Dave Wiskus, suggests an interesting and sensible change to the iTunes store. I think Aptfolk will be duping this request.
Marc LaFountain shares how his support tools help him stay on top of a huge user base. Marc is one of my Support Heros, he’s helped me out with trivial and not so trivial issues a number of times. I can attest to his mastery over the job.
If your app is storing user credentials, you probably ought to take a look at this. Your users likely won’t thank you, but you’ll have done a good job.
Gabriel Weinberg does an excellent job giving some ‘TIG’ advice.
(Note: This post is a response to, and in part a continuation of, a discussion that happened yesterday on Twitter. A few tweets from that conversation are linked here.)
It’s jailbreak season again, which means it’s time for iOS developers and jailbreak users to start arguing with each other on Twitter. To boil a fairly nuanced debate down to two bullet points:
It’s true that jailbreaking your iPhone or iPad and installing certain apps and addons can make iOS behave in unexpected ways, but we at Aptfolk feel strongly that it’s good policy to provide support for jailbreakers.
Some developers argue that most jailbreak users are pirates, and probably haven’t paid for their apps. We haven’t seen numbers on this, but none of the jailbreakers on our team—there are several—pirate apps. Many users jailbreak because they prefer to have control over their own devices, and those users don’t deserve to be presumed guilty until proven innocent; we’ve seen where that leads, and we can’t get behind it. But even assuming that our experience is an exception, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software has already explained why pirate users aren’t entirely a bad thing.
We provide support for users of great Mac and iOS apps, which means that we interact daily with both great developers and great users. It’s important to us and to our clients that users receive polite, respectful support—even when what’s going wrong is their fault. A response like “You’re causing the problem, so please stop bothering us” is never an option. Instead, there are several levels of support you can provide to jailbreak users, each better (from the user’s point of view) than the last:
Of course, providing any support for jailbreak users can be difficult in part because they tend to be quiet about their status. Very few jailbreakers end their support requests with “By the way, I’m running jailbroken iOS 4.3.1 on an iPhone 3GS”. This is often in part because they genuinely don’t think of it as an issue—after all, dozens or hundreds of other apps work just fine on jailbroken devices, so why shouldn’t this one? On the other hand, some users don’t report their jailbroken status because of the stigma that attends it: if they can get their issue resolved without mentioning it, why bother to bring it up when it might make the developer think “Pirate!”?
The stigma against jailbreaking is largely due to the pirates who give honest jailbreakers a bad name. We think the best way to eliminate this stigma is to treat jailbreak status the same way as any other device spec. Treating it this way tends to generate more useful bug reports for developers, which in turn lets them (and us) provide better support for users. And if a few pirates get free support along the way, well, that’s just good karma for the rest of us.
Remember: a user is a user is a user. Treat ‘em right.
*Update 04-09-11: Thanks to @chpwn, the developer of several popular jailbreak apps, who pointed out that MobileSubstrate is rarely a culprit. It was used here as a jailbreak ‘feature’ many people have heard of rather than as a specific example; to avoid adding to the mostly unwarranted concern about MobileSubstrate, we’ve switched in $JAILBREAKADDON instead.