• New Libraries page: every library in your area with today's opening hours, as a list or on a map. See which libraries are open now and which are nearest. • Each library's page shows two weeks of opening hours, the address, a route by public transport, parking and contact details. • In a book's availability, you can see whether each library is open right now. Tap the library for its opening hours. • Your location is used only on your phone, only when you ask for the nearest libraries, and is never sent anywhere.

• Library pages now show in the app's language: availability, your loans and holds, and the library's own messages. • Every library area shows where each copy is on the shelf, and which library it's in. In RATAMO and at Hämeenlinna's main library, tap the shelf to see it on a map. • Your home library's opening hours now show in every library area. • Rutakko works again: availability and signing in. • Searches with a hyphenated word, such as Etelä-Pohjanmaa or the author Jukka-Pekka, now find results. • Your loans, holds and the rest of your account load more reliably, also right when you open the app. • Settings has a new About page: the app's version, the privacy policy and where the app's information comes from. • Thank you to everyone who has reported problems and suggested improvements. Much of this version came from your messages.

• Holds now work in library areas that ask for a reservation type, such as Eepos, and in areas where the hold button loads slowly. • If the library can't accept a hold, the app shows the library's own reason. • If something goes wrong that the app can't explain, it shows details you can send to the developer to get it fixed.

• Signing in and your account work reliably again: your loans, holds and home library load as they should, in Finland and abroad. • You stay signed in more reliably. If the library can't be reached when you open the app, you stay signed in and your account updates once the library is reachable. • If your sign-in has ended on the library's side, the app now asks you to log in again instead of showing an empty account. • Switching library areas always shows that area's own details.

• No home library yet? Choose one right on the Home library screen — it's where your holds are delivered for pickup. • Search and your account work more reliably when you're outside Finland. • Holds and lists no longer show up empty before they've loaded. • Opening hours follow Finnish time, even when you're in another time zone. • Typing in Search no longer loses a letter now and then on iOS 18. • Your loans and holds load more reliably on iOS 18 when a library page is slow to respond.

Search works again on iOS 27. The search field that went missing from the Search tab with the iOS 27 update is back, at the top of the tab, and stays in reach as you scroll — and it now shows on iOS 18 too. In the Library of Things, the heading tucks away as you scroll and the search field stays at the top. Inside a category, the field names what you're searching, like "Search tools". Your home library's opening status now keeps itself current — it no longer says the library is open after closing time. The new-arrival shelves on the Search tab can be refreshed by pulling down, and a shelf that fails to load comes back on its own instead of quietly staying away. When you come back to the app, your loans and holds refresh sooner. The library-area picker now names the right towns for the Lahti, Ylivieska and Lohja areas. Switching between library areas is steadier: a slow page from the area you just left can no longer make the area you just picked look signed out. "Search isn't available from your region" now appears only when that is really the case. A temporary problem at the library service says so instead, and offers to try again.

The app has a new name: Kirjastot. You can now log in to public libraries across Finland — 24 library areas, including Vaski, PIKI, OUTI, Vanamo and Kuopio — all from the same app. Pick your area on first launch and change it any time in Settings. Already using the app? Nothing changes for you: your library card, loans, holds, lists and settings carry over, and your area is already set. Use more than one library area? Sign in to each — you stay signed in to all of them, and switch by tapping the area name on your Account screen. Also in this update: more reliable sign-in.

Find a book by scanning its ISBN. • Scan to search. Tap the new scan button on the Search screen, point your camera at a book's ISBN barcode, and the app searches the catalog for it — a quick way to check whether the library has a book you've spotted in a shop or to surface in the catalog a book you spotted on a library shelf.

Small refinements that make Search and your account nicer to use. • Filter more precisely. Under Format you can now show printed books only — leaving audiobooks out — along with more item types to choose from. • Search remembers your term. After you step back from the results, your search stays in the box, and pressing return runs it again. • Steadier rows. When you expand an item — in search results, Loans, or Holds — its cover and type icon stay put instead of drifting to the middle of the row. • A calmer search screen. Filter chips no longer appear before you've actually searched. • See the whole thing. Expand a search result with the keyboard still up and you can now scroll its full detail into view. • No premature "nothing here". While your loans and holds are loading, you'll see a spinner instead of a brief "you have none".

Clearer availability, and a nicer way to share. When an item doesn't have availability information yet — often because the library has ordered it but hasn't received it — the app now says so plainly, instead of leaving you watching a spinner that quietly gives up. Also in this version: • Smarter reminders. The app now keeps your loans and holds in sync in the background, so you're less likely to be reminded about a book you've already returned or a hold you've already collected. • AirDrop a book to your Mac and it opens straight in your browser, instead of landing as a text file you have to open first. • A tidy-up of the Hold and Save buttons so their labels always sit on one line and match in size. • Steadier search results: cover thumbnails now show reliably, and tapping an item always opens its details.

Renew everything in one go. A new button at the top of your Loans renews all your loans at once — with a checklist so you can leave out the one or two you don't want, and a clear result afterwards showing what renewed and why anything didn't. Also in this version: • Find any saved item — start typing in Lists to search across everything you've saved, or filter within a single list. • Press and hold the back button to jump straight up through the screens you came from. • A small visual tidy-up in the item preview.

Every edition of a book, at a glance. When a search turns up several editions of the same book, they now come together under one result. Tap to see all the editions — each with live availability: what's on the shelf, what's on loan, and how many people are ahead of you in the queue. Don't mind which edition you get? "Reserve soonest" places a hold on whichever copy will reach you fastest — starting with your home library — and shows you its pick before you confirm. Two smaller touches too: • Books in your Holds now show their page count, so you can tell at a glance whether to freeze a hold or whether you'll have time to read it. • In the Library of Things, tapping the tab again while you're inside a category or a search takes you straight back to the main grid.

Two things about sharing. You can now share catalog items with friends. Every record — in the preview sheet, in an expanded search result, and in your Loans and Holds — has a share button that opens the usual share sheet. The link opens directly in Helmet for people who already have the app; for everyone else it opens a small preview card in the browser with a "Download on the App Store" button. Copy pastes just the URL. Messages, Notes, Mail, and everything else include the item's title and author above the link, so the recipient sees what's coming through. And you can now follow someone else's public list. If a friend shares one of their Finna lists with you, open the link and Helmet offers to follow it — it then sits in a "Following" section under Lists, alongside your own. You can read it, copy any single item into one of your lists, or copy the whole list at once. It stays read-only, because it's theirs: only the owner can change what's on it. If they later make it private, you keep the last version you saw and can unfollow whenever you like. Sharing your own public list now works the same way in reverse.

A reliability pass — three places where the app was showing stale or misleading data, all fixed: • When the Finnish library API is unreachable from your region (geographic restrictions on the underlying public service), the app now tells you so clearly and suggests a Finnish or European VPN. Previously it showed an empty "No items found" state — technically true, but misleading, because no items had been returned, not because no items matched. • Tapping a "ready for pickup" or "loan due soon" notification used to deep-link straight into Holds or Loans without refreshing first, so you'd land on stale data — including the very hold the notification was about. Holds and Loans now refresh on appearance when the cache has aged past the staleness threshold. • Returning to the app from the background now refreshes patron data regardless of which tab you backgrounded on. Previously this only worked on the Account tab.

A handful of polish: • A new notification fires at 09:00 the day before a hold expires at its pickup library — a one-day warning so you don't lose the item to the queue if life gets busy. Joins the existing "due soon" loan reminders and the immediate "ready for pickup" hold notification. • A library-card shortcut now sits in the top right of the Holds and Ready-for-pickup screens. Tap the card icon to bring up your barcode without bouncing back to the Account dashboard — handy at the pickup shelf or self-service desk. The back button returns you to your holds list. • Tap an author's name anywhere in the app — in a search result, on a hold, a loan, a saved item, or the preview sheet — to jump straight to a search for that author. • Item details are now selectable. Long-press a title, ISBN, publisher, summary, or any bibliographic field in the expanded result or preview sheet to copy or look it up.

Smaller things that add up: • Frozen holds are now visible on the Holds screen — a chip on the status line tells you which holds you've paused so you can tell them apart from active ones at a glance. • The Account dashboard cards now use proper plural agreement — "1 item" / "5 items" instead of the awkward "1 item(s)". • When a hold is ready for pickup, the row tells you the hold can no longer be edited or cancelled — instead of just hiding the buttons with no explanation. • Availability lists for popular items (in 5+ libraries) now collapse to the first few entries with a "Show N more" tap, so a 40-library record doesn't dwarf everything else on the screen. • Lists overview: swipe a list to reveal a "Move all" button next to Delete — tap it to move every saved item from that list into another in one go. Handy for tidying up after a "Quick saves" / "To read" cleanup pass. • Your home library card now surfaces today's exception note ("shortened hours", holiday name) right next to the open/closed status — instead of burying it in a section users rarely scrolled to. • Home library card now shows the staffed window for branches that mix staffed and self-service hours (Haukilahti, Tapiola, others) — so you can tell at a glance whether a librarian is on duty right now, not just whether the door is open. Self-service-only days are flagged the same way. Fixes worth mentioning: • Sub-format filters (Blu-ray, DVD, CD, LP) now actually narrow the result list. Previously they were silently union'd with the parent format chip, so picking "Blu-ray" while Video was active still returned every Video record. • Search-result cover thumbnails no longer latch into permanent blanks when you scroll fast.

No more wandering at the pickup library: • When a hold is ready and the library has placed it on a numbered pickup shelf, the shelf number now shows up right next to the pickup library on the Holds screen. Walk in, walk straight to shelf N, walk out. Several of you asked for this — thank you. Save what you love: • A new Lists section in your account. Create lists to collect items you want to return to, give each list a name and an optional description, attach a note to any item you save, and move items between lists. Lists can be private (the default) or public — a public list gets a share link that anyone can open in a browser. • Open any item from the catalog and you'll see at a glance whether it's already saved to one of your lists, or already on hold — the Save and Hold buttons change to show the state, and tapping them tells you which list or which pickup library. • Lists are in sync with helmet.finna.fi, so everything you save in the app is reachable from the website (and vice versa). More to discover: • Three new "New" rails on the Search tab — New games, New sheet music, and New maps — joining New books, New movies, and New music. Six carousels covering everything libraries actually buy. • What counts as "new" is now the catalog's own acquisition date. You'll see more genuinely new arrivals, including newly-stocked older titles that the previous heuristic missed.

Browse the catalog without typing: • A new surface on the Search tab — three cover-art carousels ("New books", "New movies", "New music") so you can see what just came in, plus three "Browse by genre" sections covering the catalog: Fiction · Non-fiction · Crime · Children's · Fantasy & sci-fi · Romance · Comics · Short stories · Poetry · Memoirs · Drama · Comedy · Action · Thriller · Horror · Documentary · Animation · TV series · Rock · Pop · Jazz · Classical · Schlager · Electronic · Folk · World · Blues · Soul & funk — with "Other" catch-alls so everything in the catalog is reachable. • Tap any cover to swipe through that rail's items for a preview — large cover, full details, availability, and a one-tap Hold button when you're logged in. • Filter inside any browse view: tap the filter button (top-right of the results) to narrow by Format, Language, or Publication year, with counts that match the slice you're browsing. In other news: • Small UX polish around the chip rail and the post-tap experience. • Quieter behavior when descriptions or cover art aren't in the catalog — clear placeholders instead of blank rectangles.

Discover the Library of Things: • A new top-level Library of Things destination shows what you can borrow beyond books — musical instruments, exercise gear, power drills, season tickets, board games, sensory cards, kitchen equipment, electronics, and more. Each category gets its own colorful card; tap one to browse, or use the search field inside to find a specific thing. • The app's bottom bar now has three modes — Account · Things · Search — for quick switching between your loans and holds, browsing, and looking up specific items. The app opens directly to your account dashboard so today's loans and reminders are front and center. • Library-of-Things items get a dedicated "Things" filter chip in search, separate from "Other" (digital / archive material). In other news: • Improved the log-in experience to decrease the number of pesky situations when things don't go as they should. • Plus quieter behavior when your connection drops — clearer messages instead of stuck spinners, and the app picks up where it left off when you reconnect.

Find what you want, faster: • New Filters sheet — once a search has results, tap the filter button at the start of the chip rail to narrow by Format (Blu-ray, DVD, CD, LP, audiobook, eBook, board / video game), Language, and Publication year. Toggle a language and the count updates live across the whole result set, not just the page on screen. • Filter counts come from the full catalog response, so even a language with three matches is visible without scrolling through pages. Format at a glance: • Search results show clear format identifiers — DVD, BD, CD, LP — so a movie and an album are unmistakable at a glance, even with Movies and Music filters both on. • Board games show a die, video games show a controller, audiobooks show headphones. • Format icons are bigger and higher-contrast in both light and dark themes — easier to spot. New app icon, with a dedicated dark-mode variant that picks up on Home Screen and Settings when the system is set to Dark.

Your home library, in the app: • Set your preferred pickup location from Settings. • A new Home library card on the Account tab shows your choice with a live open/closed status — "Open until 19:00" when you can still drop by, "Opens Mon at 10:00" otherwise. • A tap takes you to a detail view with opening hours for this and next week, phone numbers, email addresses, and the library address. • Tap the address to open it in your default maps app. • Holidays and shortened hours are flagged inline and at the top of the detail view.

Search got a refresh: • Content-type filter chips are now always visible above the search field. Pre-select books, music, movies, games, journals, sheet music, maps, or other — and the next search will already be narrowed. • Results appear directly in the main view as you type. No more separate suggestion dropdown — type a few letters, see what's there, refine. Other improvements: • Switching language in Settings is now instant — no more app restart, and you stay right where you were.