Hamdam 2.0

The bigger things

1. Roots, rebuilt around people

   A family is not a list of names. Roots now holds a graph of people, the links between them, and the meaning attached to each one. The Family Universe lays faces out in tiers by generation with threads drawn between parent and child, and a stepper walks you back through the generations. Every person has a page of their own: their face, their dates, the stories told about them, and what they are connected to.

2. Ask an Elder

   Hand your phone to your grandmother and let her answer in her own voice. Hamdam records it, keeps it, and writes down the words afterwards. The audio is the thing being kept, so it is saved first and saved regardless: if the words cannot be made out, or the language is not one the transcriber knows, you still have her voice. Family Wisdom gathers what has been said into something the family can read together.

3. Your family, from their own iCloud

   Until now Hamdam was one phone and one person. Now you can invite your sister and she joins the same family from her own Apple ID. Three promises hold it up. Nothing of your own life leaves you, so she sees the family and never a reflection, a mood or a health reading. Shared things are never copied into her account, they live once in yours and she is granted access, so revoking it actually takes it back. And there is no database of ours anywhere in it, because it is Apple's own sharing and Apple's own privacy contract, not a server we run.

4. Private messages inside the family

   The people you can message are exactly the people already in your family, so there is no address book, no account and nobody to add. Messages are closed end to end: the body of what you write is encrypted before it leaves the device and Apple cannot read it, and neither can we. The conversation reaches the Watch too. Messaging is part of Hamdam Plus.

5. The Watch stands on its own

   The Watch used to show whatever the phone had last written down for it. Turn the phone off and the wrist showed yesterday. Now it owns the same things the phone owns. The whole verse catalogue is on the Watch rather than a subset of it. It works out its own membership instead of being told. It reads the family and the family conversation directly. It can record a voice on the wrist, and the phone writes the words down later. There are five complications now, including one for what happened on this day, Control Centre controls, and the Smart Stack is told when a card is worth showing.

6. Everything comes back after a reinstall

   Your reflections and your family already came back, because they live in your iCloud. Your settings did not: language, home country, your name, and every toggle you had set went back to default and the app behaved like a stranger. Now the settings follow you too. The ones that cannot follow you do not pretend to, because a permission belongs to a device and not to a person: Health, calendar and music access are asked for again on the new phone, and Your Hamdam says plainly what a reinstall brings back and what it does not.

7. Apple Intelligence underneath, never in front

   Version 2 uses the on device model in English, and only while Apple Intelligence is switched on in Hamdam's Settings. It reads the names, places and years in a recording and offers them for you to confirm, drafts a short story from an elder's recording for you to correct before you keep it, notices what keeps returning in your own reflections, and writes the daily reflection and a few short lines around the app. Linking what it finds to your family is done by the app's own rules, and a model never decides what Today shows first. In Farsi, Hamdam uses its own written library throughout. What it never does is pick the poem. The verse, the faal, the symbols in a poem and the reading of it all come from the app's own sourced library. A model has no vote anywhere a reader might mistake its guess for scholarship.

8. Today, Reflections and the Garden, reworked

   Today leads with a title row carrying both calendars, the greeting steps back, the verse plate is named, and your family comes before the fold with a face on it. After eight in the evening there is a recap of what your day held and what was around you, and it is never a score. Reflections is four clear segments, and a moment can now carry a mark for how it felt. The Garden has three coaches rather than a mixed list: Body takes movement, sleep, recovery and food; Spirit takes breath, pause, stillness and a stretched day; Mind takes the rest. A poem can be opened for a short reading and for the symbols it is built from, both from the app's own library. The breath guide has a voice beside the two bells. And there is a Kiosk, which reads RSS and Atom feeds you choose, with nothing bundled and nothing on Today.

The smaller things

• Yearly is now the tier the paywall opens on, and the one marked as recommended.
• A moment like Mehregan can be opened, and the app says plainly everything it can do for that day.
• Wellbeing is now called تندرستی in Farsi.
• A pass over every Farsi string in the app, for wording, spacing and the right Persian letters.
• Right to left layout corrected across the app. The Roots carousel had been flipped twice, which made the screen slide sideways.
• You can set a photo for a family member from their own page, and saving a birthday now tells you it saved.
• The spacing at the top of the four main screens is the same on all of them.
• The sun stopped being drawn as a grey disc against a bright sky.
• Overcast skies that had no light source at all now carry a veiled one, and dusk got a cooler zenith.
• The caption on a recitation now names the part that surprises people, instead of repeating itself.
• The Watch's Today page was empty for a reader whose language and country had not both been published. It is not any more.
• The Watch's settings screen said Free to people who were paying. It asks for itself now.
• A family invitation could not be opened by the person who received it. It can now.