Packages 2025 Wrapped

A look at my R package updates from 2025

Happy New Year! With CRAN opening for 2026 today, I’ve written up a reflection on my R package development in 2025. This follows my 2024 updates and 2023 updates.

Updates on CRAN

New packages

I’ve added two new packages to CRAN this year, down from six in 2025 and five in 2024. Things seemed to have stabilized and most of my development energy is going into new features in existing packages.

flexoki

flexoki implements ggplot2 scales and themes for working with Steph Ango’s Flexoki color palettes. The exact goal of this package is not yet fully transparent, but it demonstrates building a color palette based on my palette package. By next year, this package will have a slightly clearer purpose with an ongoing (but not yet public) side project that uses it with the typr package introduced below.

typr

typr provides a way to use the Typst cli from within R. Typst is modern approach to scientific documents and articles which will hopefully replace LaTeX in the near future. With typr, you can compile existing documents, query any feature from the cli, and compile documents from character vectors.

Updates to existing packages

During 2025, I completed my PhD at Harvard and needed to update my email address on CRAN, as I will lose access to my Harvard email in May 2026. As such, every package received at least one update to reflect this change, hence the flurry of updates in the late summer. In total, my existing packages had 35 CRAN submissions in 2025. (Special thanks to Uwe Ligges who handled the manual check for each of the package email updates!)

Name	Version	Date	Title
bskyr	0.2.0	2025-02-08	Interact with 'Bluesky' Social
PL94171	1.1.3	2025-02-19	Tabulate P.L. 94-171 Redistricting Data Summary Files
redistmetrics	1.0.9	2025-04-29	Redistricting Metrics
tinytiger	0.0.10	2025-04-30	Lightweight Interface to TIGER/Line Shapefiles
bskyr	0.3.0	2025-05-02	Interact with 'Bluesky' Social
redist	4.3.0	2025-07-08	Simulation Methods for Legislative Redistricting
ggredist	0.0.3	2025-08-29	Scales, Geometries, and Extensions of 'ggplot2' for Election Mapping
baf	0.0.3	2025-08-31	Block Assignment Files
geomander	2.5.0	2025-09-01	Geographic Tools for Studying Gerrymandering
censable	0.0.8	2025-09-01	Making Census Data More Usable
apportion	0.0.2	2025-09-01	Apportion Seats
cvap	0.1.6	2025-09-02	Citizen Voting Age Population
divseg	0.1.0	2025-09-02	Calculate Diversity and Segregation Indices
congress	0.1.0	2025-09-02	Access the Congress.gov API
crayons	0.0.4	2025-09-02	Color Palettes from Crayon Boxes
name	0.0.2	2025-09-03	Tools for Working with Names
jot	0.0.5	2025-09-03	Jot Down Values for Later
ppmf	0.2.1	2025-09-04	Read Census Privacy Protected Microdata Files
planscorer	0.0.3	2025-09-04	Score Redistricting Plans with 'PlanScore'
opengraph	0.0.3	2025-09-04	Process Metadata from the 'Open Graph Protocol'
gptzeror	0.0.2	2025-09-05	Identify Text Written by Large Language Models using 'GPTZero'
dots	0.0.3	2025-09-12	Dot Density Maps
palette	0.0.3	2025-09-13	Color Scheme Helpers
redist	4.3.1	2025-10-01	Simulation Methods for Legislative Redistricting
ggredist	0.0.4	2025-10-01	Scales, Geometries, and Extensions of 'ggplot2' for Election Mapping
baf	0.0.4	2025-10-14	Block Assignment Files
tinytiger	0.0.11	2025-10-24	Lightweight Interface to TIGER/Line Shapefiles
bskyr	0.4.0	2025-10-25	Interact with 'Bluesky' Social
redistverse	0.1.1	2025-10-27	Easily Install and Load Redistricting Software
opengraph	0.0.4	2025-11-06	Process Metadata from the 'Open Graph Protocol'
geomander	2.5.2	2025-12-11	Geographic Tools for Studying Gerrymandering
feltr	0.1.0	2025-12-11	Access the Felt API
alarmdata	0.2.4	2025-12-12	Download, Merge, and Process Redistricting Data
redistmetrics	1.0.11	2025-12-15	Redistricting Metrics
redistverse	0.1.2	2025-12-15	Easily Install and Load Redistricting Software

Some notable updates this year include:

• bskyr 0.2.0, 0.3.0, and 0.4.0: these massively expanded support for using Bluesky from R. Now you can post videos, send messages, work with lists, delete all sorts of records (e.g., unlike a post), embed link cards in posts, include tenor gifs in posts, and more. I also added 3 vignettes to cover more detailed aspects of the package.
• tinytiger 0.0.10, 0.0.11: these add support for 2024 and 2025 census shapes ( “TIGER Lines”)
• PL94171 1.1.3: this adds support for 1990 PL 94-171 redistricting files

Finally, you might note that geomander and its dependents had some extra submissions this year in December. As with many R bad experiences, Brian Ripley was involved. geomander was due for an update to address a CRAN note and, prior to the deadline for fixing it, he yanked the package from CRAN and archived its dependents. This led to a new flurry of submissions to get everything back on CRAN before the holiday break. Once again, special thanks to Uwe Ligges and to the R-pkg-devel list for advice and help on getting the packages back on CRAN quickly.

Package Downloads

Below are the cumulative downloads for each package over the last year by day.

As with last year’s post, a single summary of total downloads misses that some packages have been available for longer than others. One (simple) way to account for this is to adjust the downloads by the number of days the package has been available. Of course, this doesn’t account for potential trends where a brand new package is less likely to be downloaded than a package that has been around for at least a few weeks.

Package	Days	Downloads
		Raw	Adjusted
typr	254	4,141	5,951
flexoki	267	2,650	3,623

Comparison in growth

Now that there’s a fair bit of packages that have been around for at least two years, we can compare the growth in downloads.

Package		Downloads		Growth
		2024	2025
redistmetrics		3,795	7,673	202.19%
PL94171		4,514	8,608	190.70%
dots		2,439	3,851	157.89%
ppmf		2,547	3,899	153.08%
censable		4,034	5,473	135.67%
tinytiger		7,791	10,028	128.71%
redist		5,169	6,357	122.98%
bskyr		8,139	9,480	116.48%
geomander		4,900	5,664	115.59%
jot		2,027	2,273	112.14%
ggredist		2,699	2,990	110.78%
divseg		3,566	3,780	106.00%
apportion		3,114	3,291	105.68%
gptzeror		7,435	7,411	99.68%
feltr		7,518	7,468	99.33%
congress		8,439	8,320	98.59%
cvap		3,126	3,075	98.37%
crayons		3,064	2,922	95.37%
name		3,833	3,601	93.95%

Most packages saw modest growth, with just a few falling short of the prior year.

(Ongoing) Development in 2025

Finally, there’s always some work going on that hasn’t made it to CRAN yet. A few notable projects in the works include:

redistio

redistio offers a local redistricting map editor and a local adjacency graph editor. Both are powered by Shiny and, as of 2025, Kyle Walker’s mapgl package. Map drawers can now completely control the input data and use algorithmic redistricting methods from redist to generate plans. This is nearly ready for CRAN, once I learn a bit more about testing (fairly complicated) Shiny apps within packages.

ha

ha provides access to the HomeAssistant API so that you can change the colors of the lights or play music or anything else without ever leaving RStudio/Positron. (Just what you dream about, right?) It’s a lightweight wrapper that handles formatting requests correctly and ingesting responses into a useful object. Due to the flexibility of HomeAssistant, this package will likely stay in a minimal-ish state, with the hope that it makes it for end-users to write a tiny bit of code for things they want to do. (For example, toggling a light switch requires you to know the entity ID of the light switch, which is specific to your HomeAssistant setup, but this will handle all of the formatting of the request and response.)

pr

pr makes new probability classes for probability matrices and cumulative probability matrices. These classes are designed as a foundation for some probabilistic models that don’t fit well into a tidymodels framework and are the basis for some upcoming work with my team at Princeton.