Twelve of the twenty-nine items on our public roadmap are finished, including one that was scheduled for spring 2027. The next block is Karma and everything around it: points, levels, streaks and badges. Below is what landed this year, what we are building now, and the parts we have not answered well yet.
What shipped this year
Two full quarters are closed. The first one covered the basics that a young app is embarrassed to be missing: password recovery, sign-in with Apple and Google, photos on gifts, better wishlist sharing, and push notifications that actually arrive.
The second quarter went into the social half of the product:
- Event wishlists with a date, so a list can belong to a birthday rather than to a person in general
- Birthday reminders that nudge your friends a month, two weeks, a week and a day ahead
- Auto-fill from a link: paste a product URL and the title, photo and price come in on their own
- Thank-you notes with a photo, visible only to the person who gave the gift
- "I got it", so an owner can close a gift themselves
- Anonymous giving, where the owner sees that someone is preparing a gift but not who
Group gifts arrived three quarters early. They were scheduled for the 2027 block, we built them sooner, and the roadmap card moved: up to ten people can now prepare one gift together.
The most recent release added a guide inside the app: thirteen short walkthroughs with screenshots, reachable from Settings and from every empty screen. We wrote it up separately in how to use Gift Buddy.
What we are building now
The fourth quarter of 2026 is Karma. As published on the roadmap, it breaks into four parts: points for real activity in the app, levels that unlock profile badges and colours, streaks with a small flame on your profile for consecutive days, and achievement badges with four rarity tiers.
The reason to build it is not the badges. Gifting is seasonal, and a gifting app is empty for eleven months if nothing brings people back between birthdays. Karma is our attempt to make the quiet months feel like something other than an abandoned list.
What is hard right now
Points that cannot be farmed
Any points system invites someone to game it. Add ten fake gifts, follow twenty strangers, tap a button every morning. The work here is not the counter, it is the rules around it: daily limits, points that only count when a gift actually reaches someone, and a level curve that rewards a person who gives twice a year over a person who logs in daily and gives nothing. We would rather push Karma back a quarter than launch a leaderboard that celebrates a grinder.
Money, and why group gifts do not touch it
The most requested feature we have deliberately not built is splitting the bill. Shared preparation shipped, shared payment did not. The moment an app holds money between two users, it inherits refunds, chargebacks, disputes, tax questions, and a different class of regulation in every country we operate in. Ten people coordinating one gift solves most of the real problem: they agree on who buys and settle up the way they already do, in whatever app they use for money.
Features we removed from the plan
Comments on gifts were on the roadmap and we cut them. The idea was that people would discuss a gift before buying it. But the thing they needed to discuss, "is anyone else already buying this", was already answered by claiming: the gift changes status the moment somebody takes it, and everybody else sees it. That is covered in how claiming prevents duplicate gifts. What remained was a comment thread under someone's wish, with moderation, notifications, and a fresh way to spoil a surprise. Cutting a planned feature is harder than adding one, and it is usually the better call.
Moving to our own backend
The app used to run on a hosted backend service. This year it moved to our own API, which is the kind of work nobody notices when it goes well. It bought us realtime updates we control, a reminder schedule that runs on our own clock, and push notifications that do not depend on someone else's quota. It took months and produced exactly zero new features for the people using the app.
What is not coming
There is no web version of the app, and none is planned for this year. Public profile links open in a browser so you can send your list to someone who has not installed anything, but everything else lives in the app: on iPhone today, on Android once the build clears testing.
Tell us what to build next
The roadmap is public on purpose, including the parts we have not started. If something on it matters to you, or something missing from it matters more, write to us through the support page. If enough people ask for the same thing, it moves up the list. That is how group gifts ended up shipping a year early.
If you are new here, start with the guide to every screen and add a single gift. The rest of the app makes more sense once your list has one thing in it.
