A new version of Hikari: the things you asked for

A new version of Hikari came out past week. And the new features, even though I have a pile of my own ideas waiting to be built, all of them came from what users told me.

Hikari is small on purpose. You open it once, you set it up, and from then on it lives in your widget. A short line shows up on your screen through the day, something meant to give you a small mental switch. No feed to scroll. No tracking. No subscription quietly draining your card. You pay once and the app is yours, and you get what you came for plus every improvement that lands later.

The widget is not a feature of Hikari. The widget is Hikari... and here is the thing I did not want to admit for a while: a lot of people never managed to add it. And it surprised me. Not because the app was broken, but because a lot of users did not know they have widgets at all, or that they can add one and set it up.

The gap between what I built and what people could use

I built the widget, tested it on my phone, watched the line appear on my lock screen, and felt done... that was my mistake. It never crossed my mind that people would have trouble turning it on. I had confused "it works on my phone and the widget shows up" with "people can actually use it."

On iOS, an app cannot place its own widget automatically. There is no button or action I can ship that adds it for you. Apple does not allow it. The only path is the one every iOS user supposedly knows. Press and hold the home screen until the icons jiggle, tap the small plus in the corner, search the app by name, pick a size, add it. I had assumed, without really thinking about it, that all of that was obvious.

It is not obvious. Some people opened Hikari, did the setup, and then waited for the widget to show up on its own. It never did, so they closed the app thinking it was broken, when really the best part of it was one step away, behind a gesture nobody had shown them.

That one is fully on me. The platform has a limit, and instead of guiding people across it, I had left them standing at the edge.

So this update starts there

Before I wrote a line of the new flow, I went and studied how the apps that do this well actually do it. The clearest lesson came from how the best onboarding flows treat the widget. They do not shove a tutorial in your face the second you open the app, and they do not auto-add anything. They wait until you have felt why the thing is worth it, and then they offer a short, friendly guide. Pull, not push. Help that arrives when you want it, not a wall you have to climb before you have a single reason to care.

So that is what Hikari does now. You do not get a tutorial the moment you open it. First you reach your first quote, you feel the point of the app, you browse a few lines, you maybe save a couple, and only then does it offer to walk you through putting the widget on your screen. The guide covers both the home screen and the lock screen, because on iOS those are two different flows and mixing them up is exactly the kind of small confusion that loses people. Each step names the actual button, in plain words, one action at a time.

And it does one more thing I am quietly proud of. It checks whether you already added the widget, and if you did, it stops asking. I never wanted Hikari to be one of those apps that keeps nagging you about the same thing forever, long after you have done it. Respecting someone's screen means knowing when to stay quiet. The app can tell who still needs the nudge and who does not, and only the ones who need it ever see it again.

I also stopped treating the manual step as an apology. It is not a bug that iOS makes you add the widget yourself. It is ten seconds of making your phone a little more yours. The copy frames it that way now, because that is what it is.

What the people using it actually asked for

The other big change in this update is also something users asked me for. When a line lands on you, the natural next move is to send it to someone. A friend going through a hard week. A note to read later. Something to share on your social media. The old way of sharing a quote was functional, but depending on what the person wanted it for, it did not always do the job.

So sharing got a real redesign. You can now pick the format you want, a story, a square, a post, and see a preview of exactly how it will look before you send it. The shared image carries the same warmth the app has, the same care with contrast and color, so the quote looks like it came from somewhere that respects it. The point was never to add a share button. The point was to make the thing you share feel as good as the thing you read.

The part nobody asks for but everybody feels

The last piece is less of a headline and more of a debt I wanted to pay. I went through the app and cleaned up the contrast and the colors so the words are easy to read in any light.

This sounds minor until you remember that the entire app is the words. If a line is hard to read in bright morning light, or the soft amber of the night theme swallows the text, then the one thing Hikari exists to do is failing in a way I cannot see from my own desk at my own brightness. So I held the palette to a real accessibility standard, kept the warm amber that makes the app feel like itself, and made sure the text wins over the mood every time. You will probably never notice this change directly. You will just find the words a little easier to read, and not know why.

The new version is on TestFlight now, with the App Store right behind it and already cleared for review. If you are testing it, the widget guide is waiting for you the first time you finish a quote, and I would genuinely love to know whether it helps. That is the next thing I will be listening for.