[Remix OS for PC] RemixOS_Jason:
[MENTION=4879141]alz_uk[/MENTION] - Wow! It's pretty clear you have it in your mind that we are quite an evil, greedy company! Not sure if I can make a dent in your opinion, but I thought it prudent to give you a transparent answer:

As [MENTION=4666322]Vioner[/MENTION] and other users have pointed out to us, they'd like to see a different user feedback system. However, we designed it because we in the International (meaning outside of China) PR, marketing and customer support team is two full time staff and 2 part time interns. This means that our resources are limited.

Thus, the way the system is currently designed is for us to:

1) gather feedback - this is what this form is for: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1cZNesOmnmO2esilFpvMzFZ874rvwsiKgWIX2fo9QsDk/viewform

2) organize the feedback regularly - once a week, my colleague organizes all the feedback into topics and sections and prioritizes them based on volume of reported bugs, issues, and compatibility with specific devices. This includes issues like the audio over HDMI, black screen, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, gaming, app specific, etc. Device specific is numerous, but consider this: currently we support roughly 65% of the PCs out in the wild. This means that there will be 35% of the PCs that just don't work for one reason or another yet. That also means that for every person with a PC that doesn't work, there are around 2 people whose PC does work. With a small dedicated engineering staff as well, we try to tackle these issues from a platform point of view. Thus, you've seen in some updates the fact that we worked on GPUs that were vendor or brand specific, rather than only tackle one specific set of hardware components in a reported device. This is where the feedback form helps us to gather data so that we focus on fixing the issues that affect the widest range of users first.

3) send the feedback to the engineers - when it reaches the devs, they tweak our prioritization order based on what's feasible and what's not in the short and long term. Thus, you can be certain that we know about outstanding audio issues (we all dogfood our prodcuts and so, there are colleagues who's Remix OS for PC machines also don't have audio coming out). However, if we haven't update with this fix, you can be certain that whatever we've tried haven't passed testing, or is in the process of testing. Thus, there are two layers of what we do with feedback: count them, and then see which ones we can actually fix.

4) The fixes we do come up with must pass internal and external testing.

5) If they do pass, they are put into updates.

The installer issue was pretty simple. Most 3rd party installer do work, but as we gathered feedback from back in Remix OS for PC based Lollipop, our product manager noticed a trend where some of the OTA issues were due to 3rd Party installers. Thus, we put out the message that we couldn't promise that 3rd party installers would work 100% to support future OTAs.

Releasing fixes take time because they need to be tested. If a fix worked for some, but might cause issues for others, we don't release that fix for a stable release. Let's take the black screen issue during installation as a case example. We gathered around 65 users' emails who had this issue during installation. When we had a fix, we sent out emails and a testing ROM just for these folks with the potential fix. After around a week, most reported that their issue was fixed and that they didn't experience any other significant issues after being able to boot Remix OS (outside of some minor app compatibility issues). Thus, after a few more days of testing internally in parallel with this tester group, we rolled into that update. If you didn't see the fix applied in an update yet, it's probably because it didn't pass testing internally, or with their related testers, meaning though some folks' issues got fixed, many did not, or it caused other significant issues.

With limited resources, we do tackle issues from a platform (CPU, GPU, broadcom wireless chip, etc.) and not focus on your device, or his device or her device specific. We also work with the patches that are given out by the Android-x86 team (of which their founder, Chih-Wei Huang actually is our tech lead on Remix OS for PC) as can be evident by the update that integrated their latest release (rc2). In fact, we are small enough as a startup that we welcome our user developers assistance. So much so that I'm trying to work on making GitHub a place where interested developers can work on projects with us (where applicable since most of Remix OS is closed source). This is how much we actually need your development help!

In the end, I beg you to consider that people in general post 4-7 times more likely if they have outstanding issues, and not because we fixed any of their issues. Thus (and I know this all too well as the manager of our forums here) it can seem like everything is terrible, that Remix OS for PC just doesn't work for anyone and that no improvement has ever been made, ever. However, I just need to remember that for every 1 person with an issue that we're still trying to resolve, there are many more where the fixes we've implemented have made a difference.

As a startup, having the amount of users we have is a blessing. As a startup, having the amount of users we have with the limited resources, I mean engineers and folks like myself who communicate with the community, has been challenging. But, I ask that instead of giving up on us or spiting us for being a "mind game" playing, evil, greedy company, that you work with us to make a difference.

It wasn't that long ago that we had users who called us out on forums and tell we needed to improve our feedback system, and they're right. I'm working on improving it to offer more transparency into the process without increasing our workload to the point where it's not sustainable. Those same users who called us out are now working with us to improve through our Ambassador program. So, the challenge is, can you help us rather than just spite us? Running a startup in the industry we're in isn't easy, but it's something we're passionate about. Clearly we can still get better. Please help us.

Thanks,

Jason Zheng

Head of International PR, and Community Management at Jide Technology

I'm also frequently on our Facebook page and Twitter page