andreaslinde.com

Merry christmas to everybody out there, hope you all are having some relaxing days! Well, I wanted to do so too, but it is hard these days, somehow. Why? Oh well, I planned on having some days off on coding and gather some fresh power for the next year. A friend of mine even said:

I fear you want to make an already very good product perfect

He is probably right with that, I do always find things I want to make better and better and better. So I have to try to stop myself doing that already.

Hey, but I have so many ideas and there are problems to solve, people are having issues!

Well, that said and reading some up to date reviews on the iTunes AppStore about WorldView Live made me rethink, at least.

During the last week I was working on lots of enhancements in the background of the app. We have a new eeasy to use support forum, a bugfix release was made available in a very short time and we’ve been also working on a new design for the website and a new app logo (which will be revealed later the next 2 weeks – and hey, both look sooooo great ).

Today I took another look at the current iTunes reviews and frankly said: it struck me!

I could try to go the easy way, just ignore, but that is not me, I care. But the hardest thing in this case is to understand WHY these people directly write a bad review on iTunes, but DO NOT read the text I provide in iTunes and DO NOT try to use the support forum or DO NOT ask in any other way. Because I do have NO way to react on iTunes. Ok, this is nothing I can blame the users for, that is clearly Apple’s fault. I know a lot of developers being very upset about the (new) voting system and also the way the reviews work. Hey Apple, why can’t I, as the developer, not even send these people a private note to get in touch with them!? I don’t need their email address, just a method of sending them an information. I am not even asking for writing a public comment to every single iTunes review – which reminds me of eBay where the seller even can do that!

Ok … calm down Andreas … But hey, I have a great team of people helping me on the app development part, which mostly is there since the beginning of the app. People around the world test sometimes every day a new version on more than a dozen devices and give me so valuable feedback. Thanks to Alex, Gavin, Rees, Ingo, Karim, Nareharo, Josef, Hervé and Kai!

But still, you never can be sure to find every problem that might occur. I was used to develop desktop and web applications for years and years, but hey, developing for such a device is so tricky. Even with the gorgeous APIs and development tools Apple provides. I would even say, developing a solid rocking app for a mobile device is more tricky then writing a desktop app!

So what is the conclusion? I will probably continue to implement my ideas into the app, and people will download it or even buy it. But on the other side, I will do my very best to make the app rock stable and fun to use and help everybody as good as I can who will use the support forum. The more tricky part for me will be: not to read the iTunes reviews any more, since this way no download numbers make it worth letting these few comments in there ruin my holidays!

Enjoy your holidays and already a happy new year to everybody out there!

(If you find grammar or other mistakes in the text above, I do not care, I am native german and I am allowed to do things wrong)