Newsletter · May 2026

Dear friends,

First, the good news. Version 1.4.3 is out, and it fixes the issue some of you had with reminders not showing in the Reminders view. It is rolling out gradually over the coming days, so if your app has not updated yet, you can get it straight away from the App Store. Thank you for your patience while we worked it out.

A letter from Panos

This note comes from me, Panos. Emma and I are the two people behind Prayminder, and the work that filled my month sits on the engineering side, so I wanted to write to you directly and be honest about what it takes to keep something like this running.

Early in the month, a few of you let us know that reminders were not appearing inside the app. Our first investigations turned up nothing, and everything worked perfectly on our own test devices, which is often the hardest kind of problem to solve.

Here is one way to picture it. Imagine the code as a small crew of robots working together in a kitchen. One cracks the egg, another holds the bowl underneath to catch it. Most of the time they move in perfect sync, but every so often the robot holding the bowl wipes it clean at exactly the wrong moment, and the egg ends up down the drain instead of in the mix. Nothing looks broken. The timing is simply off by a hair.

Two things made it harder. We keep your prayers on your own device for your privacy, which means I genuinely cannot look inside the phones where these issues appear. And new iOS updates arrived in the same period, which can quietly shift the timing of all those little robot hands. It took close to three weeks of focused work to chase it down.

You might be thinking, how hard can this be? Just send the reminder and show it in the app. A lot of our effort goes precisely into making it feel that simple. To give you a sense of the scale underneath, the part of the app that handles reminders runs to more than 9,000 lines of code, and the fix in 1.4.3 touches more than 2,500 of them. Every new feature you ask for, and I do want to build them, also widens the space where bugs like this can hide.

None of this is new to software engineering. The difference is that larger products are kept stable by teams of engineers working together, and here it is one person. As much as one person paired with AI tools can do, there are moments when it feels like we are reaching past what we can realistically hold.

It is easy to assume that an app like Prayminder has a team behind it, supported by a church or by larger donors. That is not our situation, and the reality is more modest than you might expect. We have no organization or church funding behind us, so there is no salaried team. Donations cover less than a third of what it costs to run each month, and the rest comes out of our own pockets. Some days that overwhelms me, and I wonder whether I am naive to think we can carry on this way.

I do not know how we will make it. What I believe is that the calling to build Prayminder is something God placed on both our hearts, Emma's and mine, and if it is within His will, then He already knows how the story continues. What is impossible for man is possible for God.

We will keep going, and keep praying for His will to be done. Our hope is that He might use Prayminder to help cover the world in prayer.

With gratitude, Panos

If you would like to support Prayminder, you can do so here. Thank you for being part of this.