Eighteen days when nobody could sign up.

On September 9th I found out that nobody could create a new Neeos account. The first run is five screens: welcome, what Neeos does, encryption setup, bringing in your information, and choosing a plan. On the second screen, tapping Continue sent you back to Welcome. Tapping again crashed the app.

Because an account only counts as set up once you finish the last screen, nobody who hit that wall could get in. For a new person, it wasn't a bad first impression. It was a locked door. It had been broken since August 22nd, eighteen days.

How it hid

The onboarding code had six tests, and they passed every single day. But all six checked the order of the screens on paper: encryption before import, plan choice last. None of them put a screen on a simulator and tapped a button. The tests confirmed the design was sensible. They never confirmed it worked.

What was actually wrong

The encryption screen brought its own navigation along with it, even when it was already inside the first-run flow's navigation. Two systems each thought they owned the “back” path, and they fought. The first tap broke the route, the second crashed Apple's own bookkeeping. The fix makes that screen a plain step inside whatever it's placed in.

Where that leaves us

The fix is in, and there is now a test that really taps through those screens, which is the one that would have caught this on day one. The sign-up flow is the single most important thing a new person does, and we'd shipped it broken to the one place no test looked. That is why the public beta waited until this was fixed.

Written October 21, 2026 from the build log, and dated to when this happened.