It’s the developer equivalent of knocking the Monopoly board off the table because you lost a turn. Instead, he diminished the severity of the bug and blamed the removal of the app on Amazon’s uneven approval process, despite the fact that the app does not meet one of the most basic criterion of Amazon’s approval process: “Apps do not put customer data at risk once installed”. If the developer had come right out and said, “we just don’t have the resources to dedicate to fixing a major issue with the way playlists are exported from the current version of our app for FireTV, so we are discontinuing the app, effective immediately”, that would have been perfectly acceptable. I find it really disheartening that this is even a contentious opinion in the HN community.
A compromise would have been leaving the old, buggy version of the app up with a note in the description that it is no longer supported. Unless a core value of VLC’s dev team is “egos over users”, I don’t see how you could possibly argue that this is a compromise.
Having a calm demeanor when explaining that they pulled the plug on VLC for FireTV because they couldn’t be bothered with fixing a “slight bug” that causes data loss (and which Amazon views as a “blocker”) doesn’t make the decision any less diva-like. You are placing the “shining beacon of the open source community” above approach reproach, without a hint of awareness of the irony. And, except the Google PlayStore (that has other issues), all the interfaces to upload/edit are very bad and buggy.Ībove reproach? For what? Enforcing their quality standards? All of those appstores have lots of crap in there. Remember, we don't make any money from VLC, even if it is free, you are not the product (no ads, no spying, no telemetry).Īnyway, this is one of the reason why I dislike appstores: they make you lose a lot of time jumping through hoops, and the quality is not even there. Sure, that meant that version is buggy, but that's even more the reason to not have more people download it. But, for Amazon, they think it is a blocker. So, I'm not even sure that we can fix that in a correct way. The actual issue is that this precise version had a small database bug/issue that is very annoying to fix/work-around, and when you update, you lose the first audio playlist (video files, audio files, playlist files work fine). So I preferred to disable it instead of having more people load an old version. The reason is that they refused to approve the 3.0 version of VLC, which meant that people were downloading a beta version from quite a long time ago, with lots of bugs. So, I am the one who disabled it from the Amazon Store.
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