Sunsetting GomScope

Thanks to everyone for being so supportive. However I've decided to sunset GomScope. It was originally made to provide more features that Bear app doesn't, such as graph view and backlinks.

Going through private alpha and public beta, I've got good feedback from the users and iterated on the app. I got confident and officially launched the app to discover the app is useful for some people, but not for others.

The biggest issue was the performance. While I have 200-300 notes in my Bear app, there are users with 2000-3000 notes. And without the data, it has been very difficult for me to identify the issue and improve it. I asked the users for logs and updated the app over and over again. It got improved, but not enough. There are apps like Obsidian and Roam Research that have been doing very well. I cannot provide the same level of performance for those who already experienced them while I'm doing this in my spare time and while I don't have that many notes (randomly generated notes don't help much).

Another frustration was that the full refund policy (in 30 days) made me realize how many people are leaving the Bear app. Like half of them asked for a refund because it didn't fulfill their needs, but the rest was because they're not using Bear anymore. And to be honest, I'm using Bear less and less these days.

Then, what happens?

If you purchased the app in recent 30 days, you can still ask for a refund. However, if you are satisfied with the current version, you can continue to use it. There will be no major updates, but I might fix some bugs from time to time. And the app doesn't require any server, so there is no limit for you to use it.

About the Panda,

The Bear team is working on a new editor called Panda. It has been there for a long time, and recently they made it public for a test. We have no idea when they actually integrate the editor into Bear app and release the new major version. Anyway, will GomScope be compatible with it? I'm not too sure. GomScope is based on sqlite3 file stored locally: ~/Library/Group Containers/9K33E3U3T4.net.shinyfrog.bear/Application Data/database.sqlite . If they don't change the database drastically, I can update GomScope to read different columns and parse them differently. However, if they remove some values that GomScope is relying on, it won't be possible. Once they roll out the new version, I will try my best to make it compatible, but I cannot promise since I don't know what's coming. However, I will transparently share what I attempted to do, but why I failed because of which change was hard to catch up, etc.

Thanks again for being supportive. And I'm sorry if anyone is disappointed with this decision. It was a hard decision because I really enjoyed building the app and growing it with the community, especially those in the GomScope Slack. Please reach out to me at hey@gomscope.com if you have a question, complaint, or anything.