hear about all the great changes we have planned. Again, we would like to apologise to any Windows users for the delay but promise we are not forgetting you. We just want to get what we can offer right!
If you want to stay in touch, make sure you join our Discord Server where we regularly post updates or sign up to our newsletter below. Also, if you ever want to reach out directly with any questions or problems, feel free to email us at support@endlesss.fm and we will be more than happy to help.
See you in the Jams!