What's New in ComposerDeck: September 2026

Notifications, finally visible

A bell now sits in the studio header, on desktop and on your phone. Likes on your takes, replies to your comments and badges you earn land there as they happen, and one tap opens the take in question.

Here is the embarrassing part: the plumbing had been running quietly for months. Every like and every reply was being recorded, and nobody could see any of it. If you ever wondered whether anyone heard your take, the answer was probably yes. Now you will know.

Every shared take gets a real page

Share a take and the link now opens a proper page: the brief you drew, card by card, the audio player, your name, and a way into the app. It works without signing in, it looks right in iMessage and Slack, and for the first time search engines can find the music this community makes.

Before this, a shared link landed on the app itself, which is deliberately hidden from search engines. Your friends had to wait for a JavaScript bundle to load before hearing anything, and social previews were blank. Those pages are also listed in the sitemap now, so a take you are proud of can be discovered by someone who never heard of ComposerDeck.

The challenge went weekly

Since August 12, the community challenge is one shared brief for everyone, every week, anchored on Monday. The daily version was fun but brutal: a full day of work rarely fits between two draws. A week gives you real time to write, the boards fill up properly, and curated picks set the tone. Old daily links keep working and land on their week.

A curator role came with it. The person programming the weekly brief can preview it, adjust the card count and see exactly how many cards match before it goes live. Fewer surprise one-card hands.

Pro, one month in

ComposerDeck Pro went live on August 4, and the deal has not changed: the daily practice is free, the depth is Pro. Two things happened since.

• Pro perks arrived on iOS. Version 2.7 brought PNG exports of your hand as real playing cards, named studio presets, the advanced stats panel, your complete draw history and unlimited rerolls to the App Store app. Subscriptions are still handled on the web, as Apple's rules require.
• Fairer billing. If a renewal fails, you keep Pro for seven days while your bank sorts it out, with a banner on the upgrade page telling you what is going on. The checkout also refuses to start a second subscription on top of an active one.

The Founder Lifetime plan is still available at €79. It is meant for the early believers and it will not be around forever; that sentence was true in August and it is still true.

iOS 2.7 and 2.8

Two App Store releases in three weeks. 2.7 (August 31) was the catch-up release: the weekly challenge, the public Deck Gallery, custom deck covers, display names, draw archiving and all the draw improvements from the summer. 2.8 (September 8) brought the notifications bell, the new take pages, and the Friday digest opt-in.

2.8 also fixes something invisible: the app now embeds its fonts instead of fetching them at launch, so the studio opens faster and looks right on a bad connection. And a tooling change on our side means the app can no longer be shipped without its analytics and crash reporting, which had silently happened on earlier builds. If you play on your phone, 2.8 is the release to have.

The small things

None of these deserved an article. Together they change how the studio feels.

• The draw shows its hand. The card count panel tells you how many cards actually match your filters, greys out counts you cannot reach, and says so when a narrow genre or type selection would shrink your hand. No more pulling one card and wondering where the other five went.
• The Friday digest, if you want it. After a draw, you can opt into one email a week with the community's best takes and the new brief. Asked once, never again if you say no.
• Your name, everywhere. Display names show on every public surface: feeds, takes, decks, leaderboards and share links.
• Archive old draws from your profile and keep the workspace focused on what you are composing now.
• Community fixes. The USER tab of the search is back (it had been failing silently on genre filters). Comments show up the moment you post them. MALUS cards can be contributed to the community deck. Private profiles are anonymous in the leaderboard, the weekly board and the badges, not just on the profile page.
• Sign in with Google on the web, next to Apple and Spotify. The iPhone app stays with Apple and Spotify, as Apple's rules prefer.
• Under the hood. Fonts are served from composerdeck.com instead of Google, so a page load no longer talks to a third party. You can pinch to zoom in the web app again.

New this week

This post ships with a few things of its own.

• A free random music challenge generator, right on the website. No account, no app: pull a three-card brief from a public slice of the deck, reroll, copy it, go make something. It is the simplest possible way to show a friend what ComposerDeck does.
• Public decks get real pages. Like takes, a public deck now has its own server-rendered page with the cards, the creator's name and a link to load it in the studio. They are listed in the sitemap too.
• Four official decks in the gallery, so the library is not empty on your first visit: Songwriting Sprint, Finish It: Production Constraints, Odd Meters Bootcamp and Chord Progression Starter. Each one matches one of the guides below, and loads into the studio in one click.
• Genre pages with actual advice. The eleven genre pages now open with a short guide: what makes the genre tick, the constraints that work best in it, and the mistakes to avoid, before the card list.
• Four new guides built from the deck: 33 songwriting prompts, 25 production constraints to finish a track, odd time signature exercises and 20 chord progressions to steal. Every one of them ends with a draw.

What's next

More official decks as the guides grow, and more genre pages, one at a time, only when we have something useful to say about the genre. And the usual: whatever you report through the contact page tends to become the next entry in the changelog.