The IOS Development process is outdated and kind of crappy, but there are simple tacitly accepted solutions that fix virtually all of the issues. Specifically:
- Hockey App For Pre Public Distribution - Auto Updates, One Click Link Install (no need to join a google group)
- Enterprise account - no device ids, send the link to anyone
The dev cycle on mobile is slower, and more waterfall, but there is no excuse to not be iterating on anything more than 3-5 day cycles on either android or IOS.
The problem, and I speak from first hand experience here, is that its increasingly hard to make a successful consumer product that does not leverage these apis. They are accelerants, and if our primary goal is to find product market fit and take the market before anyone else, not using those accelerants can be quite detrimental.
My suspicion is that App Store rank doesn't necessarily translate into highly used app. Many of the highly ranked apps get there by buying downloads. There definitely is a ton of open data on app success out there, though spotting an app with an organically fast growth rate and high DAU is probably much harder without access to quality data.
Thanks for expanding this out, I jotted this out as a quick thought, without probably giving context to people who haven't been following the story over the last couple days.
If your gmail is slow there is a simple and effective solution. I've had gmail for years and actually pay for my google apps account. Like the author I assumed my growing mailbox size and filters were the reason for the increasing slowness. So I contacted support and after some investigation they noticed that I had tons of polling requests that were slowing down my account from connected apps (think greplin). They suggested I remove them. I was skeptical, but I did. Immediately gmail was BLAZING fast again. If your gmail or google apps is slow I highly recommend removing all connected apps ASAP:
I was coming to this page just to post a comment like yours above. Thanks for doing that.
I work on the Gmail backend team and we regularly see blogs go by such as this one. The vast majority of the times that prominent bloggers report slowness it's because they do have tons of apps polling their account via IMAP or other sync methods. All of these apps end up competing for resources to your account with the web UI and thus you experience slowness.
Internally we have accounts with upwards of 100G of mail still being very usable, so we know Gmail scales. Also we have quite a few people internally focusing specifically on finding and fixing these types of problems so that eventually it won't matter how many clients you have or how large your mailbox is, but these things take time. Gmail is a huge ship, we can't turn on a dime.
So yeah, check that IssuedAuthSubTokens page and revoke access to any random services that you've tried out and forgot about.
I'm sorry that trick isn't working for you. As you mention LKML causes slowdown, it's possible that you're getting an inordinate amount of mail. It's also possible you've got an agressive IMAP client that isn't using one of those auth tokens (another common slowdown cause).
As I mentioned in a comment below* if this persists please to post on the help forums. There are people dedicated to helping there, and if it's a legitimate bug the backend team investigates and we fix the issues.
I'm the OP. Andrew, thanks for responding here. I have a ton of connected IssuedAuthSubTokens apps, but I've most of them are just accessing my Calendar, Contacts, etc. The only one that that has access to my Gmail is Baydin (Boomerang) which, as mentioned in the post, I am writhe to remove. But I wouldn't think that one connected Gmail app would be enough to cause slowness, would it?
It all depends. I don't know how Boomerang is implemented, but it's possible that with an account your size it's hitting some degenerate condition.
One of our support folks should be emailing you and they'll help debug where the slowness lies, on our side or through some other interaction. If it's a bug, we'll fix it up shortly.
A little late to the party here, but Boomerang doesn't do anything at all except for when you Boomerang something and when it's scheduled to be sent/returned. The rest of the time, it doesn't make any API calls.
There are people working on those sorts of improvements, but it's not that straightforward so it takes time to get it right.
The reason that it's not that straightforward is that lots of operations change state in your account, so you need proper ordering of requests for everything that comes in if you want to ensure consistency. Furthermore when you do a UI operation you want it to happen now, and anything longer than that is frustrating. But if there is a large IMAP operation in the background, we can't just pre-empt that and re-start it because it might have already modified some state, not all changes are idempotent. So you have to wait, and you experience slowness.
Add in message delivery, various background operations for different features, android sync, different third-party add-ons that hit via IMAP or other sync protocols, and a stack that is more than a few layers deep and it gets very complex, very fast.
Hi Andrew, sorry to hijack the thread. Just wanted to say you guys are doing an amazing job at full-text email searching. Do you have any paper on that? I know Google publishes research papers and technical reports but couldn't find one about that.
Wow, thanks for that tip. I don't even use my gmail THAT often, but removing the connected apps I don't use has basically made opening my GMail instant (it would take a few seconds on the 'loading' bar previously)
Hey we were in the TechStars NYC class and in the TV show (Veri). I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but TechStars was the best thing to ever happen to us. We came in with a prototype and in three months had a product, traction, funding, and a great network of mentors to help us. We couldn't have done this without them. Regardless of how people feel about the idea of a TV show, I'm very grateful to TechStars for everything they've done and I think any TechStars CEO would say the same.
We're a TechStars NYC class this year (Contently), and the program has been an amazing experience. Harvard has good and bad students; YC turns out great companies and duds alike (though not very often, for sure!). I'm sad that Melanie had a bad experience, but TBH it wasn't for lack of support in the program, or for lack of amazing mentors and networking experiences.
Reality TV is a pretty bogus misrepresentation of actual reality, anyway. I'm glad they didn't film our class!
TechStars is an absolutely amazing program, and we had a fantastic experience. I could not be more complementary of the program itself. My post was only commenting on the TV show, and trying to clear up some events that were portrayed by Bloomberg.
disclaimer: TechStar alum from NYC Winter '11 here...
while the finished product that Bloomberg aired is not the most amazing piece of journalism i've ever seen, i don't think TechStars is to blame for that.
the TechStars ethos is to be open and encourage entrepreneurship. to this end, TechStars asked us if we were ok with putting ourselves out there to the world and we all agreed to it before the program started.
at the end of the day, 10/11 companies got funded, a few are driving great revenues already and all are on track to build great companies... it's hard to argue with that.
and if anyone out there learns from what we went through on the show, or is excited by startups or encouraged to go start/join a startup... then the show is a success.
Your analysis is spot on, and our hypothesis is that if we can deliver a framework that makes online education much better, that there will be a variety of uses for it - everything from paid courses on SEO (in demand hi-tech skills), to free courses on fun things like "MacBeth in an hour" (launching later this week). Our plan right now is to implement an app store like model where educators can create courses for free, but if they want to charge for them, we get a % of the revenue.
We completely agree, and will probably change that in the future. We force signup now for 2 reasons: 1) Right now the most important thing for us is to establish product market fit. And the way we do that is by sending a survey after you take a course, and by seeing where you drop off - both require signup. 2) It lets us keep track of your state (so you can stop, start, come back), and allows you to participate in the exercise / notes, both key pieces of functionality in taking the course.
- Hockey App For Pre Public Distribution - Auto Updates, One Click Link Install (no need to join a google group) - Enterprise account - no device ids, send the link to anyone
The dev cycle on mobile is slower, and more waterfall, but there is no excuse to not be iterating on anything more than 3-5 day cycles on either android or IOS.