The first Mura shipped on the App Store as "Mura: Train Together". It was built quickly, and it did its job: it showed us that people want training partners at their own pace and group sessions they can actually join. It also showed us where the seams were. This post is about why we chose to start over.
What the first app taught us
Three things kept coming back in conversations with people using it.
The feed read as a wall of cards, and a wall of cards does not tell you what to do. People scrolled, closed the app, and came back when a friend sent a link.
The profile and the match were doing the heavy lifting, but the rules behind them were scattered. Who can see whom, who can message whom, what happens when someone leaves a session: each was a check in one screen, repeated in a slightly different way in the next. The new Mura has each of those rules written once, in one place, and every screen reads from it.
And the app did not feel like it belonged on the phone. It was just... meh.
What changes on the phone
The new Mura is built for iPhone, for iOS 26 and up. That floor is deliberate. The system gives us the floating tab bar, the glass controls and the new map and photo pickers, and we would rather use what the platform gives than draw an imitation of it. The first app keeps running for everyone on an older iPhone until the day we turn it off, and that day is not today.
We are shaping every screen against a sample set of sessions, people and clubs first, so we can get the feel right without a network. Then each screen is pointed at the real thing, one at a time. The first ones, onboarding and the session page, are already there.
The promise to the people on the first app
If you made a profile on the first Mura, you will have it on the second. Profile, photos, prompts, the people you follow, your clubs and their chats, the sessions you hosted and joined, the routes you saved. We are moving it across now, and we will run that again on launch day so nothing you do in between is lost.
Nothing you have to do. Update when the new one is out, sign in, and it is all there.
Why write this down
We are going to keep notes here as we go. Not announcements so much as the calls we made and why, while the reasons are still fresh. If you are building something similar, some of it may save you a week. If you are using Mura, it is the honest account of what you are holding.
