Zwift Update Version 1.27.0 (101324) Released

Zwift staff are too busy regurgitating talking points that they are “working on game features” and silencing longtime loyal customers raising questions in forums about priorities to actually make meaningful progress on bug fixes and enhancements.

The community of riders is the product- something Zwift has never seemed to truly understand. It probably doesn’t help that most of the staff remaining after recent layoffs have been at Zwift far less time than the average customer has been a subscriber. The company doesn’t seem to value customer loyalty nor the free feedback frequently provided to improve the core experience.

Without the community of riders, Zwift would be little more than cartoony graphics of Pace Partners making inane and repetitive comments. Zwift isn’t going to fix long standing bugs or make progress towards common feature requests until the community takes action. What we need is a day (or month) without Zwift- when customers choose not to use the service- to call attention to why we the customer matter.

The first virtual world, Jarvis Island, was released as an invite-only beta product on September 30, 2014. On that day we should show Zwift what their product would be if the community stayed away.

left the platform in May when the update made my chromebook stop working in the game client, couldnt get past the loading page, to then be told it doesnt work on chromebooks even tho i had been running it on there since the start of the year!!

James Bailey is using feedback from Zwifters he agrees with. Those who offer constructive criticism about Pace Partners or raise reasonable questions about whether the effort would be better directed towards fixing core bugs are ignored or outright silenced by Bailey.

In my view, Bailey has become emblematic of the lack of regard Zwift has for its long term customers.

Offering feedback that may be different then the majority opinion is not an “attack” and being direct with questions about development priorities is not “wrath”. As Zwift customers, we have a right to opinions about what we get for our monthly membership. No one should be made to feel that if they don’t agree with the status quo that somehow they are the problem or don’t have the best interest of the community in mind.

I disagree that Bailey has engaged with the community in a reasonable manner. The opinions of Zwift customers who have offered feedback specific to Pace Partners that don’t align with the vision of that feature are routinely dismissed and criticized by Bailey. And when more than two months have passed since Zwift sent out a press release saying that the company is pausing its hardware efforts to focus on the core game experience, I think it’s a fair question to ask why so much effort has seemingly been invested in what is a beta feature.

First easy guess is simply that testing costs money, so supporting quite-old devices and OS versions is a burden on the development process.

The level of moaning about every release on Zwift is pretty striking. Personally I would prefer they didn’t officially support old OSes but allowed people to keep running them, rather than forcing updates to the latest. But this is iOS 12 we’re talking about discontinuing — which affects devices like the original iPad Air, which was released *almost 9 years ago.* This policy isn’t extreme stuff. It’s not unusual, and doesn’t reflect some sort of sneering disregard for typical users. They’re trying to strike a balance like anyone else who makes software.

Good gravy. “Otherwise you’re just wasting everyone’s time” is such a decent example, here, of the tone I mean.

I work at an agile development shop. To test older OSes and devices for new releases takes time and money — a “burden.” Whether that testing is automated or manual, you are spending time and money in order to deliver new software on a tree of OSes going back into the past.

There’s nothing complicated about that basic calculation, but hey, you want more depth to the outline.

Companies stop supporting older OSes when something ages out on them. That something might be a relatively superficial feature that has a high cost to update, or to maintain a separate branch over. (We’ve had some graphing software that, when we updated to a new version of its open source code, wasn’t drawing a specific sort of rendered line across all our software; we had to make a hard call about whether to code specifically to address that issue in some devices, or stop officially supporting the old stuff.) Or there might be more of a core-code-level issue, to do with graphics rendering when we updated the core of our software, or with how audio is streamed. We update to make streamed audio work great on newer systems, whether people are complaining of a bug — but it breaks the old stuff, and there’s no real way to fix that.

Then, too, Apple (to use the handy example) has emulation that lets a developer or tester see how things work on old systems. At some point the emulation tools, too, stop supporting specific OSes or devices, so either you keep around the old hardware on an old OS — note that Apple doesn’t let people roll back to previous OS versions, so you can’t just keep one iPad mini 2 (or whatever) and be able to test iOS XX-throughYY on that machine — or you stop being able to support things.

Look at those examples, and think about how something like an emulator that no longer includes iOS 12 would affect testing efforts for the Companion app. Does Zwift choose to incur the costs involved in testing without that emulator? One of the things they’ll do to decide that will be to check their analytics to see how many devices with such-and-so traits are currently hitting their servers.

Your essential argument is that Zwift discontinued support for reasons that were gratuitous — they just did it, it made no sense. I think you’re treating them, and me too, like anonymous people who Just Don’t Care. I don’t think you’re right about either Zwift or me, here. I’m not just some sort of ego jousting opportunity for you. Maybe Zwift has its flaws, but they’re not just doing things randomly out of indifference to their users.