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I think a lot of people here are making an assumption that the majority of the effort here will be in building the application. But note Marco's words: > then

by mhw 15y ago

I think a lot of people here are making an assumption that the majority of the effort here will be in building the application. But note Marco's words: > then supporting and maintaining it in parallel with my iOS app indefinitely and > you’ll answer all support email that comes from it I think Marco's insight is that he knows how much support work he gets just from the iOS application (notice all those posts he does about what proportion of devices have different versions of iOS on them, and the consequences for a developer). And I think his perception is that supporting an Android application could well be much more effort, at least partly because there are many more OS versions and device combinations. The developers here are probably thinking "hey this must be 90% development work, 10% answering emails"; Marco might be thinking of it more like "this could be 60% answering emails, 40% writing code" (I'm guessing at the numbers to illustrate the point, by the way). Developing the application himself would involve learning Android development to a level where he can produce an application that meets his high standards. Contracting the development work out would still leave him needing to support the Android application. I can see why the option he's suggesting looks attractive.

coob 15y ago
I get twice the volume of Android support emails than iOS. Android sales are 5% of iOS sales. The vast majority of them are nothing I can do about as they relate to the install/refund process.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  I once (2000 or so) wrote a very smart webmail client used by my then client's customer service. The most used feature were context-sensitive canned responses. It would check the message for keywords (Bayesian filtering came later) and suggest the most likely answer. It was an ugly JSP-based thing that took me a month to write. It should be much quicker to do now with modern technology.
  - coob 15y ago
    Yes, we have done this. Doesn't help that precisely 0% of people appreciate getting an automatic form letter over a personal reply.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      You need to make the canned responses use actual client data, have some variability and track what canned responses were used before for the client. We also allowed the human operator to customize the message and check if what the machine thinks is appropriate really is. We had more than 80% accuracy and we continuously measured that against the keywords found in the previous messages.

by mhw 15y ago

coob 15y ago

I get twice the volume of Android support emails than iOS. Android sales are 5% of iOS sales. The vast majority of them are nothing I can do about as they relate to the install/refund process.

rbanffy 15y ago
I once (2000 or so) wrote a very smart webmail client used by my then client's customer service. The most used feature were context-sensitive canned responses. It would check the message for keywords (Bayesian filtering came later) and suggest the most likely answer. It was an ugly JSP-based thing that took me a month to write. It should be much quicker to do now with modern technology.
- coob 15y ago
  Yes, we have done this. Doesn't help that precisely 0% of people appreciate getting an automatic form letter over a personal reply.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    You need to make the canned responses use actual client data, have some variability and track what canned responses were used before for the client. We also allowed the human operator to customize the message and check if what the machine thinks is appropriate really is. We had more than 80% accuracy and we continuously measured that against the keywords found in the previous messages.