Hey all!
As always, thank you for being a tester. Because of your efforts in reporting, things are continually improving and we are finding new issues to patch up.
Before I explain, I just want you to know that this is not a rant or anything. It has nothing to do from any feedback from you guys, but something I wanted to clear up ahead of time, especially going into the fairly soon release of a stable build on the App Store.
I just wanted to give a quick explanation of how Sean and I are using TestFlight. I'm not sure how other apps are handling this, but my current use and future plan is to use TestFlight for "hot off the press" builds. That does not mean that no testing has gone into them, but it does mean that the testing will have been limited.
Were we a big team, we would send things through QA before releasing whether to TestFlight or for production to the App Store. However, we are not, and it is primarily only two people contributing to the actual codebase. We are extremely grateful to the people who are submitting PRs with improvements and fixes however, and would love for that to continue.
With that said, TestFlight will continue to be for hot releases. Things might break, things might improve. And you guys, the community, are that QA team. There's no way we could get this sort of feedback or anything without you guys, and we are grateful for that. I just don't want you all to feel that we are throwing bugs at you for no reason.
Once a stable build is released on the App Store, I'd love for some of you to stick around with us in TestFlight to continue doing what you are doing. Builds to TestFlight will likely become more frequent rather than less with a proper CI/CD pipeline will be established to release new version tags on Git directly to TestFlight.
I also want to make sure that all of you know that regardless of whether you receive a response or not, your issues are seen and are being addressed. I think it goes without saying that this community has grown extremely fast. To go from having zero users to nearing 10000 in less than two weeks is a difficult task to juggle, especially when dealing with a brand new codebase, a brand new API, and all the while attempting to integrate and push at lightning fast speeds.
Thankfully we are starting to get to a point where integrations do not need to be made as fast (most necessary features are now implemented), so there is going to be way more smoothing out the edges coming up now.
Thanks as always for your help and understanding!