The Shambles that is Mobile Chat 3 – [Updatedx2]
[Update 07.10.08 @ 12.21pm]
It seems in an attempt to hide the fact their product just doesn’t work, Saverio and Shaun have completely disabled the commenting feature on their blog. All previous comments are not longer visible and they have provided one mail box for comments, queries, suggestions and support.
Utterly ridiculous.
[Update 02.10.08 @ 13.43pm]
Update 3.1 (aka The ‘God’ Save) now available.
6 weeks in the making, and entitled ‘Bug Fixes’ not surprisingly it didn’t do a thing.
Original Article:
Ever since I bought Mobile Chat 3 by Shaun Harrison on August 14th, I and many others have been following it’s progress and updates carefully. These also included following the developer’s text updates and status announcements at their blog tumblr.twenty08. After reading and monitoring the site for about 4 weeks now, I’ve come to the conclusion the application simply does not work. So the question is:
Why is Apple allowing this application to remain on the App Store?
In the beginning …
In order to understand just how MC3 has gotten to situation it is in today, we need to go back to it’s launch, and even before it. Make no mistake, this was one of THE most anticipated applications of the App Store. The developers, Shaun and Saverio, whether purposely or not kept it’s user base on edge. We first saw Mobile Chat appear on the jailbreak scene, and it was quite exceptional – it had a user base of thousands, and nearly everyone with installer had it, so what went wrong?
Re-thought and Re-built
On Wednesday May 21st, Saverio announced him and Shaun would be bringing Mobile Chat to iPhone 2.0 and the App Store. He listed the following features:
1. EDGE Connection Reliability – Previously, MobileChat only worked flawlessly on WiFi, where it had a stable solid connection, and even WiFi was a bit sketchy. Now, thanks to a great new architecture, that’s no longer a problem. Zero Bars? No big deal, MobileChat won’t disconnect you or drop your connection if you lose your signal. All of your messages queue up until you’re ready to receive them.
2. Memory Hog – MobileChat couldn’t run more than 15 minutes without crashing your iPhone/iPod. That’s no longer an issue with the latest version and it doesn’t use any more memory than the native applications distributed by Apple.
3. Sign Offs on Suspend – While the newer versions of MobileChat addressed this issue a bit, we never really got it right. Until now at least. You can even go as far as killing MobileChat’s process manually and you still won’t lose your connection until you explicitly tell the application you want to sign off.
While also stating the intention of having the product available in-line with iPhone 2.0 software release:
“Expected Release will be in-line with the new 2.0 firmware; which should be around June.
That’s it for now…I’m sure Shaun will have more for you guys soon.”
Over the next few weeks, the pair kept posting updates to the blog, making sure to drum up hype and stating that Mobile Chat 3 would be secure, have great features and most of all have tones of stability.
“All in all, we’ve chalked up MobileChat 1 & 2 as learning experiences for familiarizing ourselves with the iPhone Platform. MobileChat 3.0 will be the best release yet with a phenomenal feature set and extraordinary stability.”
On Saturday, May 24th the first screen shot from what was the alleged ‘native’ version of Mobile Chat, was released. The screen shot released depicted a seemingly working buddy list and account view with support for buddy icons, here.
While still ensuring the application would be flawless on release, on Monday June 2nd, Saverio posted that they had conducted a full first test of Mobile Chat 3, seen here. Again luring potential buyers into a false sense of security, as we’ll see from further posts released.
June came and went, the App Store went live, and yet Mobile Chat, literally promised for release with iPhone 2.0 and the App Store was nowhere to be seen. The pair first started blaming apple for the delay. Then came the excuse of they’re server’s were not setup in time for the App Store launch. Great, we thought.
In another attempt to lure people into believing them, Saverio and Shaun posted another update about MC3 a while later. In it, they addressed their user base and the frustration surrounding it.
“While I understand everybody’s frustration, we’re not going to follow Apple’s lead and release something that’s not ready for production. Between the activation problems, the inability to activate corporate accounts, MobileMe crashing every 10 minutes, and the iPhone 2.0 firmware being as buggy as it is, I don’t know which is worse.) We are working our hardest to get things done and in the past week we’ve completely scrapped our Ruby based server in favor of a native Objective-C based server. These changes have been for the better and we’re doing them so we can hopefully scale faster and hopefully prevent issues later on.”
Then as if my magic, a screen shot then appeared on the blog showing the application was ‘in submission’. This was posted on Wednesday, August 6th. Finally, solid evidence the application actually had a chance of making it onto the store. The next update which followed from the duo was quite intriguing, as they actually publicly questioned would the application ever launch, as ever blaming Apple.
The moment MC3 went LIVE
Finally, the application went live, and we were one of the first to publish a seemingly glowing review of it. We take it all back – all of it.
“Ladies and Gentlemen…we’re live on AppStore.
We have a number of confirmations from New Zealand users that MobileChat is on the AppStore.
This is great news for our users and TERRIBLE news for us. While we’re excited that it’s on AppStore. We had no idea that the push behind MobileChat was so big! Our server load is going through the roof as I write this email and we’re quickly beginning to feel the heat.”
In the next update posted to the blog they announced MC3 was indeed live. Yes, it seems after weeks of extensive testing and blog updates, Saverio and Shaun had forgot to test their server’s capacity in relation to the current Mobile Chat user-base it was serving through Mobile Chat 2. This caused the servers at Mobile Chat to go down, and what followed, was laughable.
No developer expects the launch of an application like Mobile Chat to go perfectly smooth, but the roll out of Mobile Chat 3 has to go down as one of the worst on the App Store, to date. The blog updates found, here, here, here, here, here, and here served to show just how unprepared and unequipped the duo were for the launch of Mobile Chat 3.
The Shambles that followed …
In their hour of need, and with the user-base losing faith rapidly, Shaun and Saverio completely pulled the server’s which Mobile Chat 3 operated on, offline! This meant, with the application still live and able to be bought by App Store customers on the store, the application when bought, didn’t function at all. Great move!
With the duo finally realising more help was needed, on Monday August 18th, Alex Schaefer developer of the renowned application ApolloIM (another IM client which far exceeds Mobile Chat 3 – available on Jailbreak) joined the team at MobileChat. On top of the above problems at launch, getting support regarding application issues etc was terrible, and still is to this day. They publicly announced the service which issues support ‘tickets’ to deal with high volume support needs was no longer working.
In the middle of issues, while the ticket system was STILL DOWN, the team were sure to post an “everything will be fine” sweetener. In it they stated:
“Forget you guys, I want my money back!
That’s perfectly acceptable. If you would like a refund, just submit a ticket with us at http://support.twenty08.com. We’ll be glad to instruct you on how to receive one. We urge you to wait for 3.1 to be released as we think that it will settle everyone’s frustration a bit. However, we completely understand that a lot of people are simply aggravated on pure principle. When you buy things, they should work. We understand that, and we’re upset about it too!”
Kinda hard that when the system to get support tickets was down.
After some time, they came back explaining the support system was live again, with another completely plausible, but questionable, excuse of ‘a bug in the pipeline’.
Continuing down the line there were even more problems seen here and here, further highlighting the rushed out launch. Over the past few weeks, problems have persisted, with the user base of Mobile Chat losing faith in the whole application and it’s developer’s (not surprisingly) as every day goes by.
They called out for: Web Developers, then Python Developers, installed NEW servers, and again and they even eventually realised they were getting bad press. They yet again promised fixes (in the form of 3.1), and then announced 3.1 had been rejected once, and again by Apple.
Summary
That’s it. No further information. You know what I think? – You have no intention of refunding anyone. You hyped up an unfinished product, launched it, were not prepared and failed. Even today, Mobile Chat 3 kicks you off their servers after 10 minutes. At £1.79, and the amount of users Saverio and Shaun are rumored to have, it’s unbelievable they have not managed to rectify it. And Apple? – Well where do I start? – allowing a NON FUNCTIONING application to continue to be sold? – What’s up with that?
I don’t care what you say, Saverio and Shaun, you completely messed up. I mean completely. Yes, you were kind enough to keep informing us of what you were doing to rectify the problem, but seriously, the information you were posting and the actions you were performing were only serving to make the situation worse. To this day you still have made no attempt to modify the application description to reflect the problems you have been experiencing. You don’t care. You just don’t care.
Mobile Chat 3 is still on the App Store today, and do you know what? – I URGE you not to buy it..
Did you buy Mobile Chat 3, Are you experiencing problems with it?
Leave me a comment below ..
This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 6:04 PM and is filed under App Store, iPhone, iPod. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Arron
Hi, I'm Arron. I'm 20 and I am currently working as a freelance graphic designer and blogger. While managing RazorianFly, I currently also write for AppBoy.com, have previously written for 148Apps.com and have been approached by many others. I've been into graphic design for about 7 years now, and now offer iPhone and iPad Interface Design to developers professionally. Along with James, I also co-founded our brilliant new shortening service, RFly.Me. I'm very much tuned into both the App Store and Apple in general. I like the design, presentation and clarity of a product. If it doesn't cut it I'll tell you straight. I'm on Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook!
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I am so glad that I never purchased Mobile Chat. When screenshots and details were released, I like everyone else, looked forward to the release date. When it was released I decided I would wait until I read a few reviews before purchasing, and boy am I glad I did.
The reviews being posted were pretty bad with things not working etc. So I thought that they are obviously just having problems due to the large influx of purchasers thus creating tons of server overload problems. So I waited some more, all the while reading their blog of updates.
They posted promise after promise of fixes, updates being submitted to Apple, and so on and so forth. Things in my opinion seemed pretty fishy. I could no longer believe anything they wrote on their blog. Now I will never purchase Mobile Chat or anything that may be released by these guys in the future.
Now I have my eyes set on Beejive which is supposedly in the App Store acceptance process. So we will see!!!
Yup i sure did purchase it..i was very optimistic that they would get it working..but delay after delay and not getting it fixed…im getting very frustrated and have moved on to use something else – palringo…
I submitted a ticket last night to get a refund and here is the email I received back from them today:
John,
First off, I’d like to apologize for your terrible experience with MobileChat. While we have plenty of happy customers, we understand that a lot of our customers are experiencing the same issues that you’ve had.
A new update to MobileChat will be available via AppStore within the next week or so. This new version is slated to fix most if not all of the problems you (and others) have been experiencing.
That being said, I’d be happy to give you a refund. You bought software that didn’t work as advertised, and for that, we are ashamed. We have been working hard to rectify the situation; however, the last thing we’d want to do is have any customer be unhappy with us, regardless of the situation.
In order to receive your refund, just email Apple at iTunesStoreSupport@apple.com and tell them that you’ve spoken with the developer of MobileChat and they have given you the O.K to receive a refund. Make sure you include your iTunes Store User ID along with that email so they can easily find your account in the system. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t allow developers to give out refunds, so we’re forced to handle it this way.
Again, I deeply apologize for your troubles and we all hope that we may one day regain you as a customer once MobileChat further evolves into a premier application. (Which, judging by the next few releases, shouldn’t be too long.)
Thank You,
twenty08 Support Team
I emailed apple this afternoon and I am waiting on a refund to my itunes account…I hope apple will approve it…
Boy am I glad I never bought this.