Plain-English updates on what's being built. We post here as
meaningful progress lands on the Suddenly Canadian mobile app and
SUDCAN Studio — no code, no jargon, no internal acronyms. Most recent
first.
What's coming, in order
The release plan.
We're shipping the mobile app in stages — focused, well-tested
slices rather than one big bet. Here's what arrives when. We
won't commit to calendar dates until we're sure of them, but
the order below is firm.
Stage 1
Initial release
The launch.
The Citizenship Certificate journey, end to end.
Bill C-3 and C-37 eligibility analysis (including the December 15 2025 amendment)
Family tree builder with life events and document organizer
Adaptive document checklist (CIT 0014)
Citizenship application package: CIT 0001, CIT 0014, CIT 0555, IMM 5476, plus the My Helpers tool for Section 15
Multi-applicant support for families filing together
On-device storage, AES-256-encrypted at rest, passphrase-derived key
Stage 2
Shortly after launch
Once the citizenship journey is stable in the wild.
The Passport Application journey for new citizenship-certificate holders.
First-adult Canadian passport (PPTC 153), pre-filled from your tree
Statutory declaration support (PPTC 132) for applicants outside Canada
Multi-applicant passport support — file as a family
Same per-applicant pricing model as the citizenship journey
Stage 3
Longer term
After the two journeys are mature.
Collaboration, community, and the SUDCAN Studio editions.
Family Sync — share one tree across phones in the same household
Caseworker Sync and Legal Counsel Collaboration — secure, encrypted hand-offs to settlement organizations and lawyers
Community Forum — a moderated space for applicants to ask, answer, and share what worked
SUDCAN Studio editions — Express, Personal, Professional, IRCC
French (Québécois) localization across the product family
We'd rather ship one journey at the quality real families deserve
than ship a wider feature set on day one and patch our way to good.
Stage 2 starts the moment the citizenship release is solid in
users' hands. Stage 3 follows when the two journeys are both
mature and we've heard from enough families to know which
collaboration features actually matter first.
What's already shipped
The dated entries below cover concrete work, most recent first.
2026-07-09
Refined yesterday's My Tasks grouping: "by source" is now the default view when you open the screen, and "by person" is available as an expand/collapse alternative when you want to see everything reorganized by which individual applicant each task belongs to.
2026-07-08
My Tasks picked up two new organizational surfaces. First, you can now group your outstanding tasks by their source — the applicant, form, or journey each one belongs to — instead of one long flat list. Second, a chip strip along the top lets you quickly filter down to just one applicant with a single tap. In a family filing for several people at once, finding a specific person's remaining work no longer means scrolling.
2026-07-07
Big under-the-hood change with a lot of visible payoff: every step required to make an application package ready to mail — the required photos, the government-ID capture, every field of the citizenship application (CIT 0001), every mandatory row of the document checklist (CIT 0014), the physical-presence form (CIT 0555), and the representative form (IMM 5476) — is now automatically surfaced as a specific task in My Tasks. Whatever's still missing shows up as a deep-linked reminder that opens straight to where you fix it. No more "did I remember to attach a photograph?" tab-hopping — the app tells you what's still open.
Proof of fee payment is now tracked the same way: attach the receipt, the task closes; skip it, and it stays open until the receipt is on file.
Fixed: adding a second applicant was silently blocked if the first applicant hadn't yet attached a birth certificate. Applicant addition is now independent of any other applicant's document state.
Fixed: the CIT 0555 physical-presence form was missing a "form not yet generated" reminder for applicants who needed it. The reminder now appears correctly, so you're not left without a nudge to generate the form.
2026-07-06
A batch of application-package fixes surfaced by running the end-to-end test suite against a realistic multi-applicant family tree. The Document Checklist (CIT 0014) row-progress pills — the "N of M resolved" counters at the top of each section — were counting backwards and never updating as documents were attached; they now count forward and stay accurate.
The application-package cover PDF was listing the same filename repeated once for every form when it should have listed each form's actual filename separately.
The application-package cover PDF was also rendering blank tofu boxes for characters the bundled font didn't cover. The cover now uses a font with the full character set required.
The CIT 0014 "Two citizenship photographs" row was marking itself complete with only one photograph attached — it now correctly requires both photos before it counts as met, and the application-package export now includes both photographs where it was previously including only one.
"Proof of Payment" is now a recognized document type, so the CIT 0014 "Proof of fee payment" row can actually be satisfied by attaching the receipt.
2026-06-19
"My Helpers" is a new tool that surfaces from the My Applications hub. Section 15 of the citizenship application (CIT 0001) asks whether anyone helped you complete it — paid or unpaid, a friend or family member, a tax accountant, a paralegal — and previously you'd answer it for each applicant on each form, every time. "My Helpers" is where you record those people once and the form auto-fills from that single source. You can add helpers as individuals or companies, pull contact details from someone you've already entered in the family tree, and assign each helper to specific applicants when you're filing for several people in one family.
Fixed a long-standing race condition in the continue / start-fresh dialog — the screen that asks whether to resume your saved work or start over when you reopen the app. It was occasionally misfiring on the very first open after install, sometimes flashing briefly when it shouldn't have appeared at all.
Fixed a false-positive in the CIT 0001 review sheet — applicants who'd marked a field as "Unknown" or "Not applicable" were sometimes still being flagged as having missing data there. Those legitimate marks are now respected, so the review sheet doesn't keep nagging you about a field you've already made a deliberate decision about.
2026-06-07
Fixed a quiet bug in the citizenship application (CIT 0001) Section 14: an apartment, suite, or unit suffix on a representative's address was being dropped from the generated PDF. Easy to miss because the rest of the address still rendered correctly — the form now includes the full address exactly as entered.
2026-05-22
The applicant picker — the control you use to switch between applicants in a multi-applicant family — now stays pinned to the top of the screen as you scroll through long forms. Before, switching from one family member to another meant scrolling back to the top; now the picker is always within reach, and the intro copy on the picker was refreshed to be clearer about what it does.
2026-05-20
IMM 5476 (Use of a Representative) — the form you fill out when you've authorized a lawyer, immigration consultant, or trusted family member to deal with IRCC on your behalf — is now end-to-end. You can add representatives, edit their full contact information, and assign different representatives to different applicants in the same family. The rep's information flows automatically into the matching section of the citizenship application (CIT 0001 Section 14), so you don't enter it twice.
The new "Select from Tree" option pulls a representative's contact information directly from the family tree if they're already entered there — name, addresses, phone, and email all prefill. And if you later edit that person's contact info in the tree, the change propagates automatically to every form where they're cited as a rep.
Family-tree people themselves gained proper contact-information support: a person's profile now has full phone and email fields, plus separate Home and Mailing addresses for those whose mailing address differs from where they actually live.
2026-05-19
The physical-presence engine was generalised to handle non-Canadian presence properly. The "Time in Canada (visit)" event type has been renamed "Time in a Country (visit / non-residency)" — the underlying math now correctly accounts for periods a parent or applicant spent in another country without being a resident there, which matters for some of the more complex descent chains. A new non-blocking warning surfaces when foreign-presence dates overlap an existing residency in the same country, since that's usually a data-entry slip worth flagging.
Fixed a quiet eligibility-classification bug: applicants whose only known birth-date detail was a partial date straddling the December 15 2025 Bill C-3 cutoff were being silently routed to not required instead of may be required. They now get the "may be required" treatment, so an ambiguous case isn't quietly closed before a careful look.
Two fixes around the empty-Reason case on the citizenship application (CIT 0001): leaving the Reason field blank on a residency-sourced absence row now correctly marks the entire absence list as missing — blocking PDF generation and the Review step until it's filled in — and the missing-required-fields modal that surfaces the problem now scrolls and grows so longer lists are actually readable.
Started IMM 5476 (Use of a Representative) with the underlying data model — the persistence layer that the representative-management screens shipping the next day will populate from.
2026-05-18
CIT 0555 (Calculation of Physical Presence for a Canadian Parent) — the IRCC form required when a second-generation-or-deeper applicant needs to show their Canadian parent met the 1,095-day physical-presence threshold added by the December 15 2025 amendment — is now fully shipping. The form auto-fills from the family tree, calculates the day count correctly across complex absence patterns, generates continuation sheets when an applicant's absence list is too long for the main form, and ties into the existing Tree Hygiene checks so you know what's still needed before the form will generate cleanly.
The 1,095-day math was tightened: physical-presence calculations now correctly include "Time in a Country" events when the country is Canada, and properly subtract overlapping periods served on a criminal sentence (which IRCC does not count toward the threshold).
A multi-parent picker was added for applicants whose lineage has two qualifying Canadian parents — you can pick which parent's physical-presence calculation to attach to the application, or attach a calculation for each.
Several smaller reliability fixes alongside: data is no longer silently dropped on import when a backup file uses an older schema, the Eligibility tab no longer crashes when a "sentence served" event is missing its type, and a "sentence served" event whose country was left blank is now treated as Canada by default rather than ignored.
2026-05-15
Each applicant's Eligibility card gained an "Explain" button that opens a full-screen, fact-by-fact trace of how the app reached its determination — every step in priority order, with citations to the statute that applies. Each fact is labelled with where it came from: you entered it, the analyzer inferred it, an attached artifact provided it, or it's a constant written into the law.
Two corrections to the eligibility logic around pre-1947 marriages. (1) When the analyzer infers that a Canadian woman lost her citizenship by marriage under the 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, the classifier now correctly recognises that as a Scenario 5 case — some of these were previously being mis-routed to Scenario 4. (2) The "loss by marriage" rule no longer fires when both spouses were British subjects pre-1947; the 1914 Act's symmetry meant no loss occurred in that case.
The Document Checklist (CIT 0014) card on the Applications screen now surfaces the most-recent saved PDF directly on the card — same way the citizenship application (CIT 0001) card already did. Out-of-date saves are clearly flagged so you know when to regenerate.
Marking a row on the Document Checklist (CIT 0014) as "Include" now opens a quick artifact picker — filtered to the document types that row actually accepts — so you can either link an existing document from your tree or upload a new one without leaving the screen.
2026-05-14
Fixed a cluster of bugs around the new "Start Fresh" reset feature — wiping a tree now correctly clears every screen, every task count, and the primary-applicant selection across the app.
Added a scenario override: if you know IRCC will treat your case differently from what the app's auto-detection suggests, you can now confirm the override in two short steps, and the document checklist adapts accordingly.
The Document Checklist (CIT 0014) form now shows a progress indicator while it generates the PDF, and the app recognizes any in-app-generated CIT 0001 as satisfying its own checklist row — no need to upload your own copy on top.
2026-05-13
The Document Checklist (CIT 0014) form picked up a per-section progress display and a clear "what's still missing" sheet so you can see exactly which documents need attention before submission.
2026-05-12
Shipped family-tree export and import — including the genealogy-standard GEDCOM format — so you can save, share, or migrate your work between devices.
Added the global Home button and the Start Fresh feature: a complete app reset for when you want to begin again from scratch.
Fixed four navigation bugs around back-button behaviour across screens.
2026-05-11
Fixed a quiet failure where edits to the Document Checklist (CIT 0014) form weren't being saved properly — and surfaced the underlying error so any future issue is visible instead of silent.
2026-05-10
Built the Document Checklist (CIT 0014) from the ground up — this is the IRCC form that itemizes every supporting document you're submitting alongside your citizenship application, with each document accounted for.
The applicant-switcher now works consistently across every screen, with no jarring reloads when you switch from one family member to another.
The Application Packages screen now shows which forms are required, missing, or simply not applicable for each applicant's specific scenario.
Set up the "My Applications" hub with quick links to each saved package.
2026-05-08
Shipped the first slice of multi-applicant support — users with spouses, children, or siblings claiming through the same ancestry can now build separate application packages for each qualifying family member, all from one shared tree.
2026-05-07
Calibrated the entire CIT 0001 citizenship application across all eleven sections — question mappings, answer ordering, address formatting, relationship descriptions, automatic country-code prefixing on phone numbers.
Added support for the CIT 0555 Physical Presence Calculation form.
Sharper eligibility detection — applicants who already hold a citizenship certificate now get classified correctly without false negatives.
2026-05-04
Polish and reliability sweep across the PDF generation system, plus cleanup of legacy cover-letter generation code.
2026-05-03
Built the image-overlay PDF engine — the system that stamps your answers, checkmarks, and signatures onto the official IRCC form in exactly the right places.
Added an internal alignment tool so the placement stays pixel-accurate as IRCC forms evolve.
2026-05-02
Built the cloud-side system that automatically pulls in updated IRCC form templates as IRCC releases them.
Added support for the December 2025 Bill C-3 update across the eligibility logic.
Added work-history life events and an applicant alias field for people who've changed their name.
2026-04-25
Big week for My Tasks — task muting (with a clear "are you sure?" warning), completed-task tracking, bulk selection, and document-sourcing suggestions.
The task list now surfaces every gap in every tree with deep links straight to the screens where you can fix them, and your "muted" and "completed" status persists across app restarts.
2026-04-24
Rebuilt the home screen for clearer messaging and a more natural flow — eligibility, then tasks, then records, then applications.
Added a Collaboration & Sync preview surface for the upcoming Family Sync, Caseworker Sync, and Legal Counsel Collaboration features.
The Records & Artifacts screen got a Sources tab — proactively browse and search for the documents you'll need, filtered by country, region, era, and document type.
Not yet active
SUDCAN Studio development hasn't started.
We're focused entirely on getting the Suddenly Canadian
mobile app to its Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
milestone first. Once that ships, active development of SUDCAN
Studio begins — and dated progress for each of the four editions
(Express, Personal, Professional, and IRCC) will appear here.
