This is what the human side of these kind of bugs looks like It doesn’t matter how good the UI is, how excited your release notes are, how cool it is to be offering something for free - at some point, one of your users is going to be sitting in front of Simplenote, with a knot in their stomach, having just lost their content, and hours of their time. Getting a core competency wrong invalidates almost everything else you do with an application - for example, all of the recent enhancements to Simplenote really can’t offset that one fact - your content isn’t safe when it’s entered into the app. Leaving that aside for now, what I want to focus on, using Simplenote as an example, is the idea of core-competency - the bits your app is supposed to be doing really, really well, either because it’s fundamental to the nature of the application, or because of the promises you’ve made in marketing it. Distributed version sync and merging is hard! However, none of these companies (including Evernote) provided up-front warning of this being a known issue at the time - the marketing copy stayed as-is, and they continued charging people on the basis of these guarantees.) (There’s a separate rant here around this kind of optimism or confidence being common among SAAS offerings of late - as a relevant example, most note and todo apps promising “sync and backup” frequently brown-out and lose large amounts of data. For a lot of users, this isn’t true, but there’s nothing on the more conventional communication channels indicating this - it’s only when you dig into the github issues that you become aware. The app is fundamentally promoted on being a simple, safe method of storing your notes. Update: Added giant banner on homepage warning about catastrophic data loss in our applications.īecause, as a note taking application that makes a promise about backup and sync, the first priorities for this application should be exactly that - backup, and sync. Hooray! However, what Simplenote really needs added should look something like: Native apps released on multiple platforms.Ability to sign in with Wordpress accounts.Since this bug was raised there’s been multiple features added to simple note and announced in the blog: The issue for me here is that free or otherwise, there’s an inherent promise being broken to users here - something incredibly fundamental to the nature of the app that it should be the first priority for any work being done to improve it. It even uses the phrase “backed up” and pushes the sync features multiple times in the blurb above, but this is a best case.Īt a worst case everything you type into the app can be lost at the next sync event.Ĭore competency - getting the fundamentals right. I’m not debating that it’s hard to fix these things or the fact that it’s great this service is being offered for free - but it there’s zero disclaimer on the obvious parts of the Simplenote website that your data is at risk if you use this application. The issue is a particularly nasty and long standing data loss issue, which I first submitted in Aug 2017 and has been impacting on users since.
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