AppFlowy 1st Anniversary and 2022 Recap

AppFlowy just celebrated its first anniversary! We launched https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy on GitHub on November 13th, 2021. Since its debut, AppFlowy has gained incredible traction, and on December 12th, 2022—a little more than a year after its launch—it crossed 30k stars on GitHub!

Looking back on 2022, AppFlowy has made big strides forward on our product, open-source codebase, and community. There is much more to come on a mission to make it possible for anyone to create apps that suit their needs well!

Building core experience

To individuals, our long-term goal is to offer Notion's functionality along with data security and a cross-platform native experience. In order to achieve this ambitious goal, we need to build AppFlowy block by block. The near to mid-term goal is to offer Notion’s core feature set and uphold our fundamental values, data privacy first, reliable native experience, and community-driven extensibility throughout.

Remember this simple editor from a year ago? Take a look at how far we've come!

A significant upgrade to the editing experience through building our own rich-text editor:

A Table-view database supporting Text, Numbers, Date, Select, Multi-select, Checkbox, Checklist, and URL property types:

A Kanban Board like Notion and Trello:

You have more control over where and how your AppFlowy data is stored on your local device, either moving your data folder from one disk to another or managing your data by creating multiple folders.

In Settings, you can turn on Dark Mode, switch languages, customize font size, and change avatars.

And many UI/UX improvements: click and drag the right edge to resize your sidebar, add more tooltips to better guide users, improve the clicking experience...

Ship more open-source code

To enterprises and hackers, our vision is to offer building blocks—that is, collaboration infra services to enable you to make apps on your own. Moreover, you have 100% control of your data. You can design and modify AppFlowy your way. In 2022, we’ve made great progress toward achieving this goal. To give a few highlights:

appflowy_editor, a highly customizable rich-text editor for Flutter, built by the AppFlowy Team from the ground up, was published as a standalone package on pub.dev

appflowy_board, a customizable and draggable Kanban Board widget for Flutter, built by the AppFlowy Team from scratch, was also published as a standalone package on pub.dev

And 3600+ commits to https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy

Our near to mid-term goal is to actively version up appflowy_editor and appflowy_board and publish more AppFlowy blocks for developers to use in their own applications.

Growing the AppFlowy Community

As mentioned earlier, one of the three fundamental values we uphold is community-driven development. We are dedicated to cultivating a community to democratize the knowledge and wheels of making complex workplace management tools while enabling people and businesses to create beautiful things on their own by equipping them with a versatile toolbox of building blocks.

We run AppFlowy Community on GitHub and Discord, a community of more than 20,000+ active members, where we receive valuable input from them. Many frequently asked questions are now integrated into our documentation, and 300+ issues for feature requests and bugs have been closed as well. We’ve grown the total number of code contributors from 3 to 120+, with some being new to development while others have many years of software experience. Moreover, we’re excited to see it’s a global effort as our contributors are from all over the world.

Our newsletter, AppFlowy Binary, is a place for us to share how we tackled technical challenges and the lessons we learned. Check out our latest blog article - how we built a highly customizable rich-text editor for Flutter

We also participated in Hactoberfest 2022, during which 50 issues labeled as Hactoberfest were accepted. Inspired by programs like Hactoberfest, we launched AppFlowy’s Mentorship Program, aiming at creating a hands-on learning opportunity for new developers who may otherwise lack the opportunity to gain exposure to real-world software practice and entry to the technical community. We’re on the way to graduating our first cohort and will share more about it next year.

As we approach v1.0, the stable release, we are interested in knowing more about what people are doing out there. With that in mind, please keep us posted about your feedback and share your stories so we can better serve your needs.

We'd like to express our gratitude to all the contributors in 2022, including:

• These contributors for moderating the community, triaging issues, and implementing new features
• All the active community members for making valuable code contributions, improving our documentation, and answering questions on GitHub and Discord

Now, some numbers to share

• Downloads: 0 -> 90,000+
• Stars: 0 -> 30,200+
• Total contributors: 1 -> 121+
• Commits: 1 -> 3,660+
• Issues: 623 opened, and 321 of them fully closed
• A new core founding member
• Twitter followers: 0 -> 1700+
• Discord members: 0 -> 2,000+

And an award we received from GitHub!

AppFlowy was selected for the Noteworthy Newcomer award as part of the Open Source Awards at GitHub Universe

From v0.0.1 to v1.0.0, onward and upward

Developing AppFlowy from v0.0.1 to v0.0.9 has been a wonderful journey, and yes, it will be incredible and exciting to progress to the next stage, from v0.1.0 to v1.0.0—a stable release to empower end users to write notes, manage tasks, ship projects, and so much more!  

Stay tuned to our plans for AppFlowy v1.0 on GitHub, Twitter, and Discord. With v1.0, we are confident to see many more new adoptions. To get there faster, we are actively hiring experienced software engineers to join the force. In addition, we plan to build a community core team who will become deeply involved in the project and represent the voice of the community.

The spoiler for the upcoming roadmap is a focus on community plugins and templates, which will create a versatile toolbox of building blocks for more people to build beautiful things on their own. Calling more builders to join us!

Thanks for reading this article. Hope you all have a wonderful new year!

And in closing, we’ll say “thank you” to 2022 and “hello” to 2023!