APPA Mundi are a British company who employ some very talented staff, most of whom are very well known in developer circles via books, videos and other means.
However, they just don’t get how to engage their customers. Something is very wrong, but what is it?
Unhappy customers are unhappy
APPA Mundi Tasks is a fairly decent application for tracking Exchange tasks and syncing them over the air. I’ve paid for this app and to be honest it could be better but it’s not bad – but I’m not here to moan about the features of the app itself.
The problem is that people seem to have issues when APPA Mundi decide to release an update. For whatever reason, the application crashes at start-up when loading in the settings from the previous version. This isn’t even the first time it has happened, and the only way to get around this issue is to uninstall – wiping any un-synchronised tasks – and re-install a fresh copy. Then you then have to set up with your Exchange details… which you always keep on you, right?
I’m not the only one who has this issue, a quick check of the reviews on the Marketplace shows a lot of people with similar issues:
“New update crash” – DAguia
“This program is no longer working, need tech support” – Player304316965
“No longer works after upgrade, please repair” – tag63
“This is crashing everytime after the recent upgrade!!! Please fix ASAP!!!!!!!!!” – CRLNAZ
These people paid for this application.
It’s not our fault, honest
So APPA Mundi have suggested a fix for this issue (the same one I described above) – but that’s not all, when I questioned them on why they hadn’t tested their update properly they informed me that it wasn’t their falt, and Microsoft was to blame
What? This is news to me. There’s a MAJOR bug in Microsoft’s update process, and no-one else knows about it apart from the smarty-pants over at APPA Mundi? Hey it’s possible…
Don’t be on Twitter if you’re not going to use it
Not your fault? Prove it!
I’ve not heard anything from them since, and as you can tell, these guys don’t update their Twitter account very often. I guess you either get social media or you don’t, but why even bother to have a Twitter account if you don’t check your replies? Does no one at APPA Mundi care about their company image?
APPA Mundi have some extremely intelligent employees – I even own their books. Why can’t they get something as simple as app updates sorted?
I was very dismayed to find this quote on their website:
“The level of Windows Mobile development expertise at APPA Mundi is virtually unrivaled anywhere in the world.” – Rob Tiffany, Mobility Architect, Microsoft
Oh god. We’re doomed.
Update…
Check the comments below for a reply from APPA Mundi.
I’m sorry you have had a problem with the application update. The update was fully tested before submission to Marketplace and the data and settings format did not change between these two versions. The support emails we received were dealt with within hours and customers were able to quickly get the app running again. We contacted all those who left comments on Marketplace with the fix and included our support email address for follow up. At no point did anyone contact us after this and say they still had an issue, most of the comments you refer to have since been updated.
We definitely dropped the ball with Twitter, to be honest dealing with a support issue like this generally goes beyond the 140 character limit so is not the place to provide lengthy descriptions of the issue and resolution. As soon as we were aware of the issue we tweeted with the workaround. As a “heads-up” mechanism it’s very quick but we’ve made all our contact details easily available for follow up. Many other users of the app will tell you how pleased they are with how quickly we have reacted to their support emails and feature requests.
We take great pride in the quality of our software and perform extensive testing on every release. The issue which occured with the 1.10 release was something which could not have been caught outside of the Marketplace update procedure and even now because of the sandboxed environment we have had no way to analyse what happened on those devices – we have no way to check the changes made to the application files or the contents of the isolated storage folder during the update process.
At this point the advice we can give is to sync regularly and especially before you perform an app update. If we ever get a response from Microsoft after raising the issue with them in February we may be in a better position to protect against it in the future. While we have no way to use the Exchange settings stored on your phone you can always access these through your email account settings for clarification.
Peter
Many thanks for your interesting reply Peter.
Do you have any idea where the exception is being thrown on launch after the update? Surly this is something you can test just by using the older version then upgrading it – or are you saying that the issue itself is when it’s upgraded ‘over the air’ by Microsoft? In a worst case scenario, would it be possible to just remove the offending settings from the Isolated Storage when something goes wrong at startup?
It hasn’t occurred during upgrade testing, only when the update is performed “over the air”. From all accounts it happens so early in the app load that it is before the code even starts to load data. And Preemptive’s Runtime Intelligence doesn’t gather any data. It has all the hallmarks of a TypeLoadException because a dll is missing or not the version expected…
I haven’t been able to identify if it is just restricted to HTC devices.
Now this is very interesting. Do you know if you are the only company to see this issue? Have you seen this issue on other apps?
Are you able to write up about your experiences tracking down this bug? I think it would be a very enlightening blog post, and would show if the evidence suggests it’s an issue with the Marketplace upgrade procedure.
I have a Samsung Omnia 7 and I have seen this issue, so it’s not restricted to HTC devices.
Pingback: Task Management in Windows Phone Mango - Julian Kay's Blog
Pingback: Task Management in Windows Phone Mango - Julian Kay's Blog