What I'm not doing in 2026

It’s the first day of 2026. The pleasant tradition of writing public roadmaps has already begun on every developer corner of the internet, and I’m sure most of them are sincere.

I’d like to do the opposite. Here is what I am not doing this year.

Not adding a single advertising SDK

Lagerland Apps has zero third-party tracking SDKs across the entire catalogue. No analytics. No advertising networks. No “anonymized” telemetry that quietly fingerprints. That isn’t going to change in 2026, and it isn’t going to change because someone offers an attractive revenue share, either. The first time I add an ads SDK is the first time the studio’s whole positioning collapses.

Not chasing a ten-app year

The catalogue today is fourteen apps. I don’t need a fifteenth, sixteenth, twentieth. The studio is one person, and the surface area is already at the limit of what one person can support thoughtfully. If I ship a new app this year, it will be because the idea is good enough to displace something else — not because the calendar said it was time.

Not turning anything into a daily-engagement product

Several of the apps would be more “successful” by App Store metrics if I added streaks, daily notifications, badges, or social comparison. Taskful Day would convert harder if I shipped a streak counter. AfterShift would have a higher retention curve with a daily nag. I am not doing any of that. I’d rather have a smaller userbase that doesn’t resent me.

Not chasing AI features for AI’s sake

This is the one I expect the most disagreement on. I use language models in my own workflow. I think they’re useful. I will absolutely add genuine AI capability to apps where it earns a place — Observa’s plain-language interpretation of HRV is one example, Chessful’s mistake explanation is another. But “tap here to summarize your day with AI” buttons that don’t change anything are noise, and I’d rather ship no AI feature than a fashionable one.

Not raising

There is no funding round in the plans for 2026. I don’t need one. The studio is small, the apps are profitable, and adding investors to a one-person operation would mean adding ambitions that don’t fit. The honest version of “we’re not raising right now” is “we don’t want to.”

Not going dark

The other thing I’m not doing is disappearing. This journal is new, and I plan to write more honestly through 2026 than I have in any previous year — including when things go wrong, which they will. There will be shipping notes, rebrand stories, post-mortems on pricing experiments, and quiet essays about why a particular feature exists. None of it on a content-marketing schedule. All of it because there’s something worth saying.

What does this mean for the apps in 2026?

For the apps you might already use, the practical answer to “what’s coming in 2026” is more of the same: better refinements, fewer additions, the same privacy posture, the same one-time-or-honest-freemium pricing. For new apps that ship this year, the bar will be high and the count will be low. Good.

If that’s the kind of studio you want to use software from, you’re in the right place. If you want a studio that ships fifteen new features a quarter and live-streams its OKRs, there are several excellent ones — and I mean that — but it isn’t this one.

Welcome to 2026.