II · AriCore · Changelog

AriCore releases.

What shipped, when, and why. Only real releases — no nightly churn.

v0.5.1
2026 · May
Current

Smarter memory · quieter Ari

The follow-up to the v0.5 surface push. Memory stops writing the same fact six different ways, dreams know what you've already told them, and a handful of small chrome decisions make the home screen calmer.

Changed — Memory
  • Activity vs. trait. Memories now have an activity category — one-off sessions, errands, "I went to the gym today" — separated from durable traits like "Alex prefers PostgreSQL". Activities fade from injection after a week or two and get pruned later, so they inform context without being permanent.
  • Similarity deduplication. Before writing a new memory the assistant compares it to existing ones. A near-match gets merged or skipped instead of creating "Alex is called Alex" three times.
  • "Already known" gate. The extraction prompt sees a compact list of what's already on file so it stops re-proposing the same trait every conversation.
Changed — Dreams
  • Dream pipeline checks itself for duplicates. When a dream wants to write a new memory it runs the same near-duplicate check; if a match is found it rewrites the proposal as an update (merging context into the existing fact) instead of creating a fresh duplicate.
  • Swipe to dismiss the dream card. Pull the card right, reveal a "Not tonight" backdrop, release and it folds. Dismissal is schedule-aware — if you'd set the card to always visible, dismissing flips it to schedule mode aimed at the next 19:00 window. Changing visibility settings clears the hold.
Changed — Look & feel
  • Foxglove leans pink. The Foxglove palette and its six Solar Hours variants shifted from purple/lilac into a clearer pink identity (bg #E6C8DC, accent #B22D7E).
  • The mode switcher floats. The CODE / SOLO / ONE / DESK pill no longer sits on a banded background — it floats over the page, and each home screen reserves its own top padding so nothing crowds it.
  • Completed routines marked with an X. The From Ari rail draws a small hand-inked X inside the timeline dot for routine entries you've ticked off, so completed and pending sit at a glance.
Fixed
  • The default Ari persona could be published (or installed from another user) via the marketplace — now blocked at both ends so the default never gets shadowed.
  • Memory cap pruning now removes expired activities first before touching durable traits.
  • Tutorial copy rewritten across all 12 chapters in plain user-facing language — no more SwiftData / Keychain / WebKit jargon explaining things to the user.
v0.5.0
2026 · May

iCloud sync · the Marketplace · personas as a tab

The biggest AriCore release since launch. Your conversations, memories, personas, notes and canvases now follow you across iPhone, iPad and Mac through your private CloudKit. A new public Marketplace lets you share plugins, skills and personas with everyone else running AriCore. And Personas finally has its own tab in the Solo bottom bar.

New — iCloud sync
  • Everything that lives on your device now syncs across your devices. Threads, memories, personas, notes, ONE canvases, study courses, dreams, plugins — all routed through your private iCloud. Apple operates the infrastructure; we have no access to any of it.
  • Sign in once, work anywhere. Open AriCore on a second device signed into the same iCloud account, give it a few seconds to pull, and your full state is there. A first-launch splash holds the UI briefly while CloudKit imports.
  • Local-only fallback. No iCloud account, or sync disabled? AriCore still works fully on-device. Sync resumes the moment you sign in.
New — Marketplace
  • Share plugins, skills and personas. A community gallery, opt-in, backed by the public CloudKit database. Anyone with AriCore can read it; you publish only what you choose to. Comments, star ratings, install counts, flagging.
  • Pick a handle once. The first time you publish you claim a display handle. Your email is never visible to anyone — author identity uses an opaque per-account identifier derived from your iCloud user record.
  • Edit or delete your own. Items you published are editable and deletable from inside the app, with deletion removing them from the public surface.
  • Light-touch moderation. Items with multiple flags are hidden pending review. The default Ari persona is locked out of publishing so it can't be shadowed by a copy.
New — Personas tab
  • Personas gets its own bottom-bar tab. Sitting between Study and Browse in Solo mode, with a theatre-masks icon. The old route through Settings stays, but the tab makes switching personas a single tap instead of three.
Changed
  • Tutorial rewritten end-to-end. All 12 chapters reflect the four-mode (CODE / SOLO / ONE / DESK) shape of the app and are written in plain user-facing language instead of developer jargon.
v0.4.3
2026 · May

Certificates · the dream sky

Finish a course and you get a framed certificate, scored on your final exam, ready to share. Dreams get their own painted visual identity — a cosmic sky behind every dream surface.

New — Study
  • Certificate of completion — when you finish a course the celebration card becomes a framed plaque: double gold border, ornament strips, your final-exam grade in a wax-seal medallion, the date awarded. Animates in on first view.
  • Curriculum shows the exact exam points — the curriculum card now reads "14 sessions · midpoint exam at 7" and the expanded view places the MIDPOINT EXAM and FINAL EXAM dividers proportionally between modules. Numbers match exactly what the scheduler will do.
  • 12-day course option — for shorter crash courses. Joins 21, 42, 90.
New — Dreams
  • Painted night sky — the dream card on the threads screen and the full dream report sheet both get a hand-painted cosmic background: crescent moon, orbital rings around a glowing sun, drifting clouds along the horizon, mountain silhouettes, a reflective body of water beneath. Soft black gradients on top so the white serif headlines and mono captions stay legible regardless of where the cloud highlights land.
  • Reveal pacing — opening the dream report fades the sky in behind the header before the proposal cards animate up beneath it. The feature has a moment of its own instead of just being another sheet.
Changed
  • Exam scheduling rewritten. The midpoint and final exams now fire on the right session count regardless of what the spine generator emits — a runaway estimatedSessions is capped at module count × 4 so exams stay within reach.
  • Ghost activities filtered. If the model emits a free-response, cloze or code block without using it, the UI no longer renders a dead card you can't dismiss. Backed by an authoritative activitiesUsed declaration in the session schema.
  • Stuck detection — the "Generating next session…" placeholder now flags itself stuck when the LLM stream goes silent (a real signal, not a wall-clock timer) and offers a one-tap retry.
  • Background-task cancellation propagates — when iOS reclaims a background-execution slot, in-flight generation Tasks now cancel cleanly so the "still generating" flag never gets wedged across foreground/background cycles.
Fixed
  • Dream card tap area extended past its visible rounded corners; contentShape + GeometryReader now pin the hit region exactly to the card.
  • PDF workbook export rendered alternating pages upside-down on CoreText's flipped CTM; rewritten on TextKit with native pagination.
  • Completing a lesson while activities were locked sometimes left the screen frozen on the lesson body until the next render; finalization is now fire-and-forget with an inline grading shimmer on the post-completion view.
v0.4.2
2026 · May

Workbook export · branch into the next course

Every completed course can be exported as a PDF workbook — lessons, your answers, the tutor's grades. And when you finish, Ari suggests where to go next, branching from what you've already covered.

New
  • PDF workbook export — the entire course as a typeset PDF, styled in AriCore's warm-cream palette. Cover with goal + duration + grade summary, the full curriculum spine, every session's lesson body, quiz with your answers shaded green/red, locked free-response and code answers with the tutor's per-item feedback, and exam results. One-tap share-sheet from the completion screen.
  • Branching course suggestions — finish a course and Ari proposes a logical next one drawn from what you just learned. You can write a short feedback note ("struggled with conjugation", "wanted more idioms") and Ari shapes the next spine around it. The new course knows what the old one covered and won't re-teach it.
  • Completed courses stay visible — a "Completed" section at the bottom of the Study tab keeps every finished course one tap away for re-export or branching.
  • AI disclaimer at the foot of the Study tab — "AI may produce inaccurate results — check anything before taking it as complete truth."
Changed
  • "Lock-in" activity model — cloze, free-response, and code blocks no longer fire an LLM grade on their own button. Locking commits your answer; grading runs in one batch when you tap COMPLETE LESSON. The lesson body, quiz, and locked activities stay on screen with their answers visible right up until the session finalizes.
  • Quiz submit is local — submitting the quiz no longer immediately advances the session. Per-question feedback shows inline, lesson stays visible, COMPLETE LESSON at the bottom of the pack is the actual session-finalizer.
  • Overnight bake — next lessons are pre-generated by an iOS background task that only fires when the device is plugged in and charging. The post-completion footer is honest about it: "We'll prep your next lesson while your phone is plugged in tonight." If you want it now, there's a BEGIN NEXT SESSION NOW button that triggers live generation.
v0.4.1
2026 · April

Studying, and Dreaming

Two new pieces of AriCore land together. Study is a top-level tab for self-paced courses on anything — Ari designs the curriculum, generates a lesson a day, quizzes you, runs exams. Dreams let the assistant reflect on its own time, while the device charges, and propose what it learned.

New — Study
  • Study tab — a new top-level Solo tab. Spin up a course from a topic and a goal in a single form: daily-minutes budget (5/10/20/30), course length (12/21/42/90 days), and your prior knowledge level. Ari designs the curriculum spine — modules with named concepts — and starts generating lessons.
  • Volume-aware curriculum — the generator scales depth to total hours of learning time, not just calendar days. A 21-day × 30-min bootcamp goes harder than a 21-day × 5-min overview; lessons, quizzes, and activity counts scale with the budget.
  • Activities — every session gets a lesson body (rendered as markdown) and a multi-choice quiz. Optional add-ons: cloze blanks for language and key-term recall, free-response prompts with rubric-graded feedback, and code exercises on programming courses (with starter code, language hints, and a rubric the tutor grades against).
  • Midpoint + final exams — exams fire automatically at the spine's midpoint and at the end. Multi-choice plus free-response, with the tutor writing prose feedback. Pass at 70% to advance; below that, you get a fail grade with weak-topic identification and an option to extend the course with focused remediation sessions before the retry.
  • Per-course tutor chat — every course has a chat with its tutor, scoped to the material. Tutors are not personas — they live separately in the Study tab and can't be picked from the persona switcher, so course chats don't bleed into your daily threads.
New — Dreams
  • Dream pipeline — while the device is plugged in and idle, Ari reads recent conversations, reflects on what it learned about you, and gathers proposals for the next day. No silent writes to your data — every proposal goes through your review.
  • Four proposal kinds — memories (one-line facts to remember), skills (small custom tools the model can call), personas (a new persona drafted around a topic you keep returning to), and watchers (background prompts that fire when conditions you care about are met).
  • Dream card — a pinned card on the threads screen that surfaces three states: a "Time to dream" CTA in the evening / on first use, a progress strip while a dream is running, or a count of proposals waiting for review.
  • Dream report — a full-screen review surface, grouped by confidence bucket. Approve, reject, or edit each proposal; cancel an in-flight dream at any point.
  • Isolated skill creator — when a dream proposes a skill, generating it hands off to a separate model context with none of your personal data in scope. The generated skill code never sees your conversations.
  • Tutors stay out — course threads are excluded from the conversation set the dream pipeline gathers, so the assistant doesn't propose "memories" sourced from your Italian-grammar lesson.
Changed
  • Study tutors are isolated from personal context. No tools, no memory writes, no calendar lookups, no appearance in the threads list, no contribution to dreams. "Ask your tutor about today's lesson" stays exactly that — the tutor doesn't know what's on your calendar tomorrow, and won't try to.
  • Study models use the global default. Course chats inherit whichever provider/model you've set as default, with no per-tutor override required.
v0.3.1
2026 · May

Five new themes · weather in Solar Hours · faster Browse

Five new theme palettes, daytime weather drifting across the masthead, and Browse with Ari gets faster and more present in the room.

New
  • Five new theme palettes — Linotype, Foxglove, Verdigris, Crow, and Manuscript. Each one has its own Solar Hours arc that walks the day from pre-dawn through dusk.
  • Daytime weather — Solar Hours now reflects the forecast outside. Drifting clouds, rain, snow, fog, and thunder, all gated by sunlight so they hand off to the starfield at dusk.
  • Browse with Ari grows up — multiple tabs, each with its own conversation. Persistent across launches. History with search, bookmarks with notes Ari can read, find-on-page, reader mode, private tabs, configurable homepage and search engine, and ad blocking baked in.
  • The Ari orb — the chat collapses to a small sun-disc that pulses while Ari is working. The latest message peeks beside it for a few seconds, then fades — so you can keep reading the page.
  • One-tap shortcuts — Summarise this page, Compare open tabs, Remember this page. Everything Ari needs is one menu away.
Changed
  • Web actions are noticeably faster. Ari can scout a page before acting on it, and settles down between steps instead of grinding.
  • Chats keep running when you switch apps. In-flight model turns and browser actions continue through the iOS background window instead of cutting off mid-sentence.
  • Threads list shows the most recent five by default; the rest fold under a "+ more" pill so the screen stays clean.
Fixed
  • Browser, themes, chat — bug fixes.
v0.3
2026 · April

Browse with Ari · sun, moon, and stars

AriCore gets a browser of its own. Ari sits beside the page you're on — read it, summarise it, act on it with your approval. Solar Hours grows a sun, a moon, and a starfield.

New
  • Browse with Ari — a new top-level tab in Solo mode. Visible browser with Ari as a copilot. It can summarise the page, extract things from it, fill forms or click for you with a tap-to-approve.
  • Per-persona memory — what Ari remembers is now scoped per persona instead of global. Each persona can know different things about you.
  • Sun and moon — Solar Hours gains a sun by day and a moon by night, with a soft crossfade through dusk and dawn on the masthead.
  • Starfield + shooting stars — at night under Solar Hours, a constellation appears across the masthead, with the rare shooting star.
  • Visible co-browse for web actions — when Ari fills or clicks on your behalf, you watch the browser sheet drive every step, all approved on a single card up front.
Changed
  • Streaming — composer renders smoother token-by-token, with less jitter on slow decoders.
Fixed
  • Memory, briefings, watchers — bug fixes.
v0.2
2026 · April

Desk mode preview · design overhaul

AriCore gains a third top-level tab — Desk — for chatting with personal agents running inside a paired Aricode. The whole app also moves to a refined Cormorant Garamond display type with a warmer, more deliberate visual rhythm.

New
  • Desk tab — agent list, per-agent chat, approval cards, inline tool-call rendering (browser, terminal, AppleScript, web search). Appears when the paired desktop advertises capabilities.desk.
  • Tool-call cards — tinted per category (browser, terminal, host, web), with expandable details.
  • Approval flow — blocking cards for privileged ops, with an "always allow for this target" rule that gets remembered per-agent.
Changed
  • Typography — display type moves from a generic sans to Cormorant Garamond italic; mono and body fonts unified to IBM Plex.
  • Pairing robustness — reconnect is instant after network flaps; session keys stay valid across device sleeps.
  • Streaming — smoother token rendering, better back-pressure handling on slow decoders.
Fixed
  • Compound-subscript @Observable streaming bug that occasionally dropped mid-sentence tokens in long agent turns.
  • Linked mode chat would scroll to bottom too aggressively when the user was reading history.
  • Pair-QR regenerating on every tab switch in settings.
v0.1
2026 · January

Initial release.

AriCore ships on the App Store. Solo mode runs GGUF quants entirely on-device; Linked mode pairs to an Aricode desktop over end-to-end encryption via a one-time QR.

Included
  • Solo mode — local inference for Qwen, Llama, Gemma quants (4-bit, 5-bit).
  • Linked mode — pair to Mac desktop, bidirectional encrypted chat, streaming replies.
  • Model manager with RAM estimates.
  • Thread persistence on-device (no cloud sync).
  • Light/dark theme, iPad layout, iOS 17+ minimum.