First, no, we’re not releasing before Christmas, it’s already the 24th 
. We are in the home stretch of finishing up a significant release for early 2019.
As our membership has grown, the idea of risking a big release right before everyone is off for a few days becomes less and less palatable. We don’t want to ruin your holidays if we happen to ship a bug, and we don’t want to ruin the holidays of our support team–which is almost unavoidable releasing just before Christmas like we did last year.
It’s always funny to me how as we approach the end of a big push, working faster than ever, the sentiment that we are moving slowly always starts to crop up.
Roon is a broad product, with far more surface area than any of our direct competitors–there will always be a lot of people with different ideas about where we should go and what is important, and there will never be enough people working here to do everything people want in a short period. Even organizations with team size and funding 10-100x ours do not move their products forward as quickly as the aggregate expectations of this community imply that we should.
It takes a huge degree of focus/discipline to make any progress at all on bigger topics amidst a sea of small + medium sized requests that would take–literally–years to address. This is true of every successful product (ever visited Sonos forums or Tesla forums?). It’s almost a trope that product forums eventually get “burned to the ground” (see: Todoist) because the noise from people who want more eventually drowns out everything else. Not because the product is bad, or failing to move forward, just because at a certain community size, this phenomenon happens.
Some good ideas will be parked for years, because having the idea is the easy part. Finding the right time + way to do them, and then executing on those ideas in a sensible way is 100x harder. “How long my pet issue/feature request is taking” is an irrational way to measure a team’s output. Having a deep pool of open feature requests/areas of potential improvement is a normal state of affairs for a functioning product team. Ultimately, it’s up to us to decide what to spend time on, and where things should go
We are continuing to grow the core product, broaden compatibility with other products, address product/technical “debt”, continue with ongoing projects like the UI refresh, and plug away at big-effort stuff like mobile sync/streaming + machine-learning-based features. There will be some of the latter in this upcoming release, btw…along with plenty of other stuff.
I’m very excited about what is coming…but work takes time, and high-quality work takes more time. We don’t ever really stop working, and we don’t intend to…
Now…I’m going to sign off and bake some cookies. Happy Holidays, everyone. Thanks for all of your support. I am really excited about what 2019 will bring for Roon.