Hey all!

As always, thank you for being a tester. Because of your efforts in reporting, things are continually improving and we are finding new issues to patch up.

Before I explain, I just want you to know that this is not a rant or anything. It has nothing to do from any feedback from you guys, but something I wanted to clear up ahead of time, especially going into the fairly soon release of a stable build on the App Store.

I just wanted to give a quick explanation of how Sean and I are using TestFlight. I’m not sure how other apps are handling this, but my current use and future plan is to use TestFlight for “hot off the press” builds. That does not mean that no testing has gone into them, but it does mean that the testing will have been limited.

Were we a big team, we would send things through QA before releasing whether to TestFlight or for production to the App Store. However, we are not, and it is primarily only two people contributing to the actual codebase. We are extremely grateful to the people who are submitting PRs with improvements and fixes however, and would love for that to continue.

With that said, TestFlight will continue to be for hot releases. Things might break, things might improve. And you guys, the community, are that QA team. There’s no way we could get this sort of feedback or anything without you guys, and we are grateful for that. I just don’t want you all to feel that we are throwing bugs at you for no reason.

Once a stable build is released on the App Store, I’d love for some of you to stick around with us in TestFlight to continue doing what you are doing. Builds to TestFlight will likely become more frequent rather than less with a proper CI/CD pipeline will be established to release new version tags on Git directly to TestFlight.

I also want to make sure that all of you know that regardless of whether you receive a response or not, your issues are seen and are being addressed. I think it goes without saying that this community has grown extremely fast. To go from having zero users to nearing 10000 in less than two weeks is a difficult task to juggle, especially when dealing with a brand new codebase, a brand new API, and all the while attempting to integrate and push at lightning fast speeds.

Thankfully we are starting to get to a point where integrations do not need to be made as fast (most necessary features are now implemented), so there is going to be way more smoothing out the edges coming up now.

Thanks as always for your help and understanding!

  • mrsvl@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    1 year ago

    You guys are crazy. You’re pushing changes more quickly then people making posts on lemmy 😅. Love the feel of the app so far. I was about to post a bug but guess what? I checked for app update and it was already fixed!

  • RustedSwitch@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    I feel like I knew this intuitively. You aren’t a business, but rather a couple of guys building a plane around us when we’re already in flight on this Lemmy journey out of Reddit-land.

    I think it’s evident that the majority of the Memmy user base is incredibly thankful for what you’re doing, not to mention impressed with how much more polished this thing gets every day. It’s astonishing.

    Was someone complaining? (Dusts off pitchfork and lights the torch).

    • gkd@lemmy.mlOPM
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      No, nothing like that. Just wanted to make it clear here before the initial build for the App Store. I’d like to see people stick around in TestFlight so we can keep getting the feedback.

  • PicoBlaanket@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    It’s fun to run test builds - and I love when a new version is ready.

    And the new text-size slider is most excellent.

    • Sean@lemmy.mlM
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Glad you love the text slider, it was a pain to implement lol

    • EeeDawg101@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I love when I come across an app that just really sucks me in and actually excites me when updates are available. I check the test flight app periodically throughout the day to see if memmy got an update and when it does it’s legit exciting for me. So I’m def onboard for starting on the betas!

  • Hazzard
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Definitely down to stick with the TestFlight version for a good while. The app has been fantastic, and it’s been really enjoyable to see things evolving and coming so quickly. I’m also happy to help out the dev team, even in this small way.

    Congrats on being so close to a full stable release! Will make it so much easier to promote this app to others!

  • Ocean@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    All good, I feel like a lot of memmy users are coming straight out of Apollo, and while it’s obviously not yet as polished as that app (completely expected considering this one is basically brand new, it’s crazy how good it is already though!) we’re all just glad you’ve given the community a new app to use, and a way to feel more familiar with our new home on lemmy.

    Thankyou! And keep up the good work :)

  • marcar@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I live for beta apps, so I’ll be sticking around. The app is astonishingly stable though

    • gkd@lemmy.mlOPM
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      We are in review right now with Apple, might only be an hour before approval let’s see.