We have been getting swamped with emails (and even calls!) about Zen Jar and Gymboss lately, so I wanted to let everyone know the status of those apps.

When Apple released iOS 5, we were shocked to discover that a lot of older apps completely broke.  I’m still not sure exactly what caused it, because the SDK is so drastically different its hard to pinpoint exactly which change caused the failure.  Zen Jar and Gymboss are actually two of our oldest apps, now over two years old!  Hard to believe they have been out that long, but in those two years, those two apps have accumulated millions of users — There are somewhere around 50,000 active users of Zen Jar, and literally millions of users of the Gymboss timer.

Since we started building apps pretty much from the launch of the Apple App Store, a lot of our older apps are based on an older iOS SDK.  Zen Jar and Gymboss are two such apps, based on iOS 3.  Obviously a lot has changed between iOS 3 and iOS 5 — remember iOS 3 didn’t have multitasking, didn’t have push notifications, didn’t have copy/paste — the list goes on and on.

At any rate, the short story is that the iOS 5 issue hit us completely by surprise.  We had always planned on making a new, improved version of Zen Jar but hadn’t scheduled it, and we were actually in the preproduction phase of a new Gymboss 2 timer app when iOS 5 struck.  But we also had several other projects on our plate at the time.

So we are working on new versions of those apps! And they will be leaps and bounds above the original versions, but as I’m sure you can imagine building an app takes time.  We’re working as fast as we can though.

In the meantime, please feel free to post a comment here for either of those two apps telling us what you’d like to see in Gymboss 2 and Zen Jar 2.  We have some ideas, but we’d love to hear what the users want!