I felt this coming given my experience using the Mailbox desktop app since it launched:
- Good experience, fairly regular releases, stability increasing with each one.
- Stagnation in releases, but app is in a fairly good working state.
- Out of the blue, big update comes in, application changes completely. For the worse, as it loses a bunch of features and is sporting a far less polished look and finish. I believe the new version is now an OS X native application as opposed to a webview.
- Frantic releases over the following weeks, killing some bugs but introducing more.
- Stagnation in releases, in its fairly broken state.
- This announcement.
From the outside, it looks like a case of an engineering team that decided it would rewrite the application from scratch in the native stack. Widely regarded as a bad idea. [1]
After numerous months spent burning money in refactoring and rebuilding features that already existed and worked, management pressure builds up, and they decide to release their "good enough" native version. After torturous weeks of back to back frantic releases to fix all of the complaints coming in, some factor or another (developer churn possibly) caused them to cease development and decide to sack the project altogether.
This is of course just speculation, a narrative I made up. That's how it looks like from the outside to me, but I'd like to hear from the developers inside, since I know they must be reading this thread.
I loved this application and I'm saddened to have to move away from it.
I worked on the desktop client for several months up until the first public beta release.
No, Mailbox for Mac has been a fully native app since inception - which is how you get those nice fluid gestures.
What happened next I have no idea, since I left the company. If I have to guess, we incurred a lot of technical debts during the sprint to beta, and they were doing some major rewriting to fix them. Before it was finished, the project was axed. The new version was released nonetheless to support sunsetting.
The reason I thought the previous version was a webview was due to the not-really-native-looking settings pane (Cmd+,), which turned into a much more typical looking one post-update.
Thank you so much for the input, and thanks for helping build something I enjoyed using.
Glad I'm not the only one who thought the one supposed 'major' update did not add very many useful features and made the UI look cluttered. Also, it ran surprisingly well for a webview app, I don't see why they felt the need to rewrite it.
I just don't think they had the numbers on Carousel, and maybe not enough growth in Mailbox either. If they were getting users like mad, of course Dropbox would focus its attention on expanding them.
- Good experience, fairly regular releases, stability increasing with each one.
- Stagnation in releases, but app is in a fairly good working state.
- Out of the blue, big update comes in, application changes completely. For the worse, as it loses a bunch of features and is sporting a far less polished look and finish. I believe the new version is now an OS X native application as opposed to a webview.
- Frantic releases over the following weeks, killing some bugs but introducing more.
- Stagnation in releases, in its fairly broken state.
- This announcement.
From the outside, it looks like a case of an engineering team that decided it would rewrite the application from scratch in the native stack. Widely regarded as a bad idea. [1]
After numerous months spent burning money in refactoring and rebuilding features that already existed and worked, management pressure builds up, and they decide to release their "good enough" native version. After torturous weeks of back to back frantic releases to fix all of the complaints coming in, some factor or another (developer churn possibly) caused them to cease development and decide to sack the project altogether.
This is of course just speculation, a narrative I made up. That's how it looks like from the outside to me, but I'd like to hear from the developers inside, since I know they must be reading this thread.
I loved this application and I'm saddened to have to move away from it.
[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RewriteCodeFromScratch