Hi All,
Just stopping by to say we released our 1.0.2 update Tuesday Eve UK time.
The main changes are around notifications, we've spent a lot of time making them more robust and reliable and would love feedback, good or bad with the new update.
I've got some more changes in 1.0.3 for notifications, but that's a 3-4 weeks away.
1.0.2 also includes some haptic feedback on the main screen for iPhone 7 users. Not sure if anyone uses the haptic at all?
Also, I thought it would be good to post some information about what may cause notifications to not get through.
First, Weather Gods approach to notifications is a little different to most other apps, in that we try to make them a slightly more personal experiences, taking into account unit settings, 24 hour clock - soon they will be localised as well
To achieve this we use a master heartbeat which is sent to the app every 15 minutes, triggering Weather Gods to run notification generation.
Things which can stop this from running - and which unfortunately are out of our control:
- force quitting the app; Apple takes this as a sign that the user is not enjoying the app and therefore notifications are no longer appropriate.
- low battery or low power mode; the device decides you can't spare the battery to run a background weather check and therefore it is cancelled until the device decides that the battery has sufficient charge again
- no network or poor network connection; Weather Gods has a limited amount of time given to it by the device to check the weather. if the network is poor then we 'overstay our welcome' and the device will terminate us :(
- software update or a reset of the device. sometimes a power off / on as well
All of the above can be quickly resolved by re-launching Weather Gods and we will carry on where we left off.
One more thing to clarify - it's safe to press the 'home' button on Weather Gods and put us into the background - we'll continue to receive the heartbeat as normal.
If anyone is having any problems with Weather Gods notifications then please don't hesitate to get in contact - we've put extra debug information in the feedback email to help us resolve these issues.
The extra debug information includes the :
- the name of the location for which the notification applies - we don't send any current location GPS information in the email
- schedule time; morning, evening or as it happens
- schedule type; rain, wind, storm, sunrise, summary etc
Fingers crossed that notifications should now be much improved!
Thanks
Scott