Several changes in this release: •
I have made the decision to remove support for Android 4 altogether. I used to keep a really old version of the app around (from 2018) for older versions of Android, but it has become nearly impossible to support, even in the new app framework. It is not easy to find test devices and many users would give bad ratings for the app when it was unfortunately the really old software causing the issues, rather than my app.
Some small updates:
I haven’t written any posts for a while, but you will notice that there have been some updates to the app. Life started getting really busy from October, but things seem to have stabilised a bit now so that I can try and find a balance between life and my app.
My posts are mainly to try and give people a bit of an insight into what goes on behind the scenes of London Bus Pal. Here’s what you need to know:
That’s all for now. Always happy to correspond over email!
Next update to make things better.
First update of 2020 – it’s just a small one to make sure everything stays up to date.
Please be sure to review this app if you find it useful – reviews are really helpful for a small, independent developer like myself.
• Updates to the platform and libraries I use to ensure that the app is as stable as possible. 📚
Tip: you can go to settings and choose whether to show the home screen, nearby stops or your favourite stops when the application starts. It’s right at the top! 🏠
Version 19.9.2 of London Bus Pal “Pro” version seems to have broken it and a user had to point this out to me after it had been live for a few days. I checked it and it is definitely broken. The app breaks completely upon start-up, so it is incredible that this got missed – if I had a team working on this, they would have had really stern words from me – this is just unacceptable.
But even by my own fairly high standards, this happened. And poor quality control is only half the story here. Back in January of this year, I mentioned the issue of having a free and paid app (https://www.londonbuspal.co.uk/blog/ideas-on-monetisation/) and that I wanted to kill off the paid app. The only action I really took since then, was to unpublish the app. I wasn’t sure that this was possible, but I could publish updates, but stop selling the application. In a perfect world, I would have loved to have kept the paid app going for another year or two.
The two versions of the app are exactly the same, except that the one shows ads and the other one sometimes shows ads (if you paid a tip, the “free” app won’t show ads either). From a technical stand-point, the apps are the same, I therefore only really thoroughly test either the paid-for or free version. Until fairly recently, it used to be the paid-for app, since it was easy to do and I didn’t have to deal with the ads during testing. A change in the way I did this changed it and the default version I now test is the free version. The latest release went out and I never really checked the paid-for version – I haven’t had issues specific to only one version forever, so not sure why this is any different.
Either way, once the code is written, I actually have to do four builds (free version for iOS, free version for Google stores, free version for non-Google stores and paid version for Google stores). As three of the four builds and the vast majority of users use the free version, it makes sense that I should be testing that version.
Whilst I cannot be sure as I haven’t investigated, the issue could very well just be that the build broke the app, rather than code. The fact of the matter here is that I just don’t have time to check right now! I am working remotely on a tablet and even if I can investigate and find the fix, it will likely be another 36 hours at the very least before I can think of publishing the fix. In all honestly, I would love to just go and revert to a working version, but this also takes effort and time I just don’t have available right now.
Due to this excessive overhead to keep a version of the app going which is used by less than 2% of my users (even though ever user is equally important to me), it just makes sense to finally drop it. The ability to remove ads is available in the free version, so no functionality is lost and at least I know that everyone is using the version I actually tested.
Please don’t believe by any means that dropping support for the paid version is at all a sign for the rest of the app. Dropping support really means I can do a much better job of keeping the free app going.
Tip: you can go to settings and choose whether to show the home screen, nearby stops or your favourite stops when the application starts. It’s right at the top! 🏠
This is a relatively light update as I updated the Flutter framework to the latest version – 1.9.1. This should generally improve the way things work on the latest versions of iOS and Android.
At the time of writing, it’s not clear if this will be published on iOS or not. My previous two attempts were rejected by Apple as the app was getting stuck on the splash screen in their test environments on iPads. When searching for this, it appears that it’s not an uncommon issue and not only related to Flutter. I do wonder if it is not an issue in their test lab as the app seemed perfectly fine on an iPad I used to test it with. It will take a day or two before I will know if this update will go out.