Alright, it’s time for another quick mid-phase update. Beta 12 is getting lengthy or at least it can be expected to get somewhat similar to Beta 11 in which we made almost half of the iOS app offline accessible. We blame our high aspiration to support offline interactions while we are a relatively small team. No regrets though! It’s bewildering to see how much you can expand your presumed limits.
About We/Us
More often I use “We/Us” in my updates. That’s because in an alternate world we’ve been posting these updates in the company’s blog at this point. However, thanks to COVID-19, last year we decided not to launch the platform and not to reveal the app/company’s name. That’s why I keep posting updates here.
So, by “We” I refer to the current team members who are in the company and are involved in the app and the business development.
Revised Timeline
If you have followed my updates, you’ve probably known that we decided to make a bold move compared to the size of our team and resources. We started making some sections of the platform offline accessible. It introduces a lot of workloads and subsequently delays to our previously projected timeline.
To make our previous projection even more off, I moved to a new place in February. This personal resettlement also put me away from the project and team for almost a month and a half. I briefly covered it in the last update so I’m gonna skip it here.
Although my other fellows were working but still as the head of the development team, my absence made its damage. Anyway, here is our most recent estimated timeline:
Public Beta Launch
As we already planned, we are going to re-evaluate the pandemic and vaccination advancement next month (July) and either confirm or post-pone the public beta testing of the platform. The progress in vaccination around the world and the way that businesses are getting back to normal in some areas, all are typical of that we probably can start the public beta testing sometime in late October or early November 2021.
At this point, one thing is certain, we’re going to have to leverage the inviting system we developed last year, cause our testing capacity will have to be increased gradually.
Android App Discontinuation – Conjecture
I was not sure If I should break it out at this point. The truth is the last few months were tough on us. Normally, you do not plan for an extra couple of years of maintenance before making any dime when you devise your budget plan.
Covid-19 pandemic put us in an awkward situation, made us considerably shrink our development team. Although we managed to even raise money during this horrible period, we have had a really hard time meeting the milestones we outlined while we were developing and maintaining the app for two entirely different platforms.
Nothing has been decided yet, but recently, we put the following two options on the table:
- Discontinue the Android version
- Maintain but not develop any further the Android version
We prefer the second option if we absolutely have to choose one, yet we’re not sure if we can afford it either. Anyway, in case of choosing any, It would be temporary and probably until the next round of capital raise when we can afford to bring some more engineers into the team.
On the other hand, we already decided to increase our public beta testing capacity gradually, therefore it may not be a bad idea to concentrate on the iOS version and bring android users back in later stages.
One way another, we are going to make up our mind on this in our next meeting.
Till the next update, stay safe!
Cheers!
