Opt-in early release for future big updates

I’ve been reading all the 1.8 comments with something of a train wreck mentality: simply unable to look away from the mayhem. I don’t mean the 1.8 release itself (which was IMHO not radically better or worse than typical software releases of this scope), but rather the intensity of vitriol and fighting between and among people on these forums this release seems to have engendered.

Given how important Roon is to an (apparently) significant portion of its user base, I’d strongly suggest you allow people to opt-in to early releases through a user preference. Lots of us love to be early adopters of our favorite tech, lots of us despise being early adopters. Your current strategy where everyone gets strongly pestered to upgrade on release day exacerbates this problem.

Having a few thousand people voluntarily put the release through its paces (after whatever beta strategy you like to implement) would ease (at least) some of the kvetching. And the final release would certainly be much more stable, even if it comes a few weeks later for many users.

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Good idea in principle, but unfortunately mobile app stores make it hard, because they do not support multiple app versions AFAIK, and most users have automatic update on to make sure bug fixes (especially for security bugs) are installed promptly.

There are app beta programs though

Well, you can sign up a fair number of users thru testflight on iOS these days. The way other companies are handling this is, they inform the interested users about the upcoming program, then they assign slots on a FCFS basis until they are all taken. Done it many times.

Dont know the situation on that other store. I like the idea suggested by @David_Roberts Would avoid a repetition of this unduly mess

The problem is Roon’s policy of upgrading all users at about the same time rather than giving people the option of delaying or deferring a version upgrade. There are good reasons for this from a maintenance and version management perspective but it leads to this kind of chaos when things go wrong. People don’t feel that it was their decision to get burned by the new bugs so they blame Roon.

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That is a good point on the App Stores. But there are workarounds like Testflight as suggested earlier. Nothing is perfect with a multi-platform release as broad as Roon’s, but there’s always a way to improve it (and I’d take bets that there will be more than a few post mortems at Roon to figure how to improve things for the next release). It’s about continuous improvement, not silver bullets.

8 posts were split to a new topic: Was testing for 1.8 adequate?

A post was merged into an existing topic: Was testing for 1.8 adequate?