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Gaia GPS

Apple Fixes Issue that Affected Offline Mapping Apps in iOS 5.0

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

I’m happy to say that I received an email from Apple tech support today, letting us know they reworked the “cleaning” behavior in iOS5 that hurt the type of apps we develop. This addresses the problems that I had blogged about and the developer of Instapaper blogged about prior.

Here is a snippet from the email:

“I’m happy to tell you that I have some new information that should resolve your issue.  Included in the newly released beta of iOS 5.0.1 is support for a new extended attribute that will allow you to exclude files from all backups on a per file basis.”

As a stop-gap, we had moved our map caching to the directory that gets backed up to iCloud and included a view to tell people how to disable backups. This was the only way to get around maps being randomly deleted. Now, we can use this new method to save your maps locally without having to back up all the gigs of data to the cloud.

We’ll be implementing this change as soon as the new iOS release goes out of beta. Hat tip to Apple for listening on this one.

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Gaia GPS

How-To Video for Gaia GPS

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

I am excited to say that we have begun a series of how-to videos for Gaia GPS. The first video covers how to create waypoints, and we will be posting them rapidly over the next week on such topics as how to download maps, record tracks, hidden features, and other topics.

You can view all the videos on the YouTube channel for Gaia, and the videos are also linked in Help within the app and in the online version of the manual too.

Many thanks to my sister Ruth, who is captaining this effort, and whose voice you will hear narrating! She’ll also be overhauling our user manuals, which is long overdue. Email your feedback and ideas to videos@gaiagps.com.

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Gaia GPS

Map Caching Now Reliable Under iOS5

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

In the version of Gaia that went live today (5.31), we fixed the issue with maps being subject to random deletion in iOS5. Please see my last blog post for a recap of that little fiasco.

All users using iOS5 should update to v5.31 to avoid any issues, and if your disk is half full for any reason, you should also probably check your maps to make sure you aren’t missing tiles.

We apologize for any issues, and we’re back to work on new features and improvements. We should have route-making and satellite maps live in the next week or so!

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Gaia GPS

iOS5 Breaks Data Storage and Crushes My Soul

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

There’s a furor in the developer community, and there’s about to be one among users too. Apple made a change in iOS5 that breaks legions of mapping, photo, and other apps. Any app that stores lots of local data is in a world of hurt.

Caches vs. Documents

Before iOS5, there were two places a developer could store permanent data.

You could store it in the “Documents” directory, or you could store it in the “Caches” directory. The difference was the Documents directory would get backed up to iTunes, while the Caches directory would not.

Because of this, we store map data (in all of our apps) in the Caches directory. When we first started, just by accident, we actually stored the data in the Documents directory, but we immediately received emails from users telling us this was bogging down their iTunes sync. Storing data in the Caches directory has worked reliably for years.

Caches Now Subject to Arbitrary Deletion

Under iOS5, the Caches directory is now subject to random deletion. When your flash drive starts to get full, files will start randomly disappearing from the Caches directory. This breaks Gaia GPS, Offline Topo Maps, and all of the apps we have built with partners. It’s a full on train wreck, and it’s ruining my week and weekend.

It wouldn’t be so bad if there were a solution – if there was any way to store local data in iOS5 and not have it backed up or randomly deleted, we would take our lumps and rewrite the code to deal with the situation. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case, and the developer community at large has found no workaround to date.

Our Workaround

We have submitted our annually allotted code-level support request, in hopes that Apple will provide a solution.

If we don’t receive guidance from Apple by Monday, we will be updating all of our apps with an absolutely terrible workaround. The app will show a pop-up on launch and instruct the user to go into their Settings and disable back-ups for the app. There is not even a way to provide a button to accomplish this within the app, as far as I know.

This is no solution at all because a lot of users will not even read the pop-up, and even some of those that do will misunderstand or ignore the severity of the problem. This will be a support nightmare and a terrible blemish on our apps.

Real Solution

Apple needs to back-track and fix iOS5. It’s unreasonable that the above workaround is the correct solution.

Apple either needs to provide a programmatic way for developers to force an app not to back-up, or they need to provide a directory where we can do local permanent storage without backups (that is, give us a directory that works the way Caches used to).

A Theory of Why

For whatever reason, Apple has decided that they don’t want app developers storing local data. They will argue that this is an attempt to improve the iPhone experience and stop developers from cluttering up phones with gobs of useless data.

But I think Apple got in a rush, and they probably underestimated the backlash and the terrible consequences for a range of apps. I don’t think there was a machiavellian plot to extract more money – but I bet Apple decided that developers would deal with any issues, so full steam ahead with iCloud and all the subscription fees that entails. It wasn’t purely greed, but it was blindness to user and developer needs.

Conclusion

My only conclusion is that I am a sad, frustrated developer. Come Monday, I’ll push my crappy workaround. I don’t expect Apple to back-track. Too many iClouds to fill up with data, too little sympathy for developers like me who would rather spend a week building new features and a weekend relaxing, instead of spending both working around a draconian technical edict handed down by people who don’t care.

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Gaia GPS

Gaia GPS Lite Headed Towards Sunset

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Get Gaia GPS Lite while you can, because we are about to take it off the App Store. Today, Apple accepted what will likely be our final release for Gaia Lite, and we’re going to give current users a week or two to update before we stop allowing new downloads.

We would love to keep providing this app for free, but people just use it too much, the ads don’t make any money, and we soon won’t be able to tolerate the expense of serving the map tiles. We intended Gaia Lite as a demo of the paid version of our app, but there just aren’t enough restrictions on it’s use, and it ends up being very popular in its own right. In the future, we will consider bringing back Gaia Lite in a more demo-like, restricted way, but for now we’re just going to sunset it and see what happens.

Gaia GPS itself is without a doubt one of the very best apps for backcountry adventures, and we’ll continue to offer a money-back guarantee for anyone who is unsatisfied with the paid app. But the days of Gaia GPS Lite are numbered.

Get it while you still can 🙂.

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Gaia GPS

Goodbye, Hero

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

It deeply saddened me to hear Steve Jobs died today. Just as his last final wondrous creation was launched, he passed on, leaving the world a much less magical place. He was a man who profoundly changed my life, even though I never met him.

I hope this is interpreted as the tribute it is intended to be, because it’s the most fitting memorial that I can think of, within my meager power.

EDIT: I had to end this right at midnight because our map server became overwhelmed. Sorry, I would have liked to keep it going longer. All of our apps are free today.

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Gaia GPS

We Roll Like Nordstrom – Money back, No Questions Asked

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

A proper business should guarantee their products. My idea of a good return policy is that you can return a product for any reason at all, and that you shouldn’t have to state the reason if you don’t care to do so. That’s how we operate, and you can boil it down into three tenets:

  1. We will never turn down a request for a refund

  2. We go out of our way to make it easy and painless to get refunded

  3. We make sure any customer in distress knows that a refund is there for the asking

I always loved the story I heard in business school about Nordstrom, a high-end department store that many of you have probably at least walked by in a mall. The story story goes like this… a man walked into Nordstrom to return a tire without a receipt. While Nordstrom does not carry tires, and while the receipt for the tire did not say Nordstrom, the customer service desk processed the refund without argument.

Now that’s my idea of good customer service – it’s a policy that guarantees that shoppers walk away happy, no matter what, and you get a big karmic kickback too. Sure, customer service could have told the man that they don’t sell tires, or maybe they could have tried to help him figure out where to return it, but instead they focused on satisfying the customer, above all else. I want more businesses like that.


A model for good customer service

Whenever it comes up in our business, we instruct people that they can request a refund through the App Store, but we also know that is a pain in the neck. So, in addition we offer to immediately process a refund via PayPal, and our only hope is that the user will keep the app and find it useful someday. It doesn’t matter to us whether you found a bug in one of our apps, you are just having a bad day, or your fortune teller told you iPhone apps are cursed. There is no invalid reason for a refund.

Maybe someday when my business is really big, I’ll find that people try and game us out of money, and we’ll need more onerous policies. But as long as we’re not going broke, that’s how we’re going to do it. I am always shocked by the goodness of our users in the face of this policy. Maybe that’s what Paul Graham means when he writes, “Go out of your way to make people happy. They’ll be overwhelmed; you’ll see.”

The response to a refund offer is usually not “yes, right away.” Only about 1 in 10 people will take a refund when offered, probably less. The much more likely response is reciprocal support and encouragement – from people who didn’t have a good experience with our software, but nonetheless want us to succeed. Or it also often ends up that we offer the refund, but we solve their problem in parallel, and they are doubly happy to know that we both care and will go to the mat to make sure they are satisfied.

And let’s be real here – I’m not selling cars or cigarettes, I’m selling software. It costs me exactly zero dollars to make each additional copy of my app, so if I can’t make money while still offering a money back guarantee, my software surely must suck. There’s no reason why a dissatisfied user shouldn’t get a refund when the marginal production cost is zero.

If you are a customer of ours, you can take that to the bank. And if you are an entrepreneur, I hope you do what we do – it’s the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do, and the world will be a better place when all products, or software at least, works that way.

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Gaia GPS

Facebook – Culture of Coercion

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

I started using FourSquare recently – I’m now the Mayor of San Pablo Park, and I check in there everyday. My wife and I just moved to a new neighborhood, and it’s strangely fun to log our daily walks. It’s also been neat to run into other FourSquare users, after recognizing pictures of their dogs.

After using FourSquare for a couple weeks, I was poking around their website, and I decided to connect with all of my various social utilities and import my contacts. I did them all – GMail, Twitter, and of course Facebook. Of all the services, I felt betrayed only by Facebook – that was the only one that took the excuse of me inviting my contacts to also sign me up for Wall Posts. I will almost never connect with a Facebook app for this reason – nearly all app makers will ask you for a slew of permissions, among them making public posts on your behalf.

So after the first wall post I nipped it in the bud, using the convenient way Facebook provides to remove the permission, available from the Wall Post itself. I think the Facebook employees would tell you that the system is working, and they would point out how easy it was for me to get what I wanted in the end. Each application explicitly asks you to post stuff, and you have to explicitly say yes. And then it’s easy to fix things on the back end.

I would argue that both this system and the attitude that fosters it are broken. In almost all cases, I simply say no, and decline to trade my privacy for the small bit of utility of an app. But is everyone like me? How many of these users facing these coercive choices are unable to understand the devil’s bargain they are making? How many are drunk, sad, or lonely? Heck, how many of these people are even old enough to be entering into binding agreements like this? Children who connect with their FourSquare friends on Facebook, and then end up posting automatically to their walls are being exploited in the same way as child actors – the only difference is that child actors are protected by contracts and labor law, and they get paid.

In the end, the Facebook API is a system of coercion. It preys on our weakness for being social, for being cool, and being part of the group. It preys on laziness. And it preys on our children. It’s not exactly a gun to the head, but then again the system isn’t trying to coerce you into handing over the money in the safe, so they don’t really need a gun. This light, social coercion is enough.

Facebook holds up the straw man of simplicity of UI. They claim that the interface makes it easy for you to share and control that sharing, but the simple truth is the interface makes it simple for programmers to coerce you into doing what they want.

The main problem is that applications use the carrot of things like “connect with your friends” to get you to also allow them to post on your wall. This simply should not be allowed – if FourSquare wants to connect me with my Facebook friends, they should not be allowed to ask for other permissions, most importantly they should not be allowed to ask for the Posting Publicly Permission. I can hardly blame FourSquare for this – they basically need to do it to keep up with other apps, but I can blame Facebook for making the rules of the game. This all starts higher up, in the form of a thought in Mark Zuckerberg’s head, that privacy is dead. But it does not manifest until it becomes this API.

The solution is apparent – the API should let you ask for just one permission at a time, for the thing that your app wants to do. At the very least, it should not allow developers to use the ultimate social tool – the contacts import – to erode your privacy. Until this changes, Facebook will never be a trustworthy system, and user ire will build and foment. The end result is unclear, but I think Facebook underestimates the growing tide, and there will be some consequences in the form of lawsuits, regulation, or platform change.

UI simplicity is a straw man – Facebook simply knows that favoring viral spamminess and coercion is a sure way to grow the network, and they will continue to develop the platform that way and hide behind a veil of good intentions and engineering issues. Until there is a change of heart at the highest level, or until people and our governments take action, Facebook’s attitude will continue to define social on the web.

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