Okay so I updated Clear and it gave me a few icons (and I think a font and theme?) for being in the beta. Went to delete the beta, accidentally deleted the new version, redownloaded it, and lost the items mentioned above. I don’t remember what all they were but I know it was at least the testflight icon (“test pilot”?). To be clear: I’m not asking about items unlocked in the beta app… I know those don’t carry over. I’m talking about items that were unlocked automatically in the newly updated regular app. How do I get them back?
(Edit for spelling)
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I don’t know but clearly we made this too complicated. (To be fair it was innately complicated, the demand for beta slots resulted in multiple SKUs of the app being set up to handle it with tester limits etc.)
I guess my totally off the cuff thinking aloud right now is maybe we should just unlock the legacy unlocks at least + some bonus stuff for you all in the 2.0.1 or 2.0.2 update. And then after that point in future updates they’re taken away for new users. Something like that vs. trying to deal with various edge cases.
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Is it safe to delete the beta app? Am reading some feedback of people losings lists and all when deleting the beta app after installing official App Store version…
wanted to confirm before deleting.
I cant even get the piano sound of the first one! Were you able to get it? How?
You really should be safe, especially with your lists all in the new release.
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The new version is horrendous, and defeats the purpose of a simple list app.
You have killed the very thing you sought to improve.
The good typography, simple interface, easy to understand transitions. All gone.
You have awful typography, no clear list item delineation, no list of list item separation, horrible spongey and irrelevant transition animations.
Please make the original available, and allow users to never update to this terrible version spew (two)
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Honestly typography probably can use a sharper eye on it, and we do have designer friends and community we can lean on to refine that over updates. Neither David or I consider that a strength.
But I dunno, like this is a lot about the animation for closing and opening lists. The animation is the list title row you tapped, expands into the list itself, à la iOS when you tap open an app for example. I feel like ‘hard to understand’ and irrelevant is a stretch. And tapping the ‘back button’ to go back you will land at your destination faster than you ever could swiping down and releasing to go back in old Clear etc.
I am totally down for improvements and feedback that’s useful to us there, I also get that this is a huge amount of change overnight. But I don’t know, the big picture is this. Clear was going to disappear from the App Store forever in a year or two or three and that would be that, without a total new foundation and big swing like this. That was its eventual death. This is not a murder, it’s a huge intervention to prevent that incoming demise.
Like you have to love Clear deeply to be this angry about the new version, that’s why I’m wondering and genuinely hopeful you’ll turn around some on this and maybe some of your feedback (or similar from the others who are most stinging from the change) will end up improving Clear for everyone.
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When will the app sync with iCloud? Not having lists on my iPhone sync with my iPad has been absolutely brutal.
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It feels impossible to offer a timeline right now but I’ll try my best. I’m anticipating there will be another push to at least scout it out again this year. One new member of our team has a lot more server experience in general so Arun will probably be splitting off to scout this out after release dust settles.
That said once the work begins, it could take a while. Syncing historically has been extremely costly to get to decent robustness. E.g. you’ve probably experienced weird iCloud sync glitches or hiccups every once in a while in Apple’s apps. They have like conservatively hundreds of full time engineers dedicated to syncing. I don’t mean to make it sound like it’s impossible for us, just that there is this built in floor of complexity, and then a rising cost to get it from 95% to 96% reliability. Then from 96% to 97% etc. So it’s a big project and lift and in some past experiences/stabs at it, hard to estimate until we’re deep into it.
But, if we eventually/finally have reliable enough syncing to ship, the first client to receive it will be Clear iPad. That’s easy enough. After that, we’re eyeing a simple web version before a native Mac version this time around. But yeah this will all take some real amounts of time unfortunately.
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If you were not designers, why wouldn’t you just copy the design as it was? It goes beyond not having capability, it’s more than that. You clearly do not value it either otherwise you would have just replicated what had already been refined and loved over a decade or so. So sad to see you waste your life energy and time on this without even realising how much you don’t know.
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Huh? We are designers. Of the original too. I’m just saying typography is our weak spot which is obviously quite relevant for Clear and we can do better there with some extra eyes/help.
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I, for one, want to say that (in my opinion) Clear 2.0 is a major step forward both visually and from user experience perspective. It feels like everything that made Clear 1.0 unique in a modern look. Humans tend to resist change, but calling this new version terrible on day 1 is a major reach.
It took me a day or two to get a hang of the new look and gestures during the test flight beta, but I can’t imagine going back to old clear anymore. Loss of sync is not as critical to me as I rarely use the iPad app, but it looks like that’s in the roadmap for the team.
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The initial changes were a bit of an adjustment for me when I first became a beta tester, but I very quickly adjusted and then after my update today, everything went smoothly for me. I came across the mention of 10 years and it made me start thinking about how long I’ve been using Clear… I thought to myself, maybe 5 years?? I encouraged my wife to download it and shared her the ‘gift’ link. I proceeded to tell her that this has been one of my most used apps over the course of many years (still thinking maybe 5ish???).
Well, curiosity got the best of me and I looked up the purchase in my purchase history. Whoa 
… I got Clear on May 8th, 2013. I’ve literally been using this app for more than 10 years 
. It’s been a part of my everyday life for a LONG time!
Congrats on the updated app!
For me, syncing between my work phone and my personal phone was something I used. It was not perfect, but it functioned most of the time and I definitely would love to see that come back at some point.
I also really like the above idea of being able to share a list (like my grocery list) with my wife and a couple of my older kids. That would be an awesome future feature. For now, count me amongst the host of people that are just thrilled that you all cared enough to not let this App die. That would have been a true tragedy. Like… it has been such an integral part of my smartphone usage that I didn’t even realize how long I’ve used it!!
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Not gonna lie appreciate you (actually the two of you!) chiming in before I head to bed here. Honestly from the general reaction across twitter, email, forums, I think outside of people who relied on sync, or upset about rewards progress not transferring over… most people seem to enjoy the new version, and many are super excited by it.
The part that makes me feel OK about the people most upset, is that they tend to cite things like certain animations, or text size/layout as their biggest issues. These things, while important pieces of the app, and I think there’s room for improvement, are also in the big picture, relatively straightforward to address. For example the new Clear has a big theme of personalize it how you want, so there potentially being ‘minimal animation’ options and such in the future is totally plausible. So I believe the bones of the design are sound, and we can see on softening some corners here and there too as we go.
And yeah @lmari535 I appreciate that, we have work to do ahead of us but I think there are some early signs that this could be a viable foundation for an actual future for the app, because yes, the alternative was Clear simply disappearing from the App Store the day when latest Xcode refuses to build it anymore etc.
Btw, we did experiment with some ideas during beta for sharing lists. But trying to avoid requiring everyone to sign up for accounts, connect, etc. is tricky. Hoping to figure out some simpler useful version before we have to consider going fully there. (More full blown ‘collaborative listing’ we would obviously only start even seriously considering after basic sync is first re-established.)
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What about widgets? For home and lockscreen?
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Hey Phill. Like @imari535, I’m super keen on sharing lists with my wife too and hoping you can implement it in some way.
Not sure if this helps, but I’ve been using a fairly new baby tracking app (https://mangobaby.app/) that allows data to be shared securely between iCloud users (e.g. me, wife, baby sitter, etc). No sign up or account is required for the sharing to work and the sync across users is instantaneous and rock-solid. I think the dev Yilei uses some form of iCloud sharing (see screenshot below of the app page). Don’t know if this iCloud sharing is a new thing, because I’ve not seen it implemented anywhere else before.
Would be awesome if you could build a sharing feature in Clear 2.0 that is just as reliable and fast.
Just went to open my TestFlight version and it was blocked by an AppStore message. I was forced to launch the updated app that had now overwritten the original Clear app. Launched it, concerned about list preservation etc and… it’s all good! TestFlight lists are there, legacy lists are there, everything seems to be working as intended (apart from my app icon doesn’t update when I change it - a small price to pay for now). And it looks and feels great. So hats off to Phill and the team for all their efforts. I’m really very happy 
I’m sorry for users that haven’t had this experience, and I’m sure what can be done will be done to fix this. I’m sorrier to see some of the more angry posts appearing, and while it must be hard for the team to have to take, please also keep in mind you’ve also made an awful lot of people very happy by keeping our favourite app alive and relevant for the foreseeable future.
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Will the iCloud sync backup be able to backup our themes, etc. earned through rewards?
Congrats to the team on launching the new Clear!
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I feel widgets missing is huge and would love some sort of interactive widget.
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