State of Support and iCloud

I woke up today and looked at my support ticket queue. And there were 250 tickets open. As much as I appreciate the feedback and the engagement you guys bring up, it has gotten to a point where answering every single email is quite impossible, if I want to continue developing cool apps and invent new stuff. There is simply not enough time in the day. And I don't want to staff up. I've already been to that point and I don't want to be responsible for a big company and for the well-being of employees and also I don't want to outsource support to India.

At this point I don't have much choice, but to stop answering every single email. I will of course read everything but I will only answer if something is very specific and needs more clarification. Please don't take this personally. At the end it is also in your best interest that I have enough time to improve my products and write new code.

A lot of emails and messages on Twitter I got are complains about iCloud not working correctly. In the last version of Instacast, I added error alerts that try to explain what's going on. This has triggered a lot more feedback since users with problematic iCloud Sync now get immediate feedback. This increase in negative feedback about the service got me thinking.

I know syncing is hard, but the main problem seems not to be the syncing algorithm itself, which isn't perfect at all, but the broken communication to the iCloud infrastructure. I don't know exactly what's wrong with that, but it seems to be the same problem over and over again. The iCloud daemon is not able to download data. Sometimes this error goes away after a while, but most of the time the error just stays. Some users reported that they could fix the problem by deleting their iCloud account from the settings and configured it again from the ground up. However I can't give any hint if that will fix the problem for sure. Also I don't have this problem myself, which is kind of unfortunate, because I have no way of finding out what's wrong. My only option is to do some things differently in the coming releases in the hope to fix the problem.

In the coming weeks, I will be working on this problem very hard and will re-think the syncing mechanism from the ground up. Please hang on.

Cheers,
Martin

March 26th, 2012 • Permalink

More articles about Vemedio Posts

06/18/2013 - Instacast Roadmap for iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 Mavericks
05/28/2013 - Instacast Mac 1.0 Available
05/04/2013 - Tips and Tricks Part Three (Sharing and Accounts)
05/03/2013 - Instacast for Mac - Tips and Tricks Part Two (System Functions)
05/02/2013 - Instacast for Mac - Tips and Tricks Part One (Playback)
05/01/2013 - Instacast for Mac - Public Beta Available
12/15/2012 - Integrate with Instacast
12/12/2012 - Instacast's Automatic Download Management
12/09/2012 - More about our Cloud Sync
12/06/2012 - Instacast 3.0 Available
09/13/2012 - Instacast Memberships