Instacast HD 1.0 Recap
Yesterday after a couple of month working on Instacast HD, I finally took the courage and launched it. The feedback I got up until now has been phenomenal. You guys seem to love it and giving it ✭✭✭✭✭ on the App Store (hint). In fact the success was far greater than I could ever hoped for. Instacast HD took the #1 spot of the News category in a lot of countries and even conquered the Top 100 with being on #5 in Germany. And I thought this wasn't possible anymore with so many apps in the App Store. Seems I was wrong.
I am also pretty happy that there are no apparent major issues with the 1.0, which is awesome. I already answered every Instacast support ticket that came in yesterday. The main issue seems to be that iCloud is sometimes not working correctly. I am investigating that. Otherwise everything seems to work great.
Being freed from support I could use the time yesterday to gracefully scale the cloud architecture Instacast connects to when browsing the podcast directory and getting push notifications. So far this worked quite well. I optimized the hell out of it and it still works great. There hasn't been any downtime or server explosion. I am now able to say, that Instacast will manage to send you push notifications not later than 30 minutes after an episode has become available on high-priority feeds (feeds that more than 5 people are subscribed to) and not later than 2,5 hours on every other feed. I will try to hold these numbers with putting priority on the 30 minutes mark for high-priority feeds.
Some followers on Twitter asked me if it was possible to bring Push Notifications to the iPhone. As much as I'd love to, I can't promise anything. The cloud architecture is already absorbing a lot of money and as I am a one man show and need to get direct revenue on any project I do, I don't see how this is possible right now on the iPhone. It is simply not economical right now. This does not mean that it will never come to the iPhone, I am not saying that. Maybe in time as I optimize it more, there will be a point when I'll be comfortable doing that.
Again thank you so much for your support and keep on spreading the word.
November 24th, 2011 • Permalink
More articles about Blog Posts
05/09/2012 - New Specs on Podlove.org
05/09/2012 - Excellent Write-up of Instacast 2.0
05/07/2012 - Instacast 2.0 Available
05/06/2012 - Instacast HD Rejected over Flattr Integration
05/02/2012 - Multi-Format Podcast Feeds
04/26/2012 - Instacast 2.0 First Impressions
04/05/2012 - Patching iCloud Sync
03/29/2012 - The Podlove Initiative
03/28/2012 - Auphonic now Open for the Public
03/26/2012 - What's next with Instacast?
03/26/2012 - State of Support and iCloud