What I'm not doing in 2026

It’s the first day of 2026. Developers everywhere have started publishing their roadmaps for the year, a pleasant tradition, and I’m sure most of them are sincere.

I’d like to do the opposite and list what I am not doing this year.

Not adding a single advertising SDK

Lagerland Apps has zero third-party tracking SDKs across the entire catalogue. That means no analytics, no advertising networks, and no “anonymized” telemetry that quietly fingerprints people. It won’t change in 2026, and an attractive revenue share offer won’t change it either. The day I add an ads SDK, the studio’s whole positioning falls apart.

Not chasing a ten-app year

The catalogue today is fourteen apps. I don’t need a fifteenth, sixteenth, or twentieth. The studio is one person, and fourteen apps is already about as many as one person can support properly. If I ship a new app this year, it will be because the idea is good enough to displace something else, and not because the calendar said it was time.

Not turning anything into a daily-engagement product

Several of the apps would look more “successful” by App Store metrics if I added streaks, daily notifications, badges, or social comparison. Taskful Day would convert harder with a streak counter. AfterShift would retain more users with a daily nag. I’m not doing any of that. I’d rather have a smaller userbase that doesn’t resent me.

Not chasing AI features for AI’s sake

I expect the most disagreement on this one. I use language models in my own workflow, and I think they’re useful. Where AI really earns a place in an app, I’ll add it. But a “tap here to summarize your day with AI” button that changes nothing is noise, and I’d rather ship no AI feature than a fashionable one.

Not raising

There is no funding round in the plans for 2026, and I don’t need one. The studio is small, the apps are profitable, and investors in a one-person operation would bring ambitions that don’t fit. The honest version of “we’re not raising right now” is “we don’t want to.”

Not going dark

I’m also not disappearing. This journal is new, and I plan to write more honestly through 2026 than in any previous year, including when things go wrong, which they will. Expect shipping notes, rebrand stories, post-mortems on pricing experiments, and short essays about why a particular feature exists. I’ll write when there’s something worth saying, not on a content-marketing schedule.

What does this mean for the apps in 2026?

If you already use the apps, what’s coming in 2026 is more of the same: refinements over additions, the same privacy posture, and the same one-time-or-honest-freemium pricing. New apps that ship this year will face a high bar, so there won’t be many of them. I’m fine with that.

If that’s the kind of studio you want software from, you’re in the right place. If you want a studio that ships fifteen new features a quarter and live-streams its OKRs, there are several excellent ones (I mean that), but this isn’t one of them.

Welcome to 2026.

Update, 25 October 2026: two of these didn’t hold. The catalogue grew this year instead of staying at fourteen, and four apps now have a streak of some kind: EarnLock (a step-goal streak with a weekly rest day), Millrace (extra undos at daily-streak milestones), WanderWiki (a reading streak with an optional reminder when it is at risk), and Taskful Day (current and best streaks in its stats). AfterShift still has none. On AI, AfterShift now has a feature that earns its place: in Premium, its plain-language explanations of your sleep debt are written on-device by Apple Intelligence, on iOS 26 or later on a supported iPhone.