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We're trying a shorter, focused format, in between newsletters. Stories and details we didn't get a chance to share before. Let's take the app: we have just rebuilt it from the ground up.

The best camera screen is already in your pocket, where it ceases to be a distraction - that conviction is the starting point of Pixii. Bluetooth Low Energy is what made that idea real. Unlike classic Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, BLE is designed to link an app and a device seamlessly.

Bluetooth 5 gives us quick photo thumbnails, with some smart compression. It is slower than Wi-Fi, yes. But the uncomplicated, instant connection really makes the difference. Well — at least on the iPhone. Android is a story of its own, and it's where this rebuild begins.

For the first Pixii app release, iOS was the only platform where BLE could be trusted. On Android, support varied with handset makers and Bluetooth chips inside: scanning would work or not, connecting was a dice draw. Wi-Fi was slower to come up, but the safer bet for Android users.

Over the last three years, Android BLE improved — finally getting the equivalent of Apple's L2CAP, an advanced API for high-throughput, reliable Bluetooth channels. It took some more time to become dependable and available on more phones. At that point, we could undertake an Android Bluetooth rewrite.

So we did it. The result: links that hold steady through an entire transfer, fewer retries, for faster photo syncs. And safer scanning and connection, now that the Android ecosystem had matured.

One thing was essential: preserving the user interface. Its simplicity is what our users appreciate most. We build the app with React Native, one codebase running natively on both platforms, so every upgrade had to leave both versions standing.

That rewrite came at a price: three consecutive framework upgrades — each time we were getting close, another Android API change required us to move one version further. But the design stayed throughout — and the upgrades paid us back underneath: better framerates, smoother transitions, and an ultra-fast scroll for the camera roll, on both platforms.

On that base, we reworked the photo-sync logic too, with systematic tests for the scenarios that hurt: transmission errors, retries, reconnections. When the camera reaches Wi-Fi mid-transfer, it can now switch over immediately, without draining the whole Bluetooth queue first.

Pixii has been the first camera to update over the air. Just like a smartphone. From your phone, every layer of the camera stays current: the boot firmware — the low-level processor that, among other things, drives the battery charger; the camera software — menus, exposure, image processing; and even the FPGA, the component that lets us drive the sensor at full speed.

And the app returns the favor: it updates itself, transparently, between store releases. When we fix something, you have the fix the next morning — no App Store round-trip. After all these years, we are still probably seen as a UFO in this industry.

Here is my favorite measure of the whole rebuild. When the camera's new exposure controls landed — Highlight Protection, now a five-step ladder, and the brand-new Lens Correction — adding them to the app took about an hour. One hour, from design to shipped, on both platforms. After months of foundation work, that hour felt very good.

Both controls are mirrored in the app, ready to dial in from your pocket. They deserve a letter of their own. We'll tackle that soon.

Thank you for reading. Until next time.

— David & the Pixii team