Minor Update: 2.1 is released with return of shuffle feature, and some speed enhancements.

I admit I wasn't very excited about this at first, but building it has actually been a blast, and I was hyperfixated on bringing this feature alive for the past weeks, probably to the detriment of my sleep (but it's worth it!). I'm working on polishing off the last few changes as this version is currently in testing. I hope to release it in early September.

Before I introduce everything about runes, let me give you a tour of the changes in layout that are also inside this update.

Addition of Meanings Tab

I know I'm breaking like one of the basic design rules of mobile, which is having a maximum of 5 items in the navigation tab...but in 2.0, a new tab is added for meanings. About a year ago I moved the reference section from inside the "Reference" tab, which was inside the "Learn" tab. I thought this location was somewhat too hidden. It made way more sense to me that since decks are such a huge part of the tarot / cartomancy experience that they had their own tab, so I created the "Decks" tab, where you can check out each deck that you own, eventually see all their meanings, etc.

But this was deeply confusing to some folks, I think partially because that last tab used to be the "Shop" tab. People were upset because they thought I removed that section, instead of what I thought I was doing, which was make it more prominent. To this day, I still get a bunch of comments asking me either where it went, or why I removed something so important. When all along, it was there, available for less clicks even!

So keeping this in mind, and seeing the request here to just better organize anything purchasable into its own section, "Decks" will basically be reborn into "Meanings", and "Shop" is now it's own thing that will have anything with upgrades. Hopefully this change is self-expanatory. Clicking on decks you already own in the shop tab will bring you to the meanings tab FYI.

Runes: Readings and Spreads (Free Feature)

Rune readings will be in a new tab. To make them a bit easier to access, you can either search in the main Spreads tab, or favorite them later for easier access.

There are 8 new rune spreads for you all to explore, some of which are detailed below.

Rune Decks: 1 Basic Option, 10 Bonus Options

Like tarot decks, rune decks can be unlocked for a one time fee to access them for a lifetime. All rune decks are available for Premium.

This is literally the only part of this gigantic feature update I'm charging for and it's completely optional as an aesthetic upgrade.

Daily Lenormand and Rune Readings

I know the request included the astrology oracle...but honestly, compared to both Lenormand and Runes I feel like the feature is under-developed. There's only one spread available, unlike both Lenormand and Runes. Instead of Astro daily readings, I've included a single rune spread instead.

Rune Lessons

Includes an intro, and lessons for upright and reversed.

Other Runes Stuff

1. AI Readings - this was much easier to offer for runes over Lenormand, because of how Lenormand is read. Runes are very much read like tarot spreads, so it was much easier to add to the existing AI logic. For Lenormand, I'd have to build a completely different section.
2. Custom Lessons and Report Card - Shows how well you're doing and stuff, while also letting you practice your weakest runes.

Not Included This Version, but in my To-Do List

Updates for Lenormand and Runes

• Mirror Data - Part of larger update I want to complete in the future.
• Daily Reading Widget for iOS
• Share as PDF reading

Updates for Runes Only

Free From Cast - Free form readings make much less sense for Lenormand, which is an extremely structured reading method. Rune casting does have a free-form tradition, where you toss the set to a cloth.

1.9 is now fully out!

The biggest change is that we had to migrate our permissions management platform because our existing one is no longer going to be maintained. This kind of sent me into a panic, and I'm not happy about having to switch over. Even with as much testing as I can possibly do, I still expect a few issues to arise, so please message me if you're dealing with weird permissions problems, I should be able to grant you access on my end. Just make sure to forward me your receipt and your Labyrinthos account email, so I can find you in the system!

Now onto more fun stuff!

Option to pick your own cards in digital readings

I wanted to do this for a long time, so it's finally implemented. The old shuffle option was kind of lame. If you choose the option "Pick Cards" in your digital readings, you can now select the card you want to draw.

Some small changes to the design had to happen to make this work on multiple pages, so it looks slightly different. No more fun rounded fan, just a swiper -- but the bonus is that the code is easier to maintain.

If you're doing this on a non-free-form reading, you'll also see the spread card position come up while you're picking, for a bit of focus and intention setting to see which card you're drawn to from the options in front of you. I don't remember where that was asked for, but I think it was a request as well.

Profile Page and Card of the Year

This was a rather easy request, except for having to move some things around. You'll now have a profile page, that I've decided to call your "Archetypal Essence", where you can get more information about your personal cards. This includes your birth cards, as well as both collective and personal cards of the year for current year, 1 year ago, and 1 year in the future.

You can always edit or delete your birthdate data by heading to your account settings page, or clicking the cog icon on the top right hand corner. The information is now under the "My Profile" section.

Syncing Data Between Devices

Sigh, this one has always been so hard. I've tried this in the past and it hasn't always been reliable, and some edge-cases make the experience crummy for a few users. I'm also sure there are extra edge-cases that I haven't thought of, so please reach out to me if you're dealing with weird stuff since this update.

Experimental Feature: Personalized AI Readings

When you edit your birthdate data, you'll also see some more information about your profile settings. Any information added here will be used in your personalized AI readings if it is relevant. All data is anonymized and not tied to your email address. The API basically only gets your cards drawn, your question, and your answers to these questions.

My husband Luis built an astrology API for funsies, and I've been in talks with him to see whether we can use it in Labyrinthos. In the far far far future, we can consider adding natal chart / transit data to these readings.

This is a experimental feature, so it might suck. If you hate it, you can just delete all the data here, and it will come back to normal.

New Themes: Elements

Sometimes I just need something a bit more fun to do, and little silly things like this always cheer me up. Hopefully they'll cheer you up a little too. These themes have a bit of a surprise. Let me know if you like them!

Card lessons now have reversed versions

A got a lot of feedback that it was confusing that cards had the same card lesson when they were both upright and reversed. Personally -- I like it this way because each card often teaches you a lesson on balance. The upright Empress is often about being unconditional love, nurturing but the reversed card is a lesson to not go overboard. But newcomers didn't understand this. The existing lessons are now for upright cards, and renamed to be affirmations. Reversed cards will have a kind of affirmation titled, "shift your thinking".

Premium Feature: In Context Meanings

I have been chipping away on writing shorter versions of what's already on the website in terms of in-context meanings for each card. If you're subscribed, you'll also see what each card means for existing relationships, dating, work and finances. These are identical per deck.

Deck Visualization Changes

A small thing to make future versions easier to manage. Every time a new deck is added, I usually take a ton of photos of the physical copy, and these days I kind of dread doing that with the massive amount of work I have to do. Now the decks are visualized with the same images used in the app.

New Deck: Tarot Bottecelli by Lo Scarabeo (Pending Approval via Lo Scarabeo)

One of my personal favorites, and I didn't know it was illustrated by the same person that restored the Visconti-Sforza deck too! The real deck is gold foiled and gorgeous. Request for approval has been sent Monday.

This takes care of 2 of our most requested features, though one is only available for one platform. Android users, please create a request for widgets too -- right now there is no data bridge plugin I can use, but if it appears in the future, I can do this for you too.

Auto-save readings (Free)

I know you all hate my guts right now, but this was the second-most requested feature and there is no way this was going to happen with non-limited amount of entries.

You can change the auto-save setting in your reading settings. When this is on, all readings will autosave after drawing all cards. The heart button will turn into an edit button, and you can continue to add notes, on the next screen as usual. Free-form readings do not have auto-save, because they don't know when you're actually done. With those, you'll have to save as usual, and you'll see the heart as you did before.

Auto-relink paid deck images (Free)

I know a lot of you have been frustrated with the big question-marks that show up post update for your paid decks. For android users, I think this only happens if you uninstall and reinstall the app, so it's a bit less annoying.

So you know why this happens, Apple saves these images into the Labyrinthos App folder, but with every new update, they move this folder around. If you uninstall the app and reinstall, they also delete this folder.

Now the app should be able to auto-detect whenever images are broken and you do the work behind the scenes to fix these images. You no longer need to manually relink paid deck images.

Hopefully a lot less confusing in the future!

One thing of note however -- when images are reloaded, the app has to refresh. That means for a split second, you'll see a black screen before it restarts again. This should only happen one time after each version download.

Widgets (iOS Only - Free)

Labyrinthos is a hybrid app, meaning I can't build widgets with the main code base. But I did find a plugin that acts as a data bridge between the app and an iOS widget, so a widget can be *added* as part of the package, but the app can remain hybrid!

Please go easy on me, I've never coded in swift before!

Updated view for large devices (Free)

Labyrinthos is a hybrid app, which means with a some modifications we can make it available on a website. That requires quite a bit of work, but I think it might be worth it in the future.

This is not the completed feature, but I'd like to say I want to work slowly towards this goal:

To make this happen, it first needs some layout tweaking (along with a lot of other things), which has started in this version. The changes will be seen in tablet view and up, for example. Please give me feedback on how this looks!

In-app announcements (Free)

This should have been added before the big journaling limit change. I communicated mostly through newsletters, and I think that was clearly not enough. As part of the update, I'll be using this in-app section to announce planned updates, and show users what have changed. You'll of course, also be linked here, for more helpful information.

This is probably going to be annoying, so I apologize to everyone that created an account on Canny. We should have imported everything over, so if you had an account there, you may have to reregister. The Canny account will close soon in favor of this board.

In order to track votes, I did have to import names and emails, but I don't think this actually creates an account here.

I wanted more people to add their ideas and upvote features, but Canny forces you to create an account on their system, which I imagine blocks a lot of people from sharing requests!

Here, you can upvote anonymously, leave reactions anonymously. Guest accounts also mean there's much less friction when you want to leave a suggestion. I hope with these changes, it'll be easier for the community to leave feedback. 💖

Voting for Tarot Decks

I used to have this on sleekplan to also try out their platform, but the platform was pretty hard to use for an admin. In order to have everything in one place, I've imported all the votes from there as well.

I have been getting a few questions about why these deck requests aren't getting filled, so I figured I would also let you know here: reaching out sometimes does not yield results. One particular publisher I hounded for months, and I never got a response from anyone that could actually make decisions.

I'm trying to get publishers right now, because of a few reasons:

1. They can often provide licensing for a lot of decks; meaning if we get permission for one, we can get them for others without having to start over with a new contact, legal department, etc.
2. They often have boilerplate legal templates and terms.
3. I want to get more indie decks into the app, but I have no idea what is fair or what the market revenue share for stuff like this is. Working with publishers helps me get an idea of the industry standard.

To be honest, I'm terrible with people stuff in general. I'm such an introvert that the contacting folks (especially when asking for something!) is incredibly draining. I'm hoping that eventually we'll have enough revenue to hire out this part of this process (along with a lot of other stuff that I've basically let fall to the wayside), so deck requests get filled out faster. Thanks for understanding!

For some context 📊

As of now, we have around 2.25 million users, with less than 1% ever having made a purchase. The average number of journal entries at the moment sits at 21, with the user with the highest number of entries at around 55k, and the lowest at 0. That means the 100 free limit is 5 times the average number of 21 entries.

Storage and hosting fees for journal entries is our highest cost. And with every single day that passes, business users are creating 200-300+ journal entries per day. It's not a small amount of users that do this either, and most of them are not paying customers.

This app used to run on deck purchases. With the rise of counterfeit decks you can get on Temu, that revenue stream is basically almost dead. I tried taking them down; I even paid thousands of dollars to own the Chinese copyright for these decks, and somehow even that does not solve the problem. For every one that gets taken down, a new one comes up. It is no longer worth it for me to create tarot decks, because the pain of seeing them get stolen and knocked off is too much.

Without those sales, this app is not sustainable and has not been for quite some time. I've constantly delayed this update because I know I'm going to get massive anger and lots of low reviews for this. I've been feeling deeply apprehensive for a long time, but it has to be done. I've already gotten my first death threat as of July 5th, even though only 1% of users have gotten the update so far. Fun times!

I gave myself about 6 months to see whether I could cover costs without having to set limits. I made a bunch of new features for premium. It was not enough. It doesn't matter how "creative" I get; the amount of core free features we provide is so much more than what most users actually need.

The reality is that if nobody has to pay for the app, nobody will. We gave away so much for free. And we still do.

I know it’s frustrating, I get it. When you’re used to getting a free service it’s a hard pill to swallow that you will need to pay. That transition is never going to go well.

I started soliciting feedback for this change starting in March, but it was mostly through newsletters and if you were not subscribed I can understand how jarring it feels. I admit that's where I could have done better.

To make sure this doesn't happen again, and everyone -- not just folks who are subscribed to the newsletter -- can get their feedback heard, I'm also going to be working on an in-app messaging system.

Changes to Journal Entries 🌕

1. Each free user has a maximum of 100 journal entries.
2. If you don't want to pay, there are ways to export your readings outside of the app, so you'll never lose them. You can do this any time. Here's how to do it: https://help.labyrinthos.co/article/87-how-can-i-export-my-readings
3. If you only want more storage space, there are one time purchase items ranging from $10 - $40 that are permanent upgrades. Even if we pay monthly for storage, you only need to pay once. Here's how to do that: https://help.labyrinthos.co/article/88-where-are-the-one-time-storage-upgrades
4. Unlimited storage is one feature included in premium ($10 monthly).
5. There is also a "Starter Pack" available, that includes 265 extra journal entries (for a year of daily readings in storage), 777 credits, and special premium thank you avatars that add up to be about a $20 discount. Also a one time fee.

To reiterate, these changes are needed so that at least the costs do not keep spiraling.

Most tarot apps lock many of their readings behind a paywall or advertisements. In Labyrinthos you can get as many readings as you like, with any of the available spreads, as well as custom ones. The reason so little folks pay for the app is realistically, they don't need to. We have generous free features, and have kept it that way without ads. But it can't stay that way unless the costs for keeping this running are put under control.

I hope this gives everyone at least some understanding about why this needs to happen. This has not been in any way an easy decision. It's deeply affected my mental health this year and I am struggling.

About Always Free Exports ✍️

You never have to pay an extra cent to do this. I personally don't think it's that big of a deal if there's ways to keep your journal entries, especially in a pretty PDF format.

No entries will be deleted, you just can't save more until you go under the limit.

Exports are always free, and you can do them whenever you want from the profile tab. You don’t need to keep track of journal entries; if you reach a limit while trying to save, you’ll be prompted to export the oldest logs until you have just enough space to save this reading. Or you can purchase upgrades. You will not lose the reading on the screen.

Plaintext and secure JSON readings have no limits on bulk exports. PDF processing is somewhat expensive computationally, depending on what device you have, so there is a 10 reading limit so it's not so taxing on your devices. All these export features are released together with the limits. For free users, that means you will never have to lose any logs, they will just live off the app and somewhere safe on your computer instead.

How to Export 💡

Please view this link to learn how: https://help.labyrinthos.co/article/87-how-can-i-export-my-readings 

Future Changes this Unlocks 👍

Option to auto-save: One of the most requested features was auto-saving readings. Clearly, without limits, my existing problem will only compound. I will never be able to make a feature like this work without limits. With limits, nobody will ever go above a number that is unsustainable! Yay!

Right now, I also want to state, that while I am the lone front-end developer / illustrator / UI UX designer for this project, the only way some new features can be built is also having a back-end developer. I have a lot of things I'd like to do in the future, some of which was already requested by users.

So far, the person who has filled that role has been my lovely husband, Luis, who also has a real job that provides me with health insurance and stability so I can muck around with Labyrinthos. That means everytime I need his help, this poor man has to dedicate his weekends -- on top of his 9-5 job -- and that sucks. I know I make this app, but he has made me making this app possible, and that is no easy feat.

Ideally, I would like to be able to make enough to actually hire a back-end engineer to do this work, so it's not dependent on charity. But that requires funds. My sanity, and being able to hire help, even part time, so that not everything is falling on my tired, exhausted, barely functioning shoulders, requires funds. The app can't continue like this, and neither can I.

Free Updates 🌈

Hindsight notifications. Have a reading you want to revisit? Set a notification in the future. Readings with notifications are starred for easy access.

Export non-AI tarot readings to PDF. Pretty PDF's with the same format as AI readings, card meanings will show deck's generic meanings instead, while summary shows your notes.

New Article. Info on tarot traditions. Pretty hard to fit the whole table on mobile, so it will likely link to the article anyway.

Framework Updates. Nothing exciting here, just required updates from android and apple necessary to keep pushing new updates. Basically, android and apple often don't allow new versions to be pushed unless they're on the latest frameworks or SDK's. I hate doing these upgrades because it usually means that something is going to break. This also means however that sometimes older versions of android or iOS will not get the new updates, and newer versions of android (like 14) that we haven't yet supported entirely will get acess to features that were available to others (like PDF exports). Wish me luck!

Enlarge Card Images. Tap to expand the image size.

Paid Feature Updates (Beta) ⭐️

Per card reading notes. You can add notes to each individual card with a premium membership.

Generate reflections. Custom generated journal prompts to help you reflect on your reading and go deeper, consider next steps, and take action.

Increased character limit on notes. To make space for reflection data.

New Deck 🔮

Lo Scarabeo's Tarot Mucha.

Bug Fixes 🪲

Autosave of AI More Information / Clarity Responses.

Hello! It's my first time trying this changelog thing. Probably should have started earlier, but oh well. These are upcoming changes and are in the final stages of testing.

Free Updates 🌈

1. Limited view for users without an account. Without an account you cannot access journals, lessons and all readings.
2. Moon phase notifications to get reading when full or new moon.
3. Custom date ranges for mirror.
4. New reader: Owlcle, lover of riddles.
5. Ability for users to get more than 1 AI interpretation per spread.
6. Eight new spreads for the wheel of the year.
7. Re-added translations for Marseille and Thoth style decks that were accidentally deleted in the last version. 🤦🏻‍♀️ Oops.
8. Fixed styling issues on moon - needed different code on android vs iOS.

Paid Feature Updates (Beta) ⭐️

1. Custom lessons. Practice your weakest cards.
2. Report card: See how well you do in quizzes.

Tina's Notes 🐸

Trying the app without login has been something that folks have given me 1-star reviews for since the beginning of time. Changing this turned out to be not so horrible to do?

As storage and data costs continue to rise, I think it would also be a nice small way for users to try the app and then if they hate it, I'm not saving any data. Hooray!

In case folks were wondering, we needed to setup accounts because the app is built on a hybrid platform, meaning one code base compiles to both android and iOS. This means I don't have a great way to store data permanently on the device (for example on iCloud). Years and years ago, I was only storing on the device, and data was constantly wiped whenever there was an app update, or a system update from android or iOS.

What's Next? 🤔

Please take a look at this thread about one of the most commonly requested features: autosaves for everything. I would love love love to get feedback on this. It explains some limitations on why this feature is blocked and what I'm nervous about, and possible solutions.

Another alternative big group of features is some journaling updates.

Also planning to release another Lo Scarabeo deck in April! 💖 Just as an FYI, because we already have an agreement with them, they're a lot easier to work with than a new vendor. That means decks can go up faster. I know folks have voted for different decks, so please don't be disappointed. That data gives me numbers to show potential partners in the future, but I still want to keep up momentum by at least featuring a new deck each month. With new vendors, I have to basically do a whole sales pitch and chase them down (even though I'm giving them money, lol) which is a bit stressful and never a sure thing.