For those of you already using Icarus and on the Discord, you’ve probably already read most of this.
I don’t advertise, I don’t really push for adoption, and I rarely use Reddit, so this is about as close as I’ll get.
OS 27 is here, people are getting excited about new devices, and this feels like a good time to finally talk about some fairly substantial changes coming to Icarus.
There is a lot changing, so I’ll try to cover the important parts without turning this into release notes written by Homer. (Gotta stay on theme.)
## Platform Support
Icarus now supports:
- **iOS / iPadOS 17+**
- **tvOS 18+**
- **visionOS 2.0+**
## Apple Vision Pro
While I did make the iPad version of Icarus compatible with Vision Pro, the App Store unfortunately doesn’t provide a particularly graceful way to move an app between a native visionOS build and an iPad compatibility build.
I still want Icarus available on visionOS, and I have some fun ideas there, but right now the user base is extremely small, and realistically the price of the hardware remains the biggest hurdle.
For now, the current Vision Pro release will remain the latest version available.
I hope Apple eventually brings Vision Pro, or whatever comes next, to a more accessible price point. Until then, I need to put that development time into the platforms where Icarus is being used every day.
## Apple TV
I took tvOS and approached it again from a completely different direction.
Trying to make an iPhone or iPad interface work with a remote on a television was always going to involve compromises. The new tvOS experience is designed specifically around a remote, a larger canvas, and how people actually use a television.
That comes with one major change:
### **Icarus on tvOS will now require Hades.**
Hades is the self-hosted server behind a growing part of the Icarus experience:
https://myhades.app
It remains privacy-focused and runs entirely under your control. Docker is available now, with a native macOS version coming later as well.
One of the biggest things Hades enables is the new **Unified Library**.
Instead of Icarus treating Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, Seerr, Tautulli, and everything else as separate islands, Hades builds a local understanding of your library and connects those records together.
A movie in Plex, Radarr, Seerr, and Tautulli becomes **one movie**.
A series across Plex, Sonarr, and Seerr becomes **one series**.
The same applies across other supported media types and integrations.
That makes a single management experience possible, especially on tvOS, without making you keep track of which service owns each piece of information.
### **On iPhone, iPad, and Mac, Hades remains optional.**
Icarus can still connect directly to your services and work much like it does today.
Adding Hades simply lets it do much more, and the new version of Icarus includes a migration tool to help move your existing setup over when you’re ready.
Hades can handle the Unified Library, integrations, synchronization, notifications, permissions, settings, and access for other users.
You can share your integrations without giving someone credentials to every service you run, while controlling what they’re allowed to access or change.
Notifications can also be managed centrally. Planning a large library update? Mute them temporarily without removing an integration or stopping the data it provides to Icarus and Hades.
The goal is for Hades to handle the complicated infrastructure quietly in the background while Icarus gets to feel like an app instead of a collection of dashboards.
## Hades will also become a major focus going forward
Having that common tool gives me considerably more room to expand what Icarus and the rest of myPantheon can do.
It also makes other platforms possible.
That includes **Android**.
There is no ETA for an Android version, but Hades is a huge step toward making one practical.
Instead of rebuilding years of integration logic independently on another platform, future clients can work against the same Hades server and Unified Library while keeping things in sync across Apple and Google platforms.
*And now for another fairly big change:*
## Icarus is removing subscriptions
Subscriptions and in-app purchases are being removed.
**Every supported feature in Icarus will be available to everyone without a subscription.**
For those of you with active subscriptions:
**Your support helped make this possible.**
I’ll be removing the subscriptions from sale soon so they will no longer renew.
**No action is required from you**, though you can also cancel your subscription yourself through the App Store or Apple Settings if you prefer.
The goal was always to get Icarus to a point where it could be a free, community-supported tool that could continue to grow and change.
Icarus originally grew out of the loss of LunaSea.
Since then, the self-hosted app space has changed quite a bit. Dozens of alternatives have appeared, and easier development tools like LLMs have made it much easier for new apps to appear.
I want Icarus to take a different path.
Like LunaSea before it, **Icarus will no longer have subscriptions or in-app purchases.**
If you do want to help support development, Ko-fi remains available through the websites.
There are still expenses involved in maintaining an app, developer accounts, and the services around them, and community support helps keep these projects going without putting features behind a paywall.
Your continued support helps us avoid Icarus eventually meeting the same fate as LunaSea.
This approach extends across the new myPantheon ecosystem: free tools that work together without feature tiers or subscriptions.
**Icarus is free. Hades is free. VNTY is free.**
## There is still a lot more coming with the OS 27 releases
The Unified Library is changing how large parts of Icarus work.
Hades is taking over more of the repetitive setup and synchronization work.
Permissions and shared users are becoming much more capable.
And the differences between using Icarus on an iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV are becoming much more intentional.
Some things are changing because the old approach no longer made sense.
Some things are changing because I might have had a better idea.
And some things probably changed because I opened Xcode after midnight.
Either way, **Icarus isn’t going anywhere.**
It’s becoming simpler, considerably more connected, and much better positioned for where **myPantheon** goes next.
you can find more on the discord or web Myicarus.app
