[BetterBatteryStats] chamonix:
RC1 us up! Sorry for the features that didn't make it into 2.2 (https://github.com/asksven/BetterBatteryStats/milestone/45) but the time window (imminent release of Nougat) is closing and experience tells that we will need a few rounds of RCs until the golden release.

I have been reflecting on my pace and ability to deliver as well and a few things struck me:

1. releases have slipped from twice a year to almost once a year: this is not good enough, I need to work on getting features faster out the door! (my KPIs would be frequency of release to XDA _and_ to gplay as well)

2. google play has evolved over the last two years and maybe it's time for some additional experiments using the alpha/beta rings there. I have always been straight forward in my opinion that such tools do not replace an active community of testers and I still don't see the ranking system as a good way to provide feedback or to have a conversation. That said times changes so why not give it a try

3. I have been thinking of a 3-step approach - instead of the beta/RC approach we currently follow: alphas will stay exclusively here , betas and RCs would potentially go to google play as well

4. I need a robust way to collect crashes (I am not talking about the crappy implementation of google play and am thinking in the direction of hockey-app. If any devs want to step-in please feel free to share your experience

5. I need a response to the causes of 1. and these would be:

a) my free time this year has been hit by hard times at my day-job and these will continue for at least 12 month so I guess I need to change my way of time-boxing to take smaller chunks

b) BBS has become a complex app and I am happy about that but I have no idea if this complexity is really useful to you as users. What I want to say here is that I have no clue for example if the graphs are used or not and on the other hand I know that the code is everything else than elegant or simple. I will need to do some thinking about how to (re-)introduce usage metrics in order to drive my priorities by hard facts

c) I admit that my release strategy has become more conservative over time and it can not be explained only by my ability to spend my free hours on this project: I have no problem in admitting that releasing code to potentially 200.000+ paying users scares the hell out of me. I did not test the upgrade process enough and one release (some of you may remember) lead to a broken release that was very hard to fix. The effect was tons of bad ratings over two weeks and it has taken "me" almost 18 month to recover from that. Now I hear some say "first world problem" and you are right in a way: BBS is not my business but a hobby with certain benefits (yes, let's use the word: earnings). Now does my existence depend on BBS? no. Do I feel bad when my users - paid or not - are unhappy? hell yea! I am still looking for a receipe for that but I guess that the problem is more with me that with any technical solution but I needed to get it out of my system so thanks if you read to this point ;)

Wow! Originally I wanted to tell you that the new version was up, and I ended-up with something more of the kind of a blog-post... sorry for that!

This is all part of the "experiment", and I'd like to hear from your comments/replies if the ramblings of a part time indie-dev are interesting to you or not. If you have an opinion / some experience / thoughts on the technical stuff above please feel free to weigh in as well ;)

Peace!