Recently, Simplify Media – a fairly large media-centric business based in Redwood City, California, yesterday announced that it’s iPhone client, released less than 4 days ago, had exceeded all expectation of it’s staffing, when it reached a staggering 205,909 downloads in approximately 30 hours.
“We launched the first version of Simplify Media last summer. For the past year, we’ve experienced smooth growth, but all of that changed dramatically less than 4 days ago when our application debuted in the Apple App Store. Our (aggressive) target was to have 100,000 downloads in 30 days. Instead we reached that goal in about 30 hours. As of last night, we had 205,909 downloads.”
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With celebration came reality, with the company also stating it had found a couple of major flaws within the application, due to server demand.
“The overwhelming response has caused us to experience some growing pains:
Infrastructure: We discovered two problems with our servers (one Friday and another last night) that forced us to scramble. That meant many of you couldn’t connect for a period of time.
Product: We learned that two of our features, album art on the iPhone and password reset, weren’t scalable, so we disabled these. If you have forgotten your password, email us from the address associated with your screen name.
Support systems: We found out that our email provider enforces a hard limit on the number of email we can send per day.
Now we face a dilemma. According to the “free for the first 100,000”³ plan we announced, we should be charging for new downloads. However, we are not confident that we can deliver a user experience that meets our expectations (and yours) until we work out a few more kinks. As a result, we’ve decided to remain free for a while longer as we make improvements. In return, we ask for your continued patience as we work through the growing pains.
A final note: to stay ahead of the curve, we are schedule a maintenance window on 8/19 from 9:00 -9:30a Pacific, that’s tomorrow.”
A clearly ‘popular’ application, for a now well-known and widely-use device.
If you are yet to use Simplify Media for iPhone,
you can still grab your free copy: Here
… Let me tell you – its awesome.
We’ll be sure to post a full review of the application, when Simplify Media give us the go-ahead that documented issues are resolved.
R-Fly
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