Color, the new amazing mobile app that crashes your phone within minutes | Hacker News Reader

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

arnorhs.com

47 pointsarnorhs44 comments

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.

>>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.

Everybody's who is in it for a big exit pile of money 1.0 app crashs

*big pile of exit money

i blame phone on-screen keyboards. Give me back my clickety keys!

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.

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/

Not if it has $41,000,000 behind it

I think that people are hating on Color because of a combination of two different things:

1. They've got a buggy 1.0 application with no users.

2. They've got $41 million dollars in VC money.

Either by itself might be understandable, but the combination is worrisome.

For example, it's one thing if some angel investors invest $500K or $2 million in strong team with a half-baked idea. That's enough money to allow some hiring and a few experiments.

Or coming from the other side, I can understand why investors might put $41 million into a promising social network with dedicated users and strong growth.

But $41 million for a company which hasn't demonstrated product-market fit, and is still working the bugs out of their 1.0 release? I'm not sure what Sequoia thinks they see in this deal.

All I'm saying is that the "buggy" adjective is the last reason to hate them. $41m, lack of product-market fit, no users, these are all genuine reasons to be hating. But anyone with ten minutes of programming experience knows that bugs are just bugs. You fix them and they're fixed. Lack of product/market fit, however, can never be fixed. Focus on that.

>Everybody's 1.0 app crashes.

Apparently 1.0 is the new beta

A crashing app isn't a reason to hate on them. But when your app does not work whatsoever. Has a terrible UI. And continually force closes or crashes the entire phone if you click buttons too quickly, that's unacceptable.

There's a reason that as of this writing, the android market has color rated at 1.5 stars.

The current app on the android market could be written in 3 hour by someone who's never written an android app before. I just need to get a page to load 1/10 tries and have the app crash out the other 9.

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.

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.

Location-based apps requiring GPS to work is a surprise to you?

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/ to drum up excitement.

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?

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.

To be fair, there are new Japanese being made every single year, too.

Not enough, unfortunately.

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?

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.

Well, I should clarify that I think the concept of grouping photos (videos, chats, etc.) by GPS is obvious. It's been done before and so far this is not much more than a logical progression (making it easier and more fun).

I don't even know what "elastic network" is supposed to mean, but yes, they better have a lot of that, for $41M...

I installed it. Couldn't understand the point. Uninstalled.

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).

There's reports of users' entire phones crashing and rebooting because of the app.

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.

I stand corrected - that is pretty bad.

If it's possible for an application to bring down the system that sounds like the system was poorly designed.

And... you've essentially discredited windows, linux, and os x.

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.

I'm not sure if this is meant to be a serious comment, but not only is it misleading, it's also naive. As you try to lead the conversation into talking about an actual kernel halt or panic as opposed to what the OP actually said.

This was the original claim that you responded to. "by making the phone so unresponsive that a watchdog kicks in, or by using so much RAM that the OOM killer goes to town."

Crashes obviously happen on linux systems all the time. That's why this exists http://linux.die.net/man/8/watchdog and why we have reports like this http://www.unix.com/aix/106921-process-crashing-aix-due-memo... and this http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6059 etc. Are you claiming that such a situation can't arise on linux.

The same is obviously true on Windows and OSX.

Pivoting the conversation isn't the best way to make your point.

edit - Not to mention you attempt to use anecdotal evidence to support a general claim. Such has no place here.

First of all: Sorry for the late reply. I somehow didn't notice your post before now.

I was actually replying to jbrennan who said "If it's possible for an application to bring down the system that sounds like the system was poorly designed." and burrows who said "And... you've essentially discredited windows, linux, and os x.". I didn't notice what ootachi said until you pointed it out. I consider "bring down the system" to main exactly that, kernel halt or panic.

The links you provided where about processes crashing and/or processes with memory leaks, which I could in no way consider to be "bringing down the system" (unless it's a very poor system where such things actually do bring down the whole system), and it would be completely insane of me to claim that processes cannot crash on nix.

My point was simply that kernel panics or anything that "brings down the system" very rarely occur, and normally occur due to hardware errors on nix systems, and as far as I know on newer Windows systems as well (again, never used OSX so I have nothing to go on there).

Simply put: When jbrennan said "bring down the system" that, to me at least, means anything that the _only_ recovery from is a reboot of the system, no more, no less, and that is what I was responding to.

In both cases, iOS would just kill the app. Why is Android not doing the same? Via limits.conf/ulimit/setrlimit, this should be quite easy to do.

Even on iOS, it is surprisingly easy to kill the springboard from an app.

"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

Sequoia did not give them 41 million.

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

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.

Working link to the hilarious slideshow, anyone?

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ajdtctfhv4hn_264g329...

Why so negative?

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.

And V 1.0, 40 million or not, always stinks and If it doesn't you shipped to late.

Whatever happened to beta releases?

I don't believe Apple will allow you to release a beta product on the app store.

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