Ember, iCloud & App Reviews

Today, I want to talk about our troubles with Ember, and ask for some help.

In March we released an update to Ember, and unfortunately it turned out that a lot of users experienced issues using Ember & iCloud together. Nik wrote a blog post with the full details on it at the time, so I won't go over it again. Needless to say we had a lot of unhappy customers. This is the exact opposite of what we want and is absolutely crushing for us to see.

Since that release we've been working tirelessly on an update to make sync more robust and to offer an alternative to iCloud. Yesterday we released an update to Ember that we believe fixes the major sync problems Ember was experiencing with iCloud. We know, however, that iCloud isn’t everyone’s preferred choice of sync service - so we’re now well on our way to adding the number one requested feature - Dropbox support.

As a sidenote: If you're still having issues with Ember & iCloud, drop us an email and we’ll get you back up and running - we've managed to fix the issue for the majority of people that have got in contact with us and would love to help.

The negative reviews we've received on the App Store because of this have really affected us, our ratings have plummeted, and in turn so has the revenue for Ember. Users were frustrated - rightly so - but instead of turning to us for support they left a review on the App Store.

No Reply

The worst thing is we can't reply to those users. It makes me sad to see users that are having issues and know that we can help, but yet have no way of contacting them. This is one thing that needs to change on the App Store.

I hear things are better over on the Google Play store. As I understand it developers can give one public written response per comment, though it's not a public conversation - just a response. The user can then choose to continue the conversation by emailing the developer.

Being able to help users on the the App Store would be amazing, we reply to every email, Tweet and Facebook post we get about our products - and we handle all support ourselves in-house. We care, want to help people get the most out of our products and want to be there for them if they have problems. Not being able to respond to customers on the App Store is ludicrous, and makes things harder for us and our users.

How can you help?

We're a small team working incredibly hard to build great apps. We’re not a startup, and we don't have private investors. It sounds stupid but reviews make a huge difference to our livelihood.

If you're happy with Ember we’d love it if you were to head on over to the App Store and leave a review. It truly means the world to us. And again, if you're having issues with Ember or any of our other products, drop us an email and we'll do everything we can to help.

Review Ember for Mac Review Ember for iOS

These reviews really help us to continue working and improving our products. Thank you for your support - it means the world to all of us here at Realmac.