Explanation for the lack of Android updates
Posted: April 17th, 2021, 11:11 pm
Today was one of the first times I deleted a Forum post from an disappointed Customer about the lack of Android updates.
In the spirit of transparency, I do want to address the issue, and give you a short update on where things stand.
We completely overworked almost all parts of our firmware, and have been working on that for a very long time. Because it was a huge refactor, it also required a change in our Bluetooth API. Therefore it also required big changes in the Apps to stay compatible with the new Firmware.
It took our iOS developers quite some time to catch up to our firmware development, but we're currently running a beta programme there, which is going very well. By now we are getting next to no bug reports back, which is a great sign.
Unfortunately, our Android app development is quite a bit behind, due to changes in our personell, including a new hire that turned out to be a huge mistake, which threw us back even further. Being a bootstrapped company without abundant resources, the hiring process is much more difficult and therefore also much slower. There are several changes in the Firmware that require rewriting significant portions of the Android app. We have switched to a newer version of the SDK of our Bluetooth Chip, requiring a big change in the Firmware updating routine in the Apps. There used to be an advantage of Android compared to iOS with this, which led to a more complicated implementation of the firmware update routine on iOS. This turned out to be an advantage for this latest change, and on Android we now have to do a similar more complicated implementation which we did for iOS years ago. The new Bluetooth API is plenty of work as well, and we had one more big internal change that I won't go into detail about now.
On top of all of this, Google added several new requirements which all apps need to implement. Since we have already changed so much of the code of the Android app for what I wrote above, we decided to only implement those required changes on top of our newer Application code. This means that we cannot simply release small updates to the Android app, such as an update with newer firmware version. Luckily, there were no more critical bugs that we had to issue updates for since the firmware version in the last android app release.
Unfortunately, at this point I still cannot give you an ETA for the next Android release - there are still several tickets open for this milestone, and given their nature, the time required to implement them is not at all easy to determine. But I can tell you that we are working very hard on it!
The good thing is that since we're doing extensive Beta testing with the iOS Beta testers, the next big firmware release will have all of the bugs already ironed out when you Android users will finally get to install it ;-)
TL;DR: Big firmware updates we've been working on require big Android app updates, new Google requirements mean we can't even do small updates since November. We're definitely behind with the Android app, but we are working on it!
In the spirit of transparency, I do want to address the issue, and give you a short update on where things stand.
We completely overworked almost all parts of our firmware, and have been working on that for a very long time. Because it was a huge refactor, it also required a change in our Bluetooth API. Therefore it also required big changes in the Apps to stay compatible with the new Firmware.
It took our iOS developers quite some time to catch up to our firmware development, but we're currently running a beta programme there, which is going very well. By now we are getting next to no bug reports back, which is a great sign.
Unfortunately, our Android app development is quite a bit behind, due to changes in our personell, including a new hire that turned out to be a huge mistake, which threw us back even further. Being a bootstrapped company without abundant resources, the hiring process is much more difficult and therefore also much slower. There are several changes in the Firmware that require rewriting significant portions of the Android app. We have switched to a newer version of the SDK of our Bluetooth Chip, requiring a big change in the Firmware updating routine in the Apps. There used to be an advantage of Android compared to iOS with this, which led to a more complicated implementation of the firmware update routine on iOS. This turned out to be an advantage for this latest change, and on Android we now have to do a similar more complicated implementation which we did for iOS years ago. The new Bluetooth API is plenty of work as well, and we had one more big internal change that I won't go into detail about now.
On top of all of this, Google added several new requirements which all apps need to implement. Since we have already changed so much of the code of the Android app for what I wrote above, we decided to only implement those required changes on top of our newer Application code. This means that we cannot simply release small updates to the Android app, such as an update with newer firmware version. Luckily, there were no more critical bugs that we had to issue updates for since the firmware version in the last android app release.
Unfortunately, at this point I still cannot give you an ETA for the next Android release - there are still several tickets open for this milestone, and given their nature, the time required to implement them is not at all easy to determine. But I can tell you that we are working very hard on it!
The good thing is that since we're doing extensive Beta testing with the iOS Beta testers, the next big firmware release will have all of the bugs already ironed out when you Android users will finally get to install it ;-)
TL;DR: Big firmware updates we've been working on require big Android app updates, new Google requirements mean we can't even do small updates since November. We're definitely behind with the Android app, but we are working on it!