For the last 4 years, I’ve been working on Bookmarks, a Pinboard client for iOS, macOS, and iPadOS. Bookmarks was my attempt at bringing a Pinboard-like visual experience to private bookmarking. It’s been in public TestFlight beta for the last couple of years and has picked up a fair number of users. After much consideration, I’ve decided to stop working on it.

Bookmarks focuses on offering a more visual experience

Before getting into the details, I’d like to say thank you to everyone who’s been helping me test Bookmarks, and has provided feedback and suggestions during development. It makes a huge difference to know that what I’m building helps others and is very much why I started writing software in the first place. Thank you!

While I’m really proud of what I’ve created with Bookmarks (it’s an app I’ve used almost daily for the last few years), I want to invest my time elsewhere. Maintaining indie software represents a huge amount of work and, of all the software I write and maintain, Bookmarks deviates most from the product I’d design if I started again today1, and is the one with the most alternatives in the market2.

Bookmarks is open source (under the MIT license), so if you’re interested in taking over the project, I encourage you to do so and am happy to help you get up to speed.

  1. I dream of a local-first peer-to-peer solution with a focus on archiving and full-text search. ↩

  2. I’ve been enjoying using Raindrop for the last couple of months. It matches almost exactly what I was trying to build with Bookmarks and has clients for most every platform out there. ↩