Changelog

[Unreleased]

New this time

Pool it with friends, soon. Anything open on a friend's list has a small "pool it with friends" line. Tap it and we'll tell you when pooling is ready. Your friend never sees it.
See a new follower's list before you decide. The nudge, the push and the email all open their list, with "follow back" right there. Looking doesn't count as deciding.
"not now" keeps a new follower for a week, quietly at the foot of your nudges, so you can still follow back later.
Add opia to your home screen. From your second visit, your list offers it once, and on iPhone it shows you how in three taps. Settings keeps it too.
A proper page when you're offline, which tries again on its own once you're back.

Easier for everyone

Easier to read. Quiet text, hints and coloured words are darker, so they're readable in sunlight and for anyone who finds pale text hard.
Works with a keyboard and a screen reader. Every page has a "skip to content" link, buttons are one stop each, and after you tick something off, delete it or confirm something, you land somewhere sensible instead of back at the top. Things like "copied" and "marked bought" are read out.
Nothing hides under the bar at the foot of your phone when you move through a page with a keyboard.
The moving strip on the home page has a pause button, and holds still while you point at it.
A shared list's link shows a preview in messages, with opia's card and never anything from the list itself.

Your list

Arrange your list. Tap "arrange", then drag things into the order you'd like friends to see them. Every card also has arrows and "to the top", and on a phone the list turns into rows you can see eight at a time. Each move saves as you make it.
New things go to the top, right under "add another", and wear a "just added" mark for a moment so you can see where they landed.
Long lists arrive a page at a time. A list shows its first 48 things, with "show more" at the foot, so a long list is quick to open on a phone. The same goes for "already yours", twelve at a time.
Filters count the whole list, not just what has loaded, so "3 must-haves in clothing" is always true.
Change an item's link, or add one to something you wrote in yourself. "look it up" shows the new shop's photo and price beside yours, and nothing changes unless you pick it.
Delete something you added by mistake. It's at the foot of the editor, beside "i have it", and it asks first.
More ways to add a photo. Paste an image straight into the photo box, use a link to a photo, or remove one. The editor now has all of them, and shows the whole photo the way your card does.

Claims

Add a week to a claim. Ordered it and it hasn't arrived? Once a week is left on your claim, you can add one more week, once. It's under the return date on your claims, in the bell and on your card on their list, and the reminder email points you to it. The person whose list it is never finds out.
A claim that runs out says so without a number, since a claim can now last two weeks or three.
Tapped "i bought it" too soon? Undo it. The row says "marked bought. undo" until you leave the page.
Releasing something you said you bought asks first, from wrapped up or your card on their list, since it goes back on their list for someone else.
"see item" opens their list at the item, even far down it, and says what they changed: the price, the photo, the link. Once you've seen it, it stops counting in the bell and fades in your feed.
If something you claimed is taken off a list, your claim says only that it's no longer there. Nothing guesses why.

Settings

Settings is four tabs now: you, occasions, following and preferences. Your name, birthday and handle sit together under "you", with how you sign in and leaving opia. Notifications and shop links share "preferences".
Change your email. We send a link to the new address and change nothing until you tap it, then let your old address know. Cancel any time before then.
Add or remove Google as a way to sign in. The email link always works.
On a phone, settings is a list you open one part of at a time.

Getting around

On a phone, your list, friends and settings sit at the foot of the screen, in reach of your thumb. They step aside while you type, add something or arrange your list.

When something breaks

A proper page when something goes wrong, instead of a bare technical screen. It says it's on us, offers one try again, and inside the app it keeps your nav and footer so only the broken part is replaced. On a friend's list it stays quiet and plain.
It knows when you're offline, says so, and tries again by itself once you're back.
A short reference code you can quote if you write in, so we can find what happened.

[0.3.0] · 2026-09-24

Getting ready to launch. Mostly the quiet kind of work: what your data is made safe with, what stops one person spoiling a list, and prices that read the way you write them.

Prices

Prices are written the way your part of the world writes them. An item stays in the currency the shop set: what changes is that an American sees "$37" where a British reader sees "US$37", and a German one sees "37 $".
Kenyan shillings are understood, from the shops that quote them and as a choice when you write a price yourself.
Better guesses about which currency a shop means. "KSh" and "CA$" are read properly, and a bare "$" is settled against your own region rather than assumed to be American.

Sharing and claiming

Sharing your list uses your phone's own share sheet, so the link can go straight into a message, rather than only to the clipboard.
You can hold three claims at a time on one person's list. Enough to be generous, not enough for one person to quietly empty someone's list, which nobody could see happening because claims are hidden from the owner.
Claiming asks you to finish setting up your account first, which keeps throwaway accounts away from a link that gets passed around.

Photos

Item photos are kept by us now, not borrowed from the shop. A photo no longer disappears when a shop rearranges its site, and the shop no longer learns who is looking at a list.

Privacy and safety

Your email address and birthday are encrypted before they reach our database, along with sign-in links and the details kept with each session. A copy of the database is no longer a copy of the people in it.
Sign-in links are deleted once used, or a day after they expire, rather than being kept.
Limits, so one bored person can't spend our budget or fill a list: on how often links can be asked for, on how fast things can be added or claimed, and on how large a list or a following can grow.
The privacy policy and terms were updated to match all of this, including what error reports contain and how long each thing is kept.

Fixes

Signing out works again. It had been failing with an error for anyone already signed in, because the site answered on one address while the sign-in system expected another.
Sign-in tells you when a link could not be sent, instead of saying to check your inbox when nothing was sent.

Under the hood

Errors are now reported to us when something breaks, with email addresses stripped out, so we hear about faults without being told.
Anonymous counts of the basic journey, so we can see whether the core loop works. They carry no account, no name and no list address.
A security policy for the site is running in report-only mode, ahead of turning it on.

[0.2.0] · 2026-09-12

Nearly everything rebuilt. v1 will be the launch.

Your list

A rebuilt list page. Your own list leads with a masthead carrying your name, your next occasion and a collage of what you've added. Items are cards with the photo shown whole rather than cropped, and the ground behind each photo is tinted to match it.
Categories and priority. Tag an item, and mark the few things you'd really love. Only the ends of the scale show a badge, so a list of eight things doesn't start shouting.
"I have it." Taking something off your list no longer deletes it, so a friend's claim is never destroyed underneath them. Everything you've marked is kept in a collapsed record at the foot of the page, which is also the way back from a mis-tap.
List settings in one place: title, tagline, the hero colour, and whether your birthday shows.

Adding things

The add page is one screen. No stages. Paste a link and the photo and title appear almost at once, while the price and the rest arrive behind them.
We read shops far better than we did. A shop's own data comes first where they publish it, then four different ways of reading the page itself, and for shops that block us, a last resort that fetches the page properly. Slow pages are finished in the background while you carry on typing.
Every field says where it came from. A value from the shop is marked as theirs; anything we worked out ourselves is marked as a guess, with a dashed edge, and the form counts them. We fill only fields you haven't touched.
Pick a different photo from the ones found on the page, upload your own, or just write the item out by hand.

Sharing and claiming

A rebuilt shared list. Your profile hero is a card you can tint, with "how it works" underneath it, so a first-time visitor understands what claiming does before they do it.
Claims are hidden from you completely, down to the count. Not just who claimed what. A full surprise, even from you.
A rebuilt friends page that leads with whoever's occasion is soonest instead of listing everyone alphabetically, with your own claims underneath.
A bell with nudges: a claim you haven't bought yet, an occasion coming up, someone who followed you, and an item that left a list while you were holding a claim. Claim and nudge taps now land immediately rather than waiting on a round trip.

Occasions

Occasions carry real dates. Anniversaries and one-offs like a wedding or a new baby take a date; the rest are known. Add your own occasions too.
Eid, Diwali, Hanukkah and Lunar New Year are worked out properly rather than guessed at, and Eid is labelled as approximate because the date is settled by sighting the moon.

Your account

Deleting your account is a 30-day countdown, not an instant ending. Sign in during that window and you're offered your account back. Nothing is released, renamed or unfollowed while you're inside it, so coming back leaves things as they were. Claims your friends hold survive too, so nobody buys a duplicate.
Sign out everywhere from settings.
Settings split into tabs: account, about you, occasions, following, notifications and the danger zone.

Under the hood

The app waits on the database far less often, so moving between pages is quicker.
Fonts are served by us rather than fetched from Google.
Faster builds, and a newer sign-in library.
Mobile navigation was fixed in June; it had lost the tab strip and the preview link.

[0.1.0] · 2026-05-11

First deploy. The site went live, and that's all it was: it was never shared with anyone, announced anywhere, or used by anybody but us. The point was to get the whole pipeline working end to end, from the database and sign-in to the daily job and the deploy itself, with enough of the product on top to prove the parts fitted together.

This entry was rewritten on 2026-09-12: it originally called itself an initial public release, which overstated what it was.

What worked by then, nearly all of it since rebuilt

Wishlists. Paste a product URL; we pull the title, image and price.
A profile at /<handle>. Unlisted and shareable, never search-indexed.
Quiet claims. Friends mark "I've got this" without the owner seeing who claimed what.
Follows, so you can keep up with the people whose lists you care about.
Occasions and birthdays, picked during onboarding.
Sign-in with Google or a magic link by email.
Legal and changelog pages, so there was something to point at.