A Flurry of updates to Mothra?
Why so many updates all of a sudden? A lot of work went into the latest 3.1.0 release. One of these items was a handy little feature for the app to “call home” in the background in the event of a crash and send us debugging information.
Now that 3.1.0 is out, it’s already calling home about some obscure bugs. ShopSavvy is a large program (by mobile standards) and is under constant development, so there are likely to be a few edge cases that we fail to catch in the lab before each release, but with our new error reports we can knock them out quickly and push updates.
We’ve spent Christmas eve morning fixing several of the little buggers, a couple of obscure wishlist crashes, and a few other things.
Where you can find me blogging…
For now I am swamped with Blogging/RSS/Wiki projects so I cannot keep up this blog too. So for now you can visit:
Productivity Blog (Architel)
MotorSport Ranch Blog (Our television show)
Weblogs Work (in partnership with Lightbox5)
Poker Blog (my WS…
“One of these items was a handy little feature for the app to “call home” in the background in the event of a crash and send us debugging information.
Now that 3.1.0 is out, it’s already calling home about some obscure bugs.”
In my haste to try out the application, I may have simply brainfarted and missed this during the installation, start-up, and usage process, but at no point do I remember agreeing to phone-home behavior. Was I presented with this option at some point and wasn’t paying enough attention and clicked right on through? (bad Jeremy!) Was there no such declaration/option? (There bloody-well should be.) What’s worse, there appears to be no way to change this behavior when running ShopSavvy itself.
In any case, further transparency in this area is highly recommended, and I dare say that a configuration option is flat-out required unless you want people to start getting angry about the application using bandwidth in an unapproved fashion.
As a software developer myself, I most certainly understand and appreciate the benefit that this kind of functionality can provide. That said, your users need to know about it and have control over it.
Prior to using the application (just after downloading) you were required to approve our terms of service (mirrored on Google’s Ts&Cs). Your comment caught my attention as you seem unaware that ShopSavvy ‘calls home’. Of course, every time you scan an item it MUST call home to search for information to present to you. The terms of service attempt to explain:
“Our applications collect from Application visitors’ statistical information regarding what UPCs are scanned, pages are visited, the date and time of the visits, how long it took a user to download a page, debugging/crash data and the TCP/IP address of the user. These automated Application functions do not collect this information in a manner intended to identify your individual use of the Application, nor do we use this information for any such purpose. This information is collected to assist us in maintaining a high quality Application, as well as, providing necessary traffic information to our advertisers.”
Use of the application depends on the ability of the application to ‘call home’. If you want to turn off ‘calling home’ you might as well uninstall the application as it won’t do anything – i.e. it can’t offer comparison pricing. We have tried to make the terms of service as prominent and simple as possible – hopefully the application is worth the overhead it creates.