Tickets, beads, and a slower release
By Zhenghao Chen ·
Version 1.4.0 shipped on 16 July 2026. The new layouts were a ticket and perler beads. The rest of the version was about pace: how often to ship, and what a first-run screen should say.
Ticket and perler beads
Friends had asked for a ticket since the first day on the store. Pick the layout and the photo becomes a ticket, in more than one ratio. Perler beads had a longer path. I had built a small bead mini-program earlier and never published it. While making ColorWander I met @小蝴蝶, who makes bead work, and that unpublished code went into the app as a layout: the photo, rebuilt as a round bead mosaic.
Most of the photos in the new onboarding were contributed by people who already used the app. A few were mine, and a few came from Unsplash.
Zoom, and the margin
You can shrink the photo. The empty margin can stay empty. Several people said the blank was the point. Or the margin can take a background.
How often to ship
Daily releases felt right in the first days, and then they felt expensive: every bug became a version. Weekly releases drifted toward whatever someone had just asked for, and the longer questions got lost. A two-week rhythm fits better. This one took a month, because the longer questions had become the work: a clearer first screen, and a paywall that says what Pro includes. The floor I want is a monthly update that answers one question. A bug that blocks someone still ships as soon as it is fixed.
An empty boat, and two forms
When other people began to echo the layouts and the posts, a friend, Jason, passed on a story whose source I have not found. A man crossing a river shouts at a boat that is about to hit his. Nobody answers. The boat is empty, and the anger goes with it. Make the product, and run it. Written in July 2026, this note ended by saying the app ran on iOS 17 and up. That was true then. It is not the app now: version 1.5.0 runs on iOS 16 or later, on iPhone and on iPad. Android still has no date. The same month I learned the Apple Small Business Program is something you enroll in yourself. Until then the commission had been about 13 points higher than I expected. An ICP filing, the registration for a site in China, took five working days. I had imagined it slower.
