Damage Report! 24 hours in alpha.
Firstly MASSIVE thank-you to the overwhelming response and positive attitude everyone has shown us, this is why I love and am honoured to be a part of the Ethereum community.
We know the timing isn’t great but some of the team are taking a well-deserved break after our last sprint over the Christmas period, meaning these issues may not get fixed as fast as we would like over the next week-and-a-half. I should mention we’re hiring core contributors, if you know #Go and/or #ClojureScript, reach out to us!
In the past 24 hours I got to speak personally with over 60 people inside Status, using Whisper, and this was our biggest concern with this release and makes the first test a resounding success. We were worried as our alternative would be to look at other messaging protocols, and they all have their own issues. There are some issues with messages not being sent, please read my answer on the Ethereum StackExchange, but I’m confident with Whisper V5 this will be a viable path forward.
We even had our first contribution from Andy Tudhope who wrote guides on how to get setup and how to submit translations. Thanks Andy!
In the past 24 hours, we’ve had 665 testers with 125 reporters on Android & 335 testers with 63 reporters on iOS. For the app itself we’ve seen 11 crashes (1.65%) on Android and 29 crashes (8.63%) on iOS. We haven’t finished curating all the bugs & suggestions we have, but so far it has lead to 46+ new issues created in Github!
In this post I want to highlight some of the more stand-out issues that have been uncovered over the past 24 hours, starting with the most common and dangerous.
Most frequent
Our phone synchronisation is terrible! Many SMS’s are not being delivered, we’re currently using Twilio from a German number, and the way we’re validating phone numbers also seems to be failing often. Good news is this is optional, you can press the back button at the top left of Console and just avoid phone syncing for now. If you’re looking for friends people are posting public keys in #find-friends channel of our Slack.
Most crippling
Sometimes the geth node crashes, Status fails to restart it and messes up its state in the process. The problem leads to most of the UI being responsive but not interact-able, message decorators fail to show and Console becomes unresponsive. Unfortunately the only ‘fix’ for this is a reinstall on iOS/Android. On Android wiping the application data also ‘fixes’ this.
Noteworthy
It seems that the password left blank can cause a crash when confirming a transaction, was picked up on iOS first.
Visual Errors
There’s a slight problem with the Material Design floating button not being able to edit a contact but the list is not long enough
We will redesign the suggestions tab to be thicker and easier to manage on iOS. It will look something like this:
We left a “Settings” option in the drawer that shouldn’t be there, oops, we’re debating whether this should be a form or be absorbed by Console itself. We’d like users to be able to control more about their node, what network to connect to, what bootstrap nodes to use and more. If you have any ideas for settings, let us know!
Copying messages and making links highlightable and tappable is certainly something we’re missing.
Great Suggestions
All in all it has been a fun, exhausting and ultimately rewarding day fielding the bugs and chatting. Looking forward to moving forward into 2017 and bringing Status into a more Stable state.
