Hey community! We missed the end-of-April date for Raycast v2. That’s on us, and we apologise.
Yesterday we tweeted about the delay, and I also answered a few questions in our Slack Community. Since the same questions are coming up here, I wanted to share a clearer summary.
While it’s tough to read some of the comments, I understand that, in most cases, they come from a good place: you care about Raycast and are eager to try the new version.
Some context, in case you missed it:
- In this video, we promised that Raycast v2 would be available for download by the end of April, with the bold quote: “You can quote me on that.”
- Throughout April, we started a staged rollout, inviting smaller batches of users to help us find and fix issues before opening it up to everyone.
- Yesterday, we posted that we’re still addressing some issues and continuing with the staged rollout.
I understand why a lot of you are disappointed. Many of you use Raycast hundreds of times per day, and many of you have been waiting for v2 for a while. So let me try to bring some clarity in FAQ format.
>You promised end of April. It’s not available yet. What happened?
We didn’t manage to deliver on our promise from the video. We apologise for that.
As engineers at heart, we were overoptimistic about some of the work that still needed to be done in this last mile.
A few weeks back, Pedro triple-checked with us and the team whether we could make v2 available for everyone to download by the end of April. We said yes, because at the time we genuinely believed we could make it. We were wrong. Some of the remaining work took longer than expected, and we needed to push the date back by roughly 2–3 weeks to have enough buffer to patch things up properly.
This happens in software development, but that doesn’t make it less frustrating when expectations have already been set.
In the end, we had to choose between rushing the release to hit the date or taking a little more time to finish it properly. We chose the latter.
I understand why some people felt misled, but that wasn’t the intent. The simpler truth is that we missed the deadline. We apologise for that.
>So now it’s a beta? A week after you announced that the new version was rolling out?
This is another thing we communicated poorly.
Raycast v2 was always planned to roll out as a beta first. When we said “rolling out”, we meant that we had started sending invites to the beta in batches. We should have made that much clearer.
There are massive changes under the hood: a new indexer, new hotkeys infrastructure, a completely new sync engine, a new model layer, and more. We absolutely cannot afford to mess up people’s setup during the update.
Our plan is:
- Stabilise v2 through a few smaller invite batches.
- Open the beta up for everyone to download manually.
- Let people try it as a separate app and decide when they are ready to switch.
- Later, once we’re confident at larger scale, enable the seamless update path from v1 to v2.
So when we say “available for everyone to download”, we mean you’ll be able to manually download Raycast v2, migrate data from v1, and try it out. During that period, you’ll still be able to use both versions in parallel in case something doesn’t work as expected.
>Why don’t you simply open the beta for anyone who wants to try it and provide feedback?
A few reasons.
First, we want the experience to be smooth. We don’t want to give a bad first experience to a large number of people if there is a major migration issue, performance problem, or broken workflow that we missed internally.
Just this week, after a new batch of users, we found a bug where one of the import processes could produce a storm of events and make everything lag. That’s the kind of issue we didn’t hit in our day-to-day internal usage, but only discovered during onboarding of more users. The next batch should be smoother because of it.
Second, small batches tend to reveal a similar class of bugs as large batches. Inviting everyone at once doesn’t necessarily give us much better signal, but it does increase the support load significantly and makes it harder for the team to respond properly.
Third, even with clear “this is a beta” communication, some users will understandably still judge it as the product experience. We’d rather take a bit more time and make sure most people get something we’re proud of.
I completely understand that, from the outside, this may feel frustrating or overly cautious. But this approach helps us move faster without overwhelming users or the team.
>The real problem is that the hype started more than four months ago, back in December 2025.
>It’s less about the delay itself, and more about the expectations that were set far in advance.
This is fair feedback.
It’s a tricky balance. We wanted to make sure our macOS users knew what we were working on, because many people were feeling like macOS was being neglected due to the lack of big visible updates. So we shared a teaser.
I don’t think going completely silent and staying in a bunker until we were 100% ready would have been met with much enthusiasm either. But did we overdo some of the hype? Probably. That’s on us.
>On what basis is it decided who gets an invite?
Initially, we invited Raycast Ambassadors to help us with testing. After that, we started going through the list of people who signed up for early access in Raycast, with Pro users prioritised within that list where possible.
>Do you have an updated timeline?
I want to be mindful about giving yet another “deadline” after missing the previous one.
That said, our current aim is to open the public beta in roughly 2 weeks, assuming the next batches don’t surface anything serious. After that, the timing depends on the number and severity of bugs we find at larger scale before this becomes the default update path from Raycast v1.
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Please trust me, we want this release out as much as you do. The team has worked incredibly hard on this new version, and we can’t wait to get it out and live in a normal world again where there are no waitlists and betas.
Thank you for the patience, the criticism, and the passion. 🫡