Changelog

Built in the open.

What shipped, what was decided, and why, newest first. An app that asks for this much trust should be watchable while it’s made.

1. July 2026 guides

   The guides get their data

   Five guides now carry the research behind the feeling. Each new chart comes with a data table you can read and the primary source linked underneath: how close-friend counts collapsed between 1990 and 2021, how many people you can really keep up with (Dunbar’s layers), how quickly a friendship cools without contact, the hours it takes to build one, and what the Surgeon General found disconnection costs. Every number was checked against its original source before it went up.

2. July 2026 security

   The full threat model, published

   The working security document behind Clarence now has its own page: the ranked risks, the trust boundaries, the hardening baseline, and the standing rules every line of code is written under. The privacy page keeps the plain-language version and the blog tells the story; the full document is for readers who want to check our work, and it ends with an email address for exactly that.

3. July 2026 guides

   Nineteen guides, and the threat model in plain words

   Two new guides join the shelf: how to keep a text conversation going (and how to end one well, which turns out to be half the trick) and an honest answer to whether the group chat counts as staying in touch. On the blog, the threat model behind an app that reads your messages gets told in plain words: the ways this could go wrong, and the design decision that answers each one.

4. July 2026 site

   Live at getclarence.app

   The site has a real address and the waitlist is open. The guides shelf now stands at seventeen (friendship drift, reconnection, check-ins, hard moments, long distance, family, and the honest tool comparisons), every one written to be useful whether or not you ever install Clarence.

5. July 2026 guides

   Five new guides

   The guides shelf grows from one to six: reconnecting with an old friend after years, replying to a text you ignored for weeks, keeping in touch as an adult, and two honest comparisons (personal CRMs and reminder apps) that name the real alternatives before saying where they fall short. Each one is written to be useful whether or not you ever install Clarence.

6. July 2026 site

   The storefront opens

   This website (the manifesto, the privacy page, pricing, and the waitlist) ships before the app does, on purpose. If Clarence is going to ask to read your messages, the promises should be on the record first, where they can be held against us.

7. July 2026 build

   A window that opens, already locked down

   The Mac app’s foundation is up: an empty window that launches, sandboxed, with no ability to load remote code and a single narrow bridge between what you see and what touches your data. Boring on screen, load-bearing underneath: the security baseline went in before the first feature, not after the last one.

8. June 2026 security

   The threat model, before the first feature

   We wrote down every way an app like this could be attacked or misused (hostile message text, the send path, the drafting AI, leaks of things that were promised discarded), ranked them, and assigned each a design that answers it. It’s a living document every stretch of building re-reads. The public version lives on the privacy page.

9. June 2026 decision

   Clarence comes to the Mac

   The decision that started all this: the Mac is where your real message history lives, and the only place a third-party app can read iMessage at all: locally, with your permission, going nowhere. We proved the heart of it first: the drift-detection engine, run against real message rhythms on a real Mac, found the same people the phone prototype had already validated.

10. Spring 2026 origin

    Where this started

    Clarence began as a phone prototype and one question: can software honestly tell, from rhythm alone (who, when, how often, never the words), which friendships are drifting? It could. The people it surfaced were the right people, the messages got sent, and some conversations that had been quiet for years are not quiet anymore.