Is AppSheet's modified rollout operation correct?

[takuya_miyai]

Hi AppSheet team and everyone.

I am curious about AppSheet's recent rollout of new features.
AppSheet initially said that they would provide the modified release to Free accounts, where it would be rolled out to Paid accounts after sufficient feedback was received.

However, the current release to paid accounts has started in no time, just as the release from Free accounts is starting after all.

As a result, frequent paid accounts are the first to notice and point out problems with releases that contain serious issues.
And the problem is actually occurring in the apps that are in production. (Horrible...😰)

The paying user reports the bug and the Free account user benefits from the bug fix.
This is not fair at all.

As other users have pointed out, I think AppSheet needs to take another look at its release procedures.

@zito 
@lizlynch 

@Koichi_Tsuji 

[zito · Accepted solution]

Okay, I understand now - appreciate the additional context.  I think that general feedback of a longer delay between paid and free is something we've heard previously, and in the example of some of the recent editor changes we've been making, we put in place a >1 month delay between free and paid, but given the limited rollout to free users, its possible that it may have seemed shorter if a free account was in the group that had the old experience.  In other words, we rolled out to a population of free users, waited ~6 weeks, then rolled out to the rest of the free users and then paid users.  So effectively we delayed the rollout to paid users quite a bit, but it may not have seemed that way - perhaps we should have gone: first group of free users->(six weeks)->remainder of free users->(2 weeks)->paid users.

Candidly, there's a tough balance to strike here - we've been chatting with a number of customers about their preferred rollout process/procedure, and there hasn't been a consensus around the optimal delay between free users and paid users.  Some customers want something closer to your Salesforce example, some want a 2 week delay, others want a configurable delay.  

Workspace offers the ability to choose between Rapid release and Scheduled release, which is a model that seems reasonable, but they also widely vary their rollout speeds, which makes the options less useful (in my opinion). 

For us, there's a balance, as having long periods of time where different users have different experiences complicates everything - documentation, testing, support, etc.  The more complicated the rollout process, the more chances for issues to arise.   

All this to say, this is very much on our mind, and I was just chatting with some folks on the team about this last week.  I hope that we can address this in a comprehensive way this year by offering a configurable option for rollout speed, but in the meantime, I'll work with the team here to try to put together a more formal set of guidelines for rollouts and share them here. 

And please keep the feedback coming - its not complaining.  I appreciate when folks take the time to clearly outline challenges they're facing and suggest improvements.  I wish we had the resources to fix everything, but we take all of the feedback into account as we go through our planning and development cycles.  Happy to discuss more here, of course.