How to sync before forced upgrade? (or is it not needed??)

[Michael Vorburger]

I have gTasks "free" from the standard Android Market (which doesn't
auto-sync) I think I have some non-sync tasks from the last few days.
Today when starting it it said "This version expired. Please update.
[Update]", without a way to continue using it. When I click Update it
goes to the Market to update, where as part of the description you say
"SYNC before UPDATE!!" - which I cannot anymore now before
upgrading! :-( Do you have any advise how to handle this situation?

May be in future releases you want to force an update before that
"version expired" message, and/or allow users to continue using it and
upgrade late (keep "nagging" at every startup seems fine by me, I
understand it's best to have all users on latest version; but are you
sure you truly want to BLOCK?).

PS: I would love to pay the few dollars for the "full" version (with
auto-sync, and task up/down move?), but having to install that other
market application and then registering there again and going through
it and all... I'm lazy! ;) Sorry. I wonder if that's just me only
being lazy or if this is true inhibitor for others as well slowing
down your growth...

[mike johnson]

I didn't want to install an app just to install an app either. After I purchased the paid version, I emailed the developer and he sent me a link to the .apk which I then installed with Astro

[Peter Flachbart]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 11:04, Michael Vorburger <mi...@vorburger.ch> wrote:

I have gTasks "free" from the standard Android Market (which doesn't
auto-sync) I think I have some non-sync tasks from the last few days.
Today when starting it it said "This version expired. Please update.
[Update]", without a way to continue using it. When I click Update it
goes to the Market to update, where as part of the description you say
"SYNC before UPDATE!!" - which I cannot anymore now before
upgrading! :-( Do you have any advise how to handle this situation?

Wait a while in gTasks after the expiration note was shown ... It will sync, if it is possible.

May be in future releases you want to force an update before that
"version expired" message, and/or allow users to continue using it and
upgrade late (keep "nagging" at every startup seems fine by me, I
understand it's best to have all users on latest version; but are you
sure you truly want to BLOCK?).

Sometimes the nagging is not sufficient enough ... but it has some merit ...
May be something in between  ...
 

PS: I would love to pay the few dollars for the "full" version (with
auto-sync, and task up/down move?), but having to install that other
market application and then registering there again and going through
it and all... I'm lazy! ;) Sorry. I wonder if that's just me only
being lazy or if this is true inhibitor for others as well slowing
down your growth...

BR
--
Peter Flachbart

[Benjamin Crist]

PS: I would love to pay the few dollars for the "full" version (with
auto-sync, and task up/down move?), but having to install that other
market application and then registering there again and going through
it and all... I'm lazy! ;) Sorry. I wonder if that's just me only
being lazy or if this is true inhibitor for others as well slowing
down your growth...

I agree with this. However, I found the app to be so useful as to be worth the hoops to jump through. I would rather have not jumped through those hoops of course!

Also, on the subject of AndappStore, here are three ways you could improve, fix these and it would help a LOT.

- Reduce the update time a LOT or get rid of it totally. The built in Market app loads faster, why would I want to install an app that doesn't load as fast? Users want speed, reliability, eye candy and features. I understand you must balance those, but this app is way too slow, imo.

- Put an interface together that has a web front end with good integration. One thing that that Apple's app store has that I find very nice is the ability to browse apps on my computer or my phone. If you could make your store interface with both web browser and your android app, I think users would find that to be very, very useful, especially if you can buy apps without a computer or with a computer and have it ready to download on the application and have the ability to store credit cards if users wanted to, or input the card number if users did not want to store that information.

- Realize that some devs will want to put their app both on your market and the standard market and make provisions for this so that if the dev doesn't upload the exact same versions on both markets at the same time the users won't be upset by this (as we saw with gTasks).

-Benjamin

[Al Sutton]

Ben,

We're working on the startup time issue, but it's been rolled into part of a larger update which is taking some time to put together and probably won't be launched until next month.

We've had a web interface since our launch over 18 months ago at http://AndAppStore.com/ , are you having some problems accessing it?

The issue with conflicting updates is due to how Android identifies applications. Android uses what's called a package name which is specified by the developer, so if a developer uses the same package name for their app on both Market and AndAppStore both on-device clients to think the application was downloaded from the corresponding market and hence offer updates from them. In the latest release I believe Peter has put in place a solution which will allow users to download updates from either market without causing any problems.

Al.

--

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[Benjamin Crist]

Ah, thank you for the information! I was not aware of all of this information, though I confess I didn't really look too hard because the app taking so long to start up was so annoying.

-Benjamin