Customer experience - Apps by Jolla

asked 2015-03-21 18:41:55 +0300

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http://reviewjolla.blogsp...

updated 2015-03-30 08:24:38 +0300

I guess this is the first time ever I link my own blog here at TJC, but please don't think I'd do that in wrong purpose. This time the post is something done together, and in my opinion has a high level of importance in development of apps provided by Jolla

http://reviewjolla.blogspot.fi/2015/03/user-reviews-applications-provided-by.html

The related question: Are you, the great Sailors at Jolla, taking these results into count in a meaning to provide us new features or better user interfaces, especially on the apps gaining lower average scores from your customers?

There are a lot of requests here at TJC regarding each app already, and I hope our contribution helps sailors in prioritizing the development work. Sail On, looking forward for some great apps!

EDIT: I just checked TJC questions for three apps with lowest average feedback from the customers. It seems that this issue might need some focus:

Maps: 1 tracked question (of 97 in total)
Browser: 0 tracked questions (of 443 in total)
Email: 12 Tracked questions (of 631 in total)

Comments

there is so much to do, i suggested sone things for the browser, mail app. i think we gave feedback, its time for jolla to do something

NuklearFart ( 2015-03-21 20:32:44 +0300 )edit

I have to agree with @NuklearFart most of the feedback is given and its time Jolla does something. Added to that this is also a potential opportunity for app developers to get to do something exciting and appealing to users. Only thing lacking is a nice platform for collaboration , is there one other than typical mailinglist or IRC channel ?

pavi ( 2015-03-21 20:43:02 +0300 )edit

It would be a great advantage for Jolla if they manage to reach above 4.5 star ratings with the tablet right after it's on the markets, and I think the lowest scoring pre-installed/essential apps are playing a key role in this. Time is now, yes!

simo ( 2015-03-21 20:43:17 +0300 )edit

Jolla should start improving their native applications such as player, browser and all others to do so stronger ecosystem.

Jose101192 ( 2015-03-21 22:02:13 +0300 )edit

Firstly, welcome to TJC and thanks for the feedback.

Second, Jolla developers and designers definitely do read TJC and take note of the suggestions. In many cases we create internal bugs to track the issues, and follow up on them that way (ie, they receive a prioritisation based on the development goals for the coming iteration, when work is started on the task the designers give input, then developers prototype, then we test and iterate internally, and then if it meets the quality criteria it gets released). To improve transparency about what the development goals for the particular iteration are, we have been sending emails to the Sailfish OS development mailing list with updates to the roadmap, including our iteration planning outcomes. If you have specific concerns about the prioritisation of specific certain activities, you can reply to those emails in those threads. Also, you can join the weekly community collaboration meetings on IRC to discuss these issues, too.

Third, if you have some particular, concrete request for a change to a particular app which would (in your opinion) improve usability or aesthetic quality (i.e., not a feature request, as feature requests need to be discussed more formally via the meetings and roadmapped etc) then you can ping me (chriadam) on freenode IRC or send me an email at chris dot adams at jolla dot com and I'll forward it to the appropriate developer or designer.

Finally, the Browser code is all open-source and developed openly and collaboratively on GitHub. If you have feature requests or changes you'd like to see in that one, please go to https://github.com/sailfishos/sailfish-browser and help out with that effort :-)

Thanks, Chris.

chris.adams ( 2015-03-30 06:43:02 +0300 )edit

answered 2015-03-31 00:11:16 +0300

bilgy_no1
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What I've sometimes wondered is why Jolla are making those apps themselves in the first place. The browser e.g. could have been an easy cooperation with Opera or some other browser specialist. Right now, it feels like it's a very basic product and all the time it takes to implement the requested features are taken away from developing the core OS experience.

The e-mail app is perhaps the most basic thing that an e-mail should be able to do these days. But we've all been spoilt by smarter apps with more advanced interfaces these days. It surely must be cheaper to get a commercial partner on board to develop a few core apps for the system. It also fits with the Do-it-Together motto of the company, especially if they can work with open source developers.

For the partners who would develop such apps it would be a great chance to get onboard at a very early stage. Having their apps presented as the official app is a great advantage as the ecosystem grows.

The Maps application was actually made by Appello, so I do realise that outsourcing is not a guarantee for success... But it would probably have been much worse if Jolla had developed this in house. It's very hard to build the required skills in the team when you're a small company and have so much to do.

Please don't read it as criticism; I believe the Sailors are working very hard and have already come very far indeed. It's just a suggestion to consider if outsourcing to professional partners could help advance the user experience more quickly. Naturally, those partners should fit the company ethos and subscribe to the core values of Jolla/Sailfish (i.e. no private data harvesting etc.).

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Comments

They develop these apps because they are needed and noone else would do it for them. Partners expect something in return for putting resources in something. Outsourcing i believe would cost more. Apart from that Open Source doesn't work in such small scale. ie look at how many people outside Jolla have contributed to it.

ApB ( 2015-03-31 00:23:20 +0300 )edit

Well, in my opinion one contributing factor in regards of contributions vs Open Source is that not everything is Open Source. This might discourage some contributors used to contribute to fully open source projects like Fedora, Debian or Gentoo and fully prevents contributions to the closed components such as Messaging UI, Calendar or Mail application. Another issues might be a mix of that - you would like to improve an open part but that might depend on a closed part sou you can't do that.

Other factors:

sparse/missing documentation
not easy to track down which part of the system corresponds to which source code repository
not clear where to fill/follow bugs - GitHub issues ? Mer bugzilla ? Nemo bugzilla ?
unclear maintainership - who to ask about contributing to the given component, etc.

But even with all these hurdles, there have been some nice community contributions to the browser, the recent conman patch from the community and there is lot of community involvement in Sailfish OS porting to various Android devices (the #sailfishos-porters IRC channel on FreeNode is crazy active).

Also you have all the native open source third party Sailfish OS application people have been developing for free in their free time. :)

And lastly - I kinda consider all the popular PatchManager patches by Coderus and others to be kinda community contributions - basically a downstream patches for a project with a missing upstream. :)

MartinK ( 2015-03-31 01:00:44 +0300 )edit

Average people don't care about if it was developed on free time neither will spent time fiddling with the phone to apply patches, openrepos and all that stuff. Store>Install>Use is what they expect. And they also expect apps that are polished down to the last detail.

ApB ( 2015-03-31 11:11:05 +0300 )edit

@ApB They might not care and I don't really care about them. :) If they expect apps polished down to down to the last detail then there needs to be an environment where such apps can be made. Like you know, being able to give money to people to make them (payment/donation support in store) and platform limitations (bugs, limits on accepted libraries in store, unaccepted APIs, missing docs, etc.) not derailing their development.

MartinK ( 2015-03-31 20:33:38 +0300 )edit

I know. Jolla must fix this -payed apps- yesterday.

On the other hand there are people that "care" enough to make their apps really good. Few but they exist.

ApB ( 2015-03-31 20:41:21 +0300 )edit

Customer experience - Apps by Jolla

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