I am pleased to announce ShopSavvy, our mobile barcode scanning application, was nominated for a 2008 Crunchie in the ‘Best Mobile App’ category. Thanks to everyone who nominated us. The winner for each category will also be chosen by reader voting. Please vote for ShopSavvy. Voting ends on January 5, 2009 at Midnight PST. You may vote up to once per day.
The 2008 Crunchies is the second annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The Crunchies are co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, and TechCrunch. Best of all, the internet community is invited to choose who wins.
The Mothra upgrade (3.1.0) was fairly exciting, but not in a good way. The good news is that our updating system works very well. Within 5 hours of release 25% of our users had upgraded from 3.0.4 to 3.1.0. The bad news is that we quickly realized that there was a strange bug in 3.1.0 and released 3.1.1 and subsequently 3.1.2 the next morning (sorry about that).
The day after we released 3.1.1 and 3.1.2 only 6% of our users were still using the problematic 3.1.0 version and by the next day only 1.3% were still using 3.1.0. If we keep getting traffic from 3.1.0 users we can assume the bug didn’t affect their installs (i.e. we think it only affected 10% of users anyway). As I mentioned before, the good news is that our updating mechanism on ShopSavvy is effective. One of the biggest challenges for remote, native applications – like web browsers is updating (Microsoft still wishes people would finally upgrade past IE 5).
Of course, the data generated by our application is one thing, actual communication from our users is another thing. Almost immediately after the update we began getting emails explaining we had broken user’s phones – that ShopSavvy no longer worked. Some users feedback:
“Why have you ruined Christmas?”
“You guys suck!”
“Why didn’t you test this before releasing, noobs!”
“I hate you!”
“DIE!!!!!!!!!!”
We received complaints from around 30 unique users, which isn’t many when you consider our user base consisting of tens of thousands of people. But let me tell you, it seemed like the sky was falling. I was freaking out. Here is the scoop: Fifteen of these users were running 3.1.1 when they complained (one was running our 3.0.4 beta). Updating their application resolved their issues. Their main issues revolved around a black screen after scanning an item resulting in a freeze of the application. The good news is that we haven’t received a single email complaint from a 3.1.2 user – seems like it is stable and hopefully bug-lite. There is one user who had an issue upgrading from 3.0.4 to 3.1.2, but we think this might have something to do with the camera driver optimizations we had in the beta and removed in 3.1.1. We will continue to keep an eye on this issue.
The results: 10% of our users experienced a problem with 3.1.0, but within a day 99% of our users were no longer experiencing any issues. 3.1.2 seems like a big improvement over 3.0.4′s wish list and memory bug reports. Let us know what you think…
You enjoy using ShopSavvy so much you were thinking to yourself, “I wonder if I could invest in this company?” The short answer is ‘no, you can’t’. The long answer is that we already raised $700,000 from Architel and won around $300,000 from Google (read more about that here) in 2008. With only four employees we have a LONG runway before we run out of capital. Our current plan is to stay small and nimble until it makes sense to raise additional capital. When will it make sense? When one of two things occurs: a) the opportunity to raise capital at an attractive valuation presents itself or b) the lack of additional capital begins to hinder our ability to compete in the mobile marketplace. That being said, if you are interested in investing in the company feel free to contact Alexander Muse (email is best amuse@biggu.com).
Rumor has it everyone who bought a G1 will be receiving a new battery – 20% longer life! Nice. Also, Michael Martin shared this G1 flash demo worth reposting here:
I interviewed Jason Hudgins about our new bug checker feature in ShopSavvy:
Q: How does the application know it crashed?
A: I wrote a custom exception handler to replace the DefaultExceptionHandler, the default one normally just shows the user a dialogue box that informs them that the app crashed). Our custom handler still shows this same message, but in the background it collects some data and attempts to send it back to our server. It’s completely transparent to the user.
Q: What data is sent back when the application crashes?
A: The phones unique id, a timestamp, the app version number, and a stack dump that can usually tell us exactly where a fault in the application occured.
Q: How many crashes did we see in our most recent release (Mothra)?
A: 151 – it’s mainly 2 or 3 minor bugs that are re-occuring, i’ve got some fixes ready to go.. the majority of our users aren’t likely experiencing any problems.
Q: Is this feature unique to ShopSavvy?
A: TuneWiki is the only other app that I know that does this.. Zach Hobbs was telling me about catching lots of obscure bugs in TuneWiki with it, and I thought it would be a good idea to do the same thing for our app.
Q: Should all mobile applications have this feature?
A: Probably…
Q: How much overhead does it add to the application?
A: Not much, I’d say it’s about 150 lines of code or less, our entire app is over 20k lines of code. It doesn’t log *everything*, for example the force close bug we had with 3.1.0 didn’t use the defaultexceptionhandler, so it doesn’t show up in our logs
Did you know that we included an option to insert sample data into ShopSavvy? This sample data is a great way to see if your phone is working properly. The first thing you do after installing ShopSavvy is to install sample products. Now you will have sample products in Wishlists, Price Alerts and History. The best way to learn how to do this is to watch this simple video:
Many new users to the G1 (and smart phones in general) are unfamiliar with the Android Market. The Market is the place where you will find applications like ShopSavvy for your Google phone. I recorded a short/blurry video to help explain how to install ShopSavvy (or any application for that matter):
