AriCore v0.5 — iCloud sync, the Marketplace, and a smarter assistant

From the start, AriCore has been deliberately small in scope: an assistant on a single phone, with everything on-device, no accounts, no servers. That posture isn't going anywhere — the privacy contract still holds. But two of the most common pieces of feedback we've heard are "I want this on my iPad too" and "can I share my persona with my partner". v0.5 answers both, without giving up the thing that made AriCore feel safe.

This post covers the four big additions in the v0.5 line — iCloud sync, the Marketplace, the new Personas tab, and a quietly smarter memory pipeline — plus the small polish that came with v0.5.1.

iCloud sync

AriCore now uses Apple's CloudKit to fan your data out across your own devices. Threads, memories, personas, ONE canvases, notes, study courses, dreams, plugins — all of it follows your iCloud account. Open AriCore on a second iPhone, your iPad, or your Mac (once a Mac build lands), wait a few seconds for the first import, and your full state is there.

The important word in that paragraph is private. Sync runs through your personal iCloud account. Apple operates the infrastructure. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest in your iCloud. We have no access to it, by design — CloudKit explicitly forbids developers from reading the private records their apps create, and we run no server-side component that could read it anyway. There is nothing for us to leak because there is nothing on our end at all.

There's nothing to configure. If you're signed into iCloud and you have iCloud enabled for AriCore in iOS Settings, sync just works. If you're signed out, AriCore falls back to local-only operation and the app still works fully on-device; sign in later and sync resumes automatically. The same is true if you sign out — local state stays where it is. No silent uploads, no surprise downloads.

The Marketplace

The second big addition is a community gallery for sharing the things you build inside AriCore: plugins (JavaScript extensions for ONE mode), skills (small tools Ari can call), and personas (full assistant configurations — system prompt, default model, tool allowlist, the lot).

The Marketplace sits on the same CloudKit container as private sync, but in its public database — visibly shared, by design, where private sync is invisibly per-account. The two never touch each other's data.

Publishing

Nothing is published unless you tap Publish. Before your first publication you pick a public handle — a display name everyone else sees attached to your contributions. Your email is never visible to anyone. Author identity uses an opaque, stable token derived from your iCloud user record, which means you can be consistent across your contributions without exposing personally identifying information.

Items you publish are editable and deletable from inside the app. Edit republishes the same record; delete removes it from the public gallery. (Copies anyone has already installed remain on their devices — there's no remote-kill button.)

Installing

Every install shows you the source first. Plugins display their full JavaScript before they touch ONE. Skills display their tool definition and what they're allowed to call. Personas display their system prompt and tool allowlist. Nothing runs without your tap. This is the same review model the existing on-device Skill Library uses; we extended it to user-published content.

Moderation

Anyone can flag anything. Items with multiple flags are hidden from the gallery pending review. The default Ari persona is locked out of publishing — you can't share the bundled persona, and you can't install someone else's copy of it — so the default never gets shadowed by a similarly-named impostor. That's the only built-in guardrail; everything else relies on the install-review screen actually showing you what you're agreeing to.

Personas, finally, as a tab

A small but long-overdue navigation change. Personas now has its own bottom-bar tab in Solo mode, sitting between Study and Browse, with a theatre-masks icon. The old route through Settings still works, but the tab makes switching between your work, home and research personas a single tap instead of three. No new persona functionality — just less friction reaching what's already there.

A smarter assistant

v0.5 also fixes two recurring annoyances: the assistant writing the same memory six different ways, and dreams proposing memories that overlap with ones you already have.

Memory now decays — selectively

Memories have always had a category — fact, preference, project. We added a fourth: activity. It covers one-off context like "went to the gym today" or "shipped the v0.5 release on Monday" — true at the time, useful for a few days, irrelevant by next month. Activities fade from the injection block after a week and a half or so, then drop out of recall, and get pruned from the store later. Durable traits stay durable; transient context stops outcompeting them for the limited per-turn memory budget.

Dedup at write time

Before any new memory is written — whether by the auto-extraction pass after a turn, or by the dream pipeline overnight — a similarity check compares it against what's already on file. Near-matches get merged into the existing entry instead of stacking a duplicate. The extraction prompt also sees a compact list of what's already known, so it stops proposing facts you've already saved.

Practical effect: the model can stop writing "Alex's name is Alex" three different ways in a single afternoon. (We tested this.)

Dreams check for duplicates too

The dream pipeline runs the same near-duplicate check before proposing a new memory. If a dream wants to write something that overlaps with an existing memory, it rewrites the proposal as an update — merging context into the existing entry — instead of creating a fresh duplicate.

Swipe to dismiss the dream card

The pinned dream card on the threads screen now responds to a horizontal drag. Pull it right, a "Not tonight" backdrop reveals; release past the threshold and the card folds. Dismissal is schedule-aware — if you'd set the card to always visible, dismissing flips it to schedule mode aimed at the next scheduled dream window. Changing visibility preferences in Settings clears the hold, so switching back to always re-shows the card immediately. (If you actually want a dream now, the tap target on the card body still opens the report sheet — drag and tap don't fight each other.)

Small polish in v0.5.1

v0.5.0 shipped the surfaces; v0.5.1 is the dot-release for everything that wanted another pass.

• The mode switcher floats. The CODE / SOLO / ONE / DESK pill at the top of every home screen no longer sits on a translucent banded background — it floats over the page, and each home screen reserves its own top padding so nothing gets crowded.
• Foxglove leans pink. The Foxglove theme palette (and its six Solar Hours variants) shifted from purple/lilac into a clearer pink identity. If you had Foxglove active before the update it'll come back warmer and brighter; existing tokens kept their roles, only the colour values moved.
• 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.
• Tutorial rewritten. All twelve chapters reflect the four-mode (CODE / SOLO / ONE / DESK) shape of the app and are written in plain user-facing language. No more developer-speak slipping into screens the user actually reads.

What's next

v0.5 closes out the "make AriCore feel like a real app, not a single-device tool" arc. v0.6 will be about depth — sharper personas, better tool composition for the assistant, and starting to fold ONE and Solo together where it makes sense (right now they're effectively distinct surfaces with their own data; a unified canvas would let dreams reflect across them). We're also planning a v0.6 pass on the Marketplace based on what actually gets shared in v0.5 — the moderation contract is deliberately minimal in v1, but if patterns emerge that need more support, they will.

The longer arc remains the same as the day AriCore shipped: a personal assistant that lives where your data lives, with your devices doing the work, and no middleman between you and the model.