9 ms·

Color, the new amazing mobile app that crashes your phone within minutes

47 points by arnorhs 16y ago

aresant 16y ago
"They have so much faith in this product, that they’ve pumped 41 million dollars into the company . . ." I think the right assumption is that "they have so much faith in the team." Chief Scientist @ LinkedIn, Founder of Lala, Founder of BillShrink, etc
shasta 16y ago
Working link to the hilarious slideshow, anyone?
- pixelbath 16y ago
  https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ajdtctfhv4hn_264g329gwcc&pli=1 https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ajdtctfhv4hn_264g329...
dmauro 16y ago
Sequoia did not give them 41 million.
- raganwald 16y ago
  Was it "only" M$25, with other investors having put up the remaining M$16?
Goronmon 16y ago
Am I the only one who is annoyed at apps that require GPS to be enabled? I can deal with it for things like Navigation where I can plug my phone into my car to keep the battery up. But for general use, it just sucks up way too much battery and is easy to forget to turn off. The result is that I just avoid apps that require it.
- _stephan 16y ago
  Does disabling GPS actually save power if no app is trying to use GPS? I thought the GPS receiver only draws power if an app is actually using it.
- Zev 16y ago
  Location-based apps requiring GPS to work is a surprise to you?
dangero 16y ago
Jokes aside, I bounced the concept for colors.com off of some people and they didn't like the idea of automatically sharing pictures they take with people who are nearby. While there is something interesting to this concept, I think it could go either way. It could be a lot like Google Wave. It is certainly innovative, but I'm not convinced it will catch on. Maybe it will... Thoughts anyone?
- phlux 16y ago
  Teenagers. And Japanese. They will always use stuff like this. And funny thing abou teenagers - there are brand new ones being made by the millions every single year.... It's the Toys'r'us business model. Your customer base is brand new every single year.
  - jbrennan 16y ago
    To be fair, there are new Japanese being made every single year, too.
    - rbarooah 16y ago
      Not enough, unfortunately.
- moe 16y ago
  I'm sure it will catch on, it's a just a pretty obvious thing to do. But I wonder how color plans to maintain market dominance? I can't see enough of a first-mover advantage here to justify such a big bet. - But perhaps they have something awesome up their sleeve that we don't know about yet?
  - dangero 16y ago
    It's funny you say it's obvious. The whole elastic network concept wasn't obvious to me at all until they explained it. It's somewhat engenius in my opinion, but maybe I'm slow and this idea is obvious. Like I said though, I think the concept has some mainstream acceptance problems and I'm not sure it will work.
spolsky 16y ago
Boy, there are a million reasons to hate on Color, but the fact that their 1.0 app crashes is the least convincing and the most mean-spirited. Everybody's 1.0 app crashes.
- credo 16y ago
  >>Everybody's 1.0 app crashes. No, that is wrong. My 1.0 apps don't crash (as per itunesconnect which says "No Crash Reports" for my last 3 iPhone/iPad apps which are all on their 1.0 version). One of them was recently ranked #1 on Apple's top charts for its category. So this isn't a matter of trivial apps with a low user base.
  - gcb 16y ago
    Everybody's who is in it for a big exit pile of money 1.0 app crashs
    - gcb 16y ago
      *big pile of exit money i blame phone on-screen keyboards. Give me back my clickety keys!
  - mikeklaas 16y ago
    iTunes crash reports aren't reliable. We launched our iPad app two weeks ago and have already fixed a couple crash bugs that were reported by users and didn't show up in the iTunes logs. There should have been quite a few, too, since we were the #1 iPad app for a while so I expect every crash report to mean 10x that many users actually experienced the crash.
  - Zev 16y ago
    iTunes Connect is the last thing you should be using to know if your app actually crashes or not. I'd consider app reviews in the App Store to be more useful than iTunes Connect is to know if my app is crashing or not. iTunes Connect relies on people syncing their phone. Which doesn't happen nearly as often as you think. You should use something like PLCrashReporter[1] if you want accurate crash reports. 1. http://code.google.com/p/plcrashreporter/ http://code.google.com/p/plcrashreporter/
fabiandesimone 16y ago
This might get down-voted to oblivion, but here it goes: OP, cool it down with the link bait headlines. It seems like fashionable to bad mouth Color right now with their monster financing, etc, but if you have ever built anything (and it looks like you have) you know damn well how hard it is. And V 1.0, 40 million or not, always stinks and If it doesn't you shipped to late. So, let's give this guys some time so we can understand why Sequoia gave so much money to Color.
- geoka9 16y ago
  And V 1.0, 40 million or not, always stinks and If it doesn't you shipped to late. Whatever happened to beta releases?
  - jgh 16y ago
    I don't believe Apple will allow you to release a beta product on the app store.
bradgessler 16y ago
This seems like a classic, "OMG TC IS SCOOPING US!" reaction. They rushed to get something out ended up throwing some real crap over the wall. This is going to hurt them a little bit, but $40mm will help that pain go away. Color would have been much better served by a "Give us your email address" page like http://lifepath.me/ http://lifepath.me/ to drum up excitement.
PatrickTulskie 16y ago
I tried it out and while it worked fine and didn't crash, I struggled to find the purpose in my day to day life. It might be great at a concert or something. Also, I'd like to just share with a subset of users - not share with everyone.
alex_c 16y ago
Nitpick: there's a big difference between an app crashing (which is what this sounds like) and an app crashing your phone (rendering it unusable or forcing a reboot).
- Pewpewarrows 16y ago
  There's reports of users' entire phones crashing and rebooting because of the app.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- ootachi 16y ago
  The app actually is crashing phones. It turns out that it's quite possible for apps to crash most Android phones, either by making the phone so unresponsive that a watchdog kicks in, or by using so much RAM that the OOM killer goes to town.
  - alex_c 16y ago
    I stand corrected - that is pretty bad.
  - jbrennan 16y ago
    If it's possible for an application to bring down the system that sounds like the system was poorly designed.
    - burrows 16y ago
      And... you've essentially discredited windows, linux, and os x.
      - deadcyclo 16y ago
        Really? Not once have I had an application take down GNU/Linux. Sure an application takes down X once in a blue moon, but never the whole Os. And I've been using it for about 15 years now. The few full scale crashes I've experienced were due to hardware errors. Only once have I experienced a full crash on android. The phone simply rebooted. No idea why. I have never used OSX or windows after XP, so I can't say anything about them.
st3fan 16y ago
Why so negative?

47 points by arnorhs 16y ago

"They have so much faith in this product, that they’ve pumped 41 million dollars into the company . . ." I think the right assumption is that "they have so much faith in the team." Chief Scientist @ LinkedIn, Founder of Lala, Founder of BillShrink, etc

shasta 16y ago

Working link to the hilarious slideshow, anyone?

pixelbath 16y ago
https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ajdtctfhv4hn_264g329gwcc&pli=1 https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ajdtctfhv4hn_264g329...

dmauro 16y ago

Sequoia did not give them 41 million.

raganwald 16y ago
Was it "only" M$25, with other investors having put up the remaining M$16?

Goronmon 16y ago

Am I the only one who is annoyed at apps that require GPS to be enabled? I can deal with it for things like Navigation where I can plug my phone into my car to keep the battery up. But for general use, it just sucks up way too much battery and is easy to forget to turn off. The result is that I just avoid apps that require it.

_stephan 16y ago
Does disabling GPS actually save power if no app is trying to use GPS? I thought the GPS receiver only draws power if an app is actually using it.
Zev 16y ago
Location-based apps requiring GPS to work is a surprise to you?

dangero 16y ago

Jokes aside, I bounced the concept for colors.com off of some people and they didn't like the idea of automatically sharing pictures they take with people who are nearby. While there is something interesting to this concept, I think it could go either way. It could be a lot like Google Wave. It is certainly innovative, but I'm not convinced it will catch on. Maybe it will... Thoughts anyone?

phlux 16y ago
Teenagers. And Japanese. They will always use stuff like this. And funny thing abou teenagers - there are brand new ones being made by the millions every single year.... It's the Toys'r'us business model. Your customer base is brand new every single year.
- jbrennan 16y ago
  To be fair, there are new Japanese being made every single year, too.
  - rbarooah 16y ago
    Not enough, unfortunately.
moe 16y ago
I'm sure it will catch on, it's a just a pretty obvious thing to do. But I wonder how color plans to maintain market dominance? I can't see enough of a first-mover advantage here to justify such a big bet. - But perhaps they have something awesome up their sleeve that we don't know about yet?
- dangero 16y ago
  It's funny you say it's obvious. The whole elastic network concept wasn't obvious to me at all until they explained it. It's somewhat engenius in my opinion, but maybe I'm slow and this idea is obvious. Like I said though, I think the concept has some mainstream acceptance problems and I'm not sure it will work.

spolsky 16y ago

Boy, there are a million reasons to hate on Color, but the fact that their 1.0 app crashes is the least convincing and the most mean-spirited. Everybody's 1.0 app crashes.

credo 16y ago
>>Everybody's 1.0 app crashes. No, that is wrong. My 1.0 apps don't crash (as per itunesconnect which says "No Crash Reports" for my last 3 iPhone/iPad apps which are all on their 1.0 version). One of them was recently ranked #1 on Apple's top charts for its category. So this isn't a matter of trivial apps with a low user base.
- gcb 16y ago
  Everybody's who is in it for a big exit pile of money 1.0 app crashs
  - gcb 16y ago
    *big pile of exit money i blame phone on-screen keyboards. Give me back my clickety keys!
- mikeklaas 16y ago
  iTunes crash reports aren't reliable. We launched our iPad app two weeks ago and have already fixed a couple crash bugs that were reported by users and didn't show up in the iTunes logs. There should have been quite a few, too, since we were the #1 iPad app for a while so I expect every crash report to mean 10x that many users actually experienced the crash.
- Zev 16y ago
  iTunes Connect is the last thing you should be using to know if your app actually crashes or not. I'd consider app reviews in the App Store to be more useful than iTunes Connect is to know if my app is crashing or not. iTunes Connect relies on people syncing their phone. Which doesn't happen nearly as often as you think. You should use something like PLCrashReporter[1] if you want accurate crash reports. 1. http://code.google.com/p/plcrashreporter/ http://code.google.com/p/plcrashreporter/

fabiandesimone 16y ago

This might get down-voted to oblivion, but here it goes: OP, cool it down with the link bait headlines. It seems like fashionable to bad mouth Color right now with their monster financing, etc, but if you have ever built anything (and it looks like you have) you know damn well how hard it is. And V 1.0, 40 million or not, always stinks and If it doesn't you shipped to late. So, let's give this guys some time so we can understand why Sequoia gave so much money to Color.

geoka9 16y ago
And V 1.0, 40 million or not, always stinks and If it doesn't you shipped to late. Whatever happened to beta releases?
- jgh 16y ago
  I don't believe Apple will allow you to release a beta product on the app store.

bradgessler 16y ago

This seems like a classic, "OMG TC IS SCOOPING US!" reaction. They rushed to get something out ended up throwing some real crap over the wall. This is going to hurt them a little bit, but $40mm will help that pain go away. Color would have been much better served by a "Give us your email address" page like http://lifepath.me/ http://lifepath.me/ to drum up excitement.

PatrickTulskie 16y ago

I tried it out and while it worked fine and didn't crash, I struggled to find the purpose in my day to day life. It might be great at a concert or something. Also, I'd like to just share with a subset of users - not share with everyone.

alex_c 16y ago

Nitpick: there's a big difference between an app crashing (which is what this sounds like) and an app crashing your phone (rendering it unusable or forcing a reboot).

Pewpewarrows 16y ago
There's reports of users' entire phones crashing and rebooting because of the app.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
ootachi 16y ago
The app actually is crashing phones. It turns out that it's quite possible for apps to crash most Android phones, either by making the phone so unresponsive that a watchdog kicks in, or by using so much RAM that the OOM killer goes to town.
- alex_c 16y ago
  I stand corrected - that is pretty bad.
- jbrennan 16y ago
  If it's possible for an application to bring down the system that sounds like the system was poorly designed.
  - burrows 16y ago
    And... you've essentially discredited windows, linux, and os x.
    - deadcyclo 16y ago
      Really? Not once have I had an application take down GNU/Linux. Sure an application takes down X once in a blue moon, but never the whole Os. And I've been using it for about 15 years now. The few full scale crashes I've experienced were due to hardware errors. Only once have I experienced a full crash on android. The phone simply rebooted. No idea why. I have never used OSX or windows after XP, so I can't say anything about them.

st3fan 16y ago

Why so negative?