Q2 2026 in Review: More Devices, and Sync You Can Trust

The monthly release notes cover the what. This is the why. Looking back at April, May, and June, the quarter had two threads running through almost everything I shipped: get 1Retro onto more of the devices you actually play on, and make the sync underneath it something you can trust with a save you cannot afford to lose.

More than 8,000 save files are backed up with 1Retro now. That number is the reason both threads mattered.

Thread one: more devices

A save library that only lives on one machine is not a library, it is a hostage. So a lot of Q2 went into reach.

• Linux, properly. The desktop app now runs on Linux, on both Intel/AMD and ARM64. If you play on a Steam Deck, a desktop-Linux handheld, or a regular machine, your saves ride along with everything else.
• One-click install is coming via Flathub. I did the multi-arch Flatpak packaging and submission work so that, once it lands, Linux folks can install straight from Discover. The interesting part was doing it the right way: the app uses the desktop’s file-picker portal and only ever sees the folder you point it at, not your whole disk, even inside the sandbox.
• MiSTer got hands-off. The MiSTer tooling picked up proper login, logout, sync, and watch commands, a one-shot sync script, and a single-instance daemon that logs in and watches for changes on its own. Set it once and forget it.
• Android, earlier in the quarter. Sign in with a QR code, point it at your saves folder, and it syncs in the background.

Add those to macOS, Windows, OnionOS, and the CLI, and the shelf story finally holds together: the same save library follows you across all of it.

Thread two: sync you can actually trust

Reach is worthless if the sync itself is flaky. This is the less glamorous half of the quarter, and the half I am most glad I did.

• It streams instead of slurping. ROM hashing and transfers no longer load whole files into memory, so large ROMs and modest devices stop choking.
• Fewer false conflicts. I changed how 1Retro tracks the state of your cloud saves, moving to a monotonic sequence instead of a reusable version number. That quietly removed a whole class of “these are in conflict” alarms that were not real conflicts.
• Conflicts got more legible. When two devices really do disagree, the conflict screen now shows device metadata parsed from the save itself, so you are choosing between “my Steam Deck from Tuesday” and “my MiSTer from Sunday,” not two timestamps.
• Security hardening. 1Retro now verifies SSH host keys before authenticating and checks the integrity of every save it downloads. Boring, essential, done.
• Groundwork for multi-file saves. Some systems store one logical save as several files. The schema, the batch upload path, and the conflict-and-bundle download endpoints to treat those as a single unit all landed this quarter.

Under all of it, I gave the core types real names. IDs and hashes and sequence numbers are now distinct types the compiler understands, so a whole category of “you passed the wrong number to the wrong function” bugs simply cannot compile anymore. You will never see it, but it is why the changes above could happen without me holding my breath.

More emulators, more formats

• RetroArch and Retrobat became first-class: point 1Retro at the folder and saves come along. (If you run RetroArch, I wrote a full guide to backing up its saves this month.)
• OpenEmu routing got more reliable, so downloaded saves land in the right place even with unusual playlist and core setups.
• The game catalog kept growing as I ingested more reference databases, which is what lets 1Retro match a save to the right game by hash.

Billing grew up, and a few growth bits

Q2 is when the business side stopped being duct tape.

• Real subscriptions, end to end: cancel at period end, change your mind and resume a scheduled cancellation, and a grace window on a failed payment so a single declined card does not instantly drop your paid features. New Plus and Pro tiers, laid out inline.
• Two-sided referrals. Invite a friend and you both get a bonus, shown live on your dashboard.
• Promo codes that actually flex. They can carry different kinds of rewards now and be redeemed after signup, not just during it.
• This newsletter. With a real double opt-in, so you only ever get mail you asked for. Sign up here if you want the short version of these recaps in your inbox.

What is in the oven

A few things started moving in Q2 that will land properly in Q3:

• Reading saves straight off cartridges. Support for the GB Operator landed, so you can pull a save directly off a physical Game Boy cart on Windows and Linux.
• itch.io library sync. Linking your itch account and syncing owned ROMs is in early access behind a role while I sort out curation.
• An open saves format. The bigger swing: I am working toward a Universal Saves Format, an open and documented container so your saves are never hostage to one emulator or one service, including this one. Open-sourcing the sync engine is part of the same plan.

That is the quarter. Thank you to everyone who trusted 1Retro with a save this spring, and especially to the people who filed the weird bug reports that made the sync sturdier. If your setup is doing something strange, come tell me on Discord or the forums. Onward to Q3.