What a mess and a nightmare

In a previous blog post, I wrote about my experience in setting my applications for free in order to generate buzz on the internet. Here is the rest of the story.

A few hours after my promotion started, I decided to give a look at user reviews to see if reactions were coming in. Reactions came in drove in a particular country, France:

Users in France started to give very bad and harsh reviews because of application crashing at startup. I was also receiving many emails from users asking why the application could not start. I was shocked. What was the problem? How in the world I could not have caught it while testing the application myself? I had to think and react fast. 

Users complaining in the App Store though application reviews is a very bad thing for two reasons: first, we cannot get in touch with them directly to get more information and secondly if reviews are very bad, it may takes forever to recover from this bad press. User sending support requests was the only solution to search for more information about the problem: what device they were using, in what language, on which iPhone OS version, etc. So I responded to support requests with the usual questions and a trend was starting to show clearly: the problem was occurring on devices configured in French locale. So I tested it myself on my own device and was experiencing the exact same problem. What a mess.

After a few moments investigating the problem, I thought  my application was experiencing a SIGABRT problem because of caching issue that sometimes is Interface Builder fault. The solution to make my application work was to configure the device in English locale. So I started to send the following email to my users:

"The problem has been identified. It will be fixed in the next release that will come soon. The workaround is to configure your device in English and start the application normally. Thank you for your patience with this issue."

What this email is in fact saying is this: I recognizes the problem, offers a workaround and promises to fix the problem very soon. I think this represents a good attitude. Many users responded with a thank you and a promise to update their application review once they get a working version of Ultimate Password Manager.

As all of this happened I was working on the next release of Ultimate Password Manager. I was planning to include many new features. But, I wanted to get the fix out the door asap. I was done with a few new features and I could manage to stop there and start testing in order to fix the problem. After a few hours of work, my application was ready to be submitted to Apple for review. I've also emailed to the appreview@apple.com email address to ask for quick approval of my application. We'll see if this speed things up.

Once the new version comes out, I will get back to every users who sent me support request asking them to upgrade to the latest version and reconsider their application review. It will take time to fix the "bad" reviews because I'm pretty sure lot of users simply decided to remove the faulty version of the application and pass on something else. That's life and I'll need to pass on something else myself.