MobileChat: A Lesson in Using Paying Customers to Alpha Test
August 16, 2008 by Erik MacKinnon
A few days ago, we posted a quick article about the brand spanking new (and purportedly first fully-featured) iPhone instant messenger client MobileChat. The idea was to provide you, dear reader, with a review of the functionality of MobileChat and how awesome finally having an IM client that can connect to multiple networks at once would be.
Unfortunately for us – and especially for developer twenty08 – the launch of MobileChat has been somewhat of an epic disaster and a true lesson on why alpha/beta testing and planning are a part of the software development process.
It takes no more than a quick look at the developers’ blog to see the chain of failures that have accompanied this launch. Twenty08 was clearly nowhere near ready for the launch of their product, and considering they are charging for it (it’s only $2.99, but it IS paid software) they should have been much better prepared. Here’s a timeline and quick snippets from their blog:
Tuesday August 12 – 7:30pm
We have a number of confirmations from New Zealand users that MobileChat is on the AppStore.
This is great news for our users and TERRIBLE news for us. While we’re excited that it’s on AppStore. We had no idea that the push behind MobileChat was so big! Our server load is going through the roof as I write this email and we’re quickly beginning to feel the heat.
With that being said, I just want all of our users to know that we are a very SMALL company. (There’s really only 2 of us!) As a result, we’re struggling to keep up with the demand and scale as we need. (This is a good problem.)
Wednesday August 13 – 2:50am
We are working hard to bring the servers back online. Here’s a run down of the problem:
We expected MobileChat to be popular, but we didn’t expect the amount of volume that we received (and are still receiving). Our estimate was 100 sales a day during the first week. We’ve gone far above that. The application is currently the 35th Top Paid Application on the AppStore and Apple isn’t willing to work with us in pulling the application down until we can recover. (I don’t blame them, but it would have been nice.)
Wait a second… you developed an application for the iPhone App Store – the only one that can connect to multiple IM networks – and your estimate was 100 sales a day? Sigh. Clearly our poor developer friends (the two man show!) have never run a business of any sort. Step 1: PREPARE FOR UNEXPECTED POPULARITY!
Wednesday August 13 – 11:00am
While the servers are still slow (due to the fact that each box is handling 1000+ AIM sessions alone); the load has lightened up a bit and we think we’ll be able to restore full service by the end of the night.
Again, we apologize for the excessive ridiculous amount of downtime and would like our users to know that we will be compensating them in one way or another.
So… day 1 is complete and so far all that has happened is some apologies, some server software trials to lighten the load, and a promise for user compensation. Not good.
Wednesday August 13 – 10:28pm
Here are some of the questions I found looking through the last blog post:
1. The app crashes/freezes when opening it.
We’re aware of that. We fixed a lot of the bugs you guys are having and submitted it to Apple within seconds of the first version getting approved. The new version should appear on AppStore very shortly. (Updates aren’t as fast as we’d like thm to be.)
Here’s lesson #2, folks. “We’re aware our app crashes – we fixed a lot of bugs and then released a second version after our buggy, untested version was approved and we sold an assload of them” <— not a way to win happy customers. Having used this application from the first few minutes that it was launched, I can tell you that there is NO WAY that this application was fully alpha tested.
Saturday August 16 – 1:35am
A quick reminder to everyone who’s been following the blog comments. Please ignore the few people who seem to come here with the sole intention of causing trouble. I know I’m guilty in this respect (it’s so hard to turn your head), but it’s better off that we keep this a friendly and positive community and not get down to their level.
Also, I just wanted to make a quick shout out to everyone who’s offered us help while we battle to get this project moving uphill once again. We’ve come a long way over the past few days and we couldn’t have done it without a community who believed in us and the people who emailed us offering their knowledge and expertise.
Sigh. Those “people with intention to cause trouble”? THOSE ARE YOUR PAYING CUSTOMERS, WHICH YOU SOLD A BUGGY, ALMOST USELESS APPLICATION TO! They have every right to be upset, as they feel ripped off. Also – giving a “shout out” to the “community” for helping this “project” get moving uphill again? If you meant this to be an open source application in which people would contribute – well then it should have been a free application, shouldn’t it?
Let me give you an analogy. Say I bought a nice shiny new car, and when I got it home, it wouldn’t start. It turns out that every one of this make and model had an engine that flat out didn’t work. Instead of offering a refund (or a new car!), the expectation of the car manufacturer is that some of the car’s buyers would help develop their engine technology so that they could fix the engines so that the car would work.
Are you going to buy this car? And if you did… are you going to be even remotely happy with the purchase?
The only upside of MobileChat and the $3 I wasted in buying it is that the application actually has some potential. MobileChat can simultaneously connect to AIM, Windows Live Messenger, ICQ, .Mac, Yahoo! Chat, Google Talk and Jabber. The chat functionality does work most of the time now that the server issues are starting to clear up. Unfortunately, however, there are still some glaring issues. For instance, I can’t even get MobileChat to launch at all. Here’s the screen I get before being booted back out to the SpringBoard:
No joke – in the middle of writing this review, MobileChat just stopped being able to launch, forcing me to have to reinstall it from the App Store. Unbelievable.
Anyway – there ARE features in this thing. First of all, all of your buddies will load in a single buddy list. This is great – except there’s no way to exclude offline buddies, and they show up for me in alphabetical order. Also – for Windows Live Messenger friends, there’s no way to view them via their nickname. All that shows up in the buddy list is their email address. Here’s what the developer had to say:
MSN nicks not appearing, mail-adresses used instead.
Once we get our servers smoothed out, we’re going to take a look to see why the MSN/Windows Live nicknames aren’t being passed trough as aliases like the other protocols. Hopefully this is something we can fix on our end without requiring an app update.
Translation – we have no idea if we can fix this. Anyway, the chat functionality works fine – including a handy picture button with which you can shoot a picture or choose one from your library, and MobileChat will upload it to QuickShareIt and inject a link into your chat for you.
Also, MobileChat supports remaining online once you close the application. The way this works is that MobileChat stores all incoming messages on their servers and sends them to you when you reopen MobileChat on your iPhone. You can also set an away message, and MobileChat will mark you as away once you close the client on your iPhone. This will become even better in September, once Apple enables push notifications. Speaking of push – MobileChat does support a rudimentary email push notification (to hold you over until Apple releases it) but I couldn’t get it to function at all:
Push-notification via e-mail.
This is coming, I promise. We have it disabled right now because our servers are already taking a beating, but once everything is running nice and smoothly, we’ll get this up and going again.
All in all I can see MobileChat becoming a premier IM application for the iPhone. Once twenty08 works out the ridiculous amount of bugs and glitches – both with their client and their servers – it might actually be a recommended buy.
However – at this point, I would recommend that you stay away and wait it out. If you need any further reason to… look no further than the twenty08 blog, or check the reviews for MobileChat in the App Store.
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