What's changed
Every release, newest first — this is the complete history.
The app itself only shows you what's changed since you last opened it.
- Settings now has a standing "If you need someone to talk to" section — always there, never triggered by anything you write. The Philippines gets a specific hotline; everywhere else points to findahelpline.com.
- Days with a photo now show a small green square in the calendar, alongside the usual entry dot.
- Milestones in Reflections now list newest first, matching the month list below them, and a long list now scrolls within a fixed height instead of growing the page indefinitely.
- VIASTERRA is now marked ™, next to the wordmark itself. Filed for trademark registration with IPOPHL on 5 September 2026.
- A new "Luck" prompt category, for noticing small good things and the feeling of things going your way.
- Fixed a bug where tapping "Skip introduction" from the very first screen could skip past the one step that adds Viasterra to your home screen.
- The masthead logo is a little bigger, matching the size it already appears at on the marketing site.
- The compass placeholder is gone. The real Viasterra mark now appears everywhere: the masthead, the browser-tab icon, the home-screen icon, and the Add to Home Screen walkthrough.
- The masthead now shows the full logo — mark and name together, as one piece of art — instead of pairing the icon with the name typed out in an ordinary font. The wordmark is hand-drawn, not a font, so this is the first time it has appeared correctly inside the app itself.
- Days with a photo now show a small green square in the calendar, alongside the usual entry dot — so you can see which days had a photo without opening each one.
- Settings now has a standing "If you need someone to talk to" section — always there, never triggered by anything you write. Scanning a private journal for warning signs would be both unreliable and corrosive to honest writing, so it is offered plainly instead. The Philippines gets a specific hotline; everywhere else points to findahelpline.com.
- Fixed a small thing: the icon meaning "this leaves the app" was showing up on the phone-number link, which only makes sense for links that go to a website.
- A new "Luck" prompt category, for noticing small good things and the feeling of things going your way.
- Milestones in Reflections now list newest first, matching the direction the month list below them already reads — the page no longer changes direction partway down. A long list of milestones now scrolls within a fixed height instead of growing the page indefinitely.
- VIASTERRA is now marked ™, next to the wordmark itself. Filed for trademark registration with IPOPHL on 5 September 2026.
- Fixed a bug where tapping "Skip introduction" from the very first screen could skip past the one step that adds Viasterra to your home screen — the step that only ever gets offered once, before there is anything written yet to move. Skip now always lands on that step when one is being offered.
- Saving a copy now offers two sizes, and each says what it weighs before you press it. Photographs are what make a backup heavy — a year of daily ones can outweigh a year of daily pages by a hundred to one — so there is now a text-only copy that leaves them out. Every page still comes back from it; one that had a picture shows a line where the picture was.
- If you ever kept a backup as plain text rather than as a file, there is now a way to bring it back in.
- Demo pages are for looking at rather than writing in, and they no longer travel in your backups — a file you save holds your journal and nothing invented. If you had already written your own words into one, it quietly becomes a page of your own instead of sample text.
- Removing a license now asks first, and offers you the key before it takes it. That key is the only copy the app keeps, and it is not held in a backup either.
- Feedback is an email now rather than a form, which means it reaches a person and nothing passes through anyone else on the way. Both kinds are welcome: what is broken, and what is working.
- Saving a copy from a home-screen app no longer leaves a second, useless file beside the backup.
- Quiet controls — Cancel, Delete, Keep it — now look like controls rather than like the sentences around them.
- If your phone is set to show desktop sites, Viasterra says so. That setting is what makes everything too small to read, and it belongs to the browser rather than to the app.
- Viasterra is for sale from today. If you were already writing here before this, you are a founding writer: your journal stays free, always, and none of what follows applies to you. Nothing you need to do, nothing to pay, ever.
- For anyone starting from today, Viasterra is free until both 60 days and 100 entries have passed — whichever takes longer — counted from your first written page rather than from the day you installed it.
- When that free period ends, only the blank page is withheld. Everything you have written stays readable, searchable, exportable, and editable. A license is needed to begin a new page, and nothing else.
- A license is $29, paid once. It is checked on your own device against a key built into the app, so it works with no connection and nothing is ever sent anywhere to confirm it.
- Founding writers are no longer shown a license box as though something were owed. Settings now says plainly that your journal is free, always, with the key field folded away in case you ever want it.
- Tapping a field on a phone no longer zooms the page in with no way back out.
- Viasterra has moved to app.viasterra.com. If you are still opening it at the old testing address, the app now says so every time, and shows you how to carry your journal across.
- The old address closes on 31 August 2026. Your writing does not travel with the address — a browser stores a journal against the exact address it was written at — so it has to be exported from the old one and brought into the new one by hand. The notice does the export for you in one tap.
- Settings said how long ago you last saved a copy in decimal places — “1.68 days ago”. It now says today, yesterday, or a whole number of days.
- Settings now draws the three steps for adding Viasterra to your home screen, on whichever phone you are holding, and shows the same app in a browser tab beside the installed one so the difference is visible rather than described.
- The same guide now covers computers: Chrome and Edge install Viasterra from a control at the end of the address bar, recent Safari from File — Add to Dock, and it opens in a window of its own. Firefox cannot install web apps, so it is told to use a bookmark instead of being shown a button it does not have.
- Saving a copy on a Mac or PC no longer offers “Save to Files, or send it somewhere”. That route is for phones, and on a computer it could appear and then do nothing at all. The plain download — which already works — is now the main button.
- When a way of saving does not work, the message no longer points at a box that is not on the screen. Whatever it names is now actually there, and the backup text opens by itself when it is needed.
- After a download has already started, the Save a copy box says so instead of silently offering the same thing again.
- The explanation of Export everything and Bring in a backup is in plainer words.
- Demo pages say more plainly that removing them does not touch your own entries.
- The free period now starts when you write your first page, not when you first open the app. Installing it and coming back three weeks later no longer costs you three weeks.
- A backup now carries where your journal stands in its free period, so moving to a new browser or a new address carries it with you rather than starting you over.
- When a free period ends, only the blank page is withheld. Every page you have written stays readable, searchable, exportable and editable — and a license restores new pages the moment you paste it in.
- A rare, gentle question at the foot of Today: do you write in Viasterra on another device? Each one keeps its own journal, so this is the reminder to join them up. Send it away and it stays away for a month.
- LUMEN is now VIASTERRA. Same journal, same writing, same device — only the name on the door has changed. Older notes below still say LUMEN, which is how it was at the time.
- A new mark to go with it: the ring you know, with the dot drawn out into a compass needle.
- The icon in the browser tab is drawn heavier than the one on your home screen, so it stops looking washed out at small sizes.
- Saving a copy now works properly from the home-screen app: it opens the share sheet so you can put the file in Files, AirDrop it, or mail it to yourself. If that route fails, the backup can be shown as plain text and copied by hand.
- The reminder to save a copy now comes early — within a few days of starting to write, rather than after three months. A young journal is the one with no copy of itself anywhere.
- About this journal now explains what deleting the app from your home screen costs, and what to do before you do it.
- The welcome screens now offer to bring in a backup. A reinstalled app looks exactly like a new one, and that is the moment the offer is needed.
- Settings shows how long it has been since you last saved a copy, so the answer is always there rather than only when a reminder appears.
- Saving a copy now reads the file back and counts the pages before telling you it worked.
- The compass now sits beside the name at the top of every screen, so the mark is in the app itself rather than only on your home screen and in the browser tab.
- The settings control in the corner is three dots. It used to draw the app’s own mark, which read as a logo rather than a button.
- The calendar in Journal can be pointed straight at a month and year instead of stepping there. The arrows are still fine for a hop or two back.
- The month in Journal now spans the page, in line with the search field and the entries beneath it, instead of sitting in a narrow box on the left.
- The main button on Today, Journal and Reflections is now the same size on every page.
- Today, Journal and Reflections now open at the same size and wrap the same way. The headings on the two empty pages were smaller than Today’s and squeezed into a narrow column, so they broke over three lines where Today used one.
- A new first screen asks you to acknowledge, before you write anything, that this journal lives on this device and nowhere else. The three welcome screens are unchanged; this comes after them, and it is the one screen that cannot be skipped.
- Before a first copy exists, a quiet line on Today says so and stays until it is no longer true — and once there are seven pages, the app interrupts once to explain what that means. Once, not repeatedly.
- About this journal is more exact about privacy: the app still never sends a word of your writing anywhere, and it now also says that whoever hosts a website can add scripts to its pages — naming any it finds on this one.
- Milestones: mark a page as a moment worth remembering, and see them all on a timeline in Reflections. Mark one while writing, from the finished page, or straight from the Journal list.
- A long entry no longer jumps away from the cursor while you type.
- Long words and pasted links now wrap instead of running off the side of the screen.
- The "newer version" notice sits properly on a phone screen instead of running off the edge.
- Updates now appear as soon as they are published, rather than after a delay of up to ten minutes.
- Settings now carries a short anonymous feedback form, if you have something to say about the app.
- The Journal calendar now shows the dates, with a small mark under the days you wrote on.
- Photographs: add pictures to a page, kept as polaroids.
- LUMEN now opens without a connection once you have used it once.
- An occasional, dismissible reminder to save a backup copy.
- About this journal, in Settings, explaining where your writing lives.
- Text throughout is darker and easier to read in daylight.
- Backups now carry edits and deletions between devices, not just new pages.
- The first version: Today, Journal and Reflections, written and kept entirely on your own device.
VIASTERRA was called LUMEN until 23 August 2026. The notes from before
that date use the old name, which is how they were written at the time.