Quieter under the hood: a quarter spent on reliability

1.12 through 1.12.3 added almost no new buttons. The point was to make the app you already rely on harder to break.

I want to write this one down with specifics, because "we improved stability" tells you nothing, and the actual work is worth being concrete about.

Edits that save themselves

Editing a note used to assume you would leave the screen politely. People do not. They close the app, lose power, get a call, switch apps mid-sentence. So we made edits save themselves. Close Cleft, come back, and your changes are waiting. On the Mac, the app now waits until your work is written to disk before it lets a window close.

A failed note should explain itself

A note that is stuck with no explanation leaves you unsure whether it is working, broken, or gone. So failed notes now give you one clear reason and one tap to try again, and a batch of previously stuck notes became retryable instead of abandoned.

The iPad data-loss path

This is the one I am most glad we caught. On iPad, rotating or entering split view can swap the size class, which rebuilds part of the view tree. The recording surface could get rebuilt while a live session was still running, and the new surface would tear down the session the old one thought it owned. That is a recording lost to a layout change.

The fix was to give recording a single, process-wide notion of ownership (RecordingSurfaceOwnership). When a newer presentation takes over, the superseded one stands down instead of tearing out the live session. The recording surface also got anchored outside the part of the navigation tree that mutates during those swaps. None of this is visible in the UI, but losing a recording to a screen rotation is not something we are willing to ship, so it was worth the time.

Fewer crashes, less drain

Alongside that we eliminated dozens of crash causes across iPhone, Mac, and Watch, removed hangs that caused momentary freezes, and cut unnecessary background activity so the app is easier on your battery.

None of this is exciting to announce, but everything else in Cleft depends on you believing a note will still be there when you come back. That is what the quarter went into.