So, Where Are We?
I get asked this a lot at the moment. By testers, by parents in home education groups, by people who've been quietly watching oodlü from a distance for a while.
So here's an honest answer.
Progress is good. Genuinely good, the kind I'm happy to put my name to rather than something I'm saying to keep momentum up. We're hoping to release over the next couple of months, and everything happening behind the scenes right now is building toward that.
A few things have changed since I last wrote about the build. Here they are.
Each Group World will have a Town Square. A meeting point for students to get together at the start of their journey, and return to for quests and information.
We're not building native apps
This took a while to settle on, but it's settled now. We won't be building separate native apps for iOS and Android.
Two reasons. First, maintaining native apps properly, across two operating systems, two app stores, two review processes and two sets of bugs, is a heavy ongoing commitment for a team our size. Second, working within Apple's ecosystem in particular has been a source of friction I don't want to keep fighting whilst also trying to build the actual product.
So instead, oodlü is being built as a Progressive Web App.
In practice, that means you install oodlü directly, no app store required. On a PC or Mac, it sits in your tray like any other installed application. On a phone, it adds an icon to your home screen and opens exactly like an app would.
The experience is the same. Better, in some ways. It's always up to date, there's no separate build waiting on Apple's review queue, and one version runs whether you're on a desktop, a laptop or a phone. One thing to build, one thing to maintain, improving every week rather than every few months.
What the worlds are looking like
Some current, work in progress shots from the build. Not final polish, but a real sense of where the 3D worlds are right now. Please excuse the quality of the screenshots. They are literally photos of the screens of our development machines!
Building the town square and getting shadows working well (harder than it sounds).
Adding lights to night scenes
Building homesteads for Explorer Habitations
Building Quest Machines
Navigators and Explorers
We've also changed how we talk about who oodlü is for. Instead of teachers and students, we now talk about Navigators and Explorers.
Any responsible adult looking after a child's learning, whether that's a teacher, a parent, a grandparent or someone running a home education co-op, is a Navigator. Any child using oodlü, whatever their age or setting, is an Explorer.
It's a small change on the page, but it comes from a real shift in how we see oodlü. Home education has grown into a significant part of our community, and the language needed to work as naturally for a co-op meeting at someone's kitchen table as it does for a classroom of thirty. Navigators and Explorers does that. It welcomes whoever is doing the teaching and whoever is doing the learning, without asking anyone to squeeze into a label that never quite fits them.
We’re creating worlds for everyone, not just for space explorer types.
New features, and quite a few of them
Alongside all this, we've been significantly upgrading the whole class games, adding translation features so oodlü works better across languages, and a fair bit more I'll save for its own post nearer the time. Individually, each of these is a solid improvement. Together, when they land, it should feel like a proper transformation rather than a routine update.
Shortlisted for the Stationers' Company Innovation Excellence Awards 2026
We found out recently that oodlü has been shortlisted for the Stationers' Company Innovation Excellence Awards 2026. Winners are announced at Stationers' Hall in October. Whatever happens on the night, being shortlisted alongside the other businesses on that list is worth marking, so I wanted to share it here.
Every Explorer (learner) will have their own “Habitation”.
And a few conversations worth watching
There are some long term partnership discussions underway at the moment. Early days, and nothing I can share properly yet, but exciting enough that I wanted to flag them rather than stay quiet until everything's signed.
More on all of this as it happens.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Find us on the social channels linked at the top of the page.