- We’re really close to having our GM candidate (original planned for August 1st): we’ve been hovering around 10 tickets for the last few days starting from 1,500+ tickets completed since our beta release
- Our iPad app was initially rejected by the App Store review process due to subscription mechanism but we are re-submitting it to fix the issue
- There are no new users since mid-July as we turned off user registration and went back to an invite list in preparation of our launch
- We have also removed our iPhone app and Mac app from the App Store until our launch as we need to do a complex transition for existing beta users
- We switched our accounting from cash to accrual basis
As a reminder the current steps to launching Everpix 1.0 are:
- Wrap up GM candidate i.e. the candidate for the Everpix 1.0 release (ETA this week)
- Complete extensive QA and approve candidate for release (ETA next week)
- Invite our existing beta users to move to the final Everpix
- Start sending invites to people waiting on our new waiting list (1,000 right now)
- If no major issues are found, start PR
All new image analysis algorithms have been integrated, we have run a lot of consistency tests on the data set in the new system, fixed various bugs and performed some early performance tests as well to validate scalability assumptions. Everything has been fine so far and we only have a couple bugs left.
Our estimated one-time cost for importing the thousands of photos of a new user has been increased due to the new image analysis being quite more computationally expensive than before, but we are still under our $1 upper-bound estimate.
The new website has been deployed to www.everpix.com and redirects are in place to beta.everpix.com for our beta users.
We are still fixing a few remaining bugs and finishing the full product description page at www.everpix.com, but this is matter of days at this point.
Our iPhone app had been updated to be compatible with our new back end for some time but was still running an outdated sync engine, compared to our new iPad app and Mac app. We have decided to slightly postpone the iPhone 1.2 release to upgrade to the new sync engine which brings significant benefits.
We plan to submit the new iPhone client to the App Store by end of this week.
The submission to the App Store was done almost 2 weeks ago. Considering this is a first time submission, we wanted to have enough margin so it could be reviewed by Apple before August 1st. It indeed took 10 days to have the app reviewed and Apple eventually rejected it because it depends on an outside subscription service.
Not all apps on the App Store which depend on subscription services require users to buy the subscription through the App Store, so we thought we would be in this gray area, but apparently Apple is tightening the rules. We have no choice but to offer in app subscription and give its 30% cut to Apple instead of having users subscribe through our website and keep 100% of the proceeds.
However for now we will only offer our monthly $4.99 plan on the App Store and not the yearly $40 one as compounding the heavy yearly discount with the extra 30% fee seriously reduces our profits.
We are re-submitting the iPad app with in app subscription purchase today.
Our contractor is getting closer to having a early beta, but it’s still too early to have a reliable ship date as required QA work is unknown on Windows.
The goal is still to ship a beta of our Windows Uploader as close as possible to our 1.0 release.