He seems to be quite a bit more humble in the one-on-one August 30th episode of the Under the Radar podcast interview. I’m willing to give him a ‘little’ more time to address the various issues contained in this thread….including but not the least of which is his attitude!
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I agree, Marco’s far more conciliatory in this Under the Radar episode than ever before and he actually apologises.
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We’ve hashed this over a number of times, but just some quick thoughts:
The key is that that’s a reversal of his previous position. He had previously said that having a larger beta test, or that reading the user feedback he received via email, wouldn’t have yielded any additional information. He knew everything he had to know based on his very limited initial beta to his friends.
I agree 100% - but I would also hold a mirror up to this. Depersonalizing a developer is a problem, but so is depersonalizing a user base.
I’ve said this before, but listening to various podcasts in the morning in Overcast is actually part of my mental health regimen. I was fine with the new UI. I wasn’t fine with the fact that things didn’t work. And weeks of Marco being on his own podcasts and opining about (a) how great his new UI was, and (b) how all the complaints were basically from Luddites who couldn’t handle the UI change, was downright insulting. He literally went so far as to claim that he was being held hostage by 1-star reviews.
This is a two-way street. We absolutely need to consider that he’s a solo indie dev. Bugs will happen sometimes, and fixes won’t necessarily be instant. Calling him names or attacking him personally isn’t okay.
In turn, he needs to consider that his user base isn’t a monolith. There’s all the difference in the world between “I hear what you’re saying, but I’m going a different direction” and constantly announcing that you’re not even listening, but that’s okay because there’s nothing you could possibly learn if you did.
I’ve never had any ill will toward Marco, and I’m glad that he’s doing well mentally.
I’m also glad that he seems to be learning appropriate lessons from this. One of the key ones IMHO was when he talked about how an app the size of Overcast isn’t really “his app” anymore. It’s his in the sense that he’s the designer/maintainer, but a huge user base isn’t going to pivot on his whim. I think that’s incredibly important.
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I was going to comment on him not “literally” saying he was held hostage by 1 star reviews but…
Your insightful point about whose app it is provoked a lot of thoughts (and is relevant way beyond Overcast).
At one level, it’s purely transactional: a developer produces a product: it’s their property (intellectual and otherwise) and users are licensed to make use of it. The terms of that licence almost always make it clear that the user has absolutely no other rights or expectations (they might also have to sign away their rights e.g. to allow tracking and selling of their personal data). You pay (or use an app with advertising or tracking) and you get whatever the developer chooses to provide and nothing more. There’s no guarantee of any level of service or even that service will continue.
But there is something real about the idea that the user base has a stake, especially in a popular app that does important things for them. Many users do feel that the developer should listen to them and respond to their wishes, and that that should go beyond simply seeking to have users renew their subs,
I genuinely don’t know how widespread this expectation is: I often feel it is a vocal and rather entitled sub-section of the app-buying public, often those who have some technical understanding or who are immersed in tech themselves and who have the skills and connections to use online systems and networks to make their points. That seems to be especially true for the kind of niche that Overcast occupies. Some of the discussion about the Overcast re-write and release has people basically instructing Marco about what he should have done, in painstaking detail, and deep into the technical weeds.
I am pretty sure that the feedback developers hear about what they should do, and what works well and not, is not representative of all their users. That’s not a surprise: understanding customers is very hard and takes a lot of work. I agree that anyone in business ignores it at their peril, but I have some sympathy with a single-person business who decides that they have to do it their way and not listen to all the loud voices being pointed at them.
I have been through a cycle with many apps that I value, where changes are reversed or amended in response to “user feedback”, where I had seen those changes as big improvements, but because I was OK with them, had not weighted in with more than superficial positive feedback. This overcast release has been more mixed than that for me, but I welcomed removing streaming, for example, for all the reasons of simplification and reliability that Marco explained, but now it’s back. I hope we don’t end up with an app that is worse for many users in an attempt to please some.
We will see
I’ll concede the incorrect use of “literally.” But I think it’s a fair directional summary:
“But all of these one-star reviews I’m getting are forcing me to take action. I am being forced to make changes, to like you know consider, I had to re-add you know one-tap play, I’m having to make design changes, I’m going to have to add more options to the app, I am going to have to like add more buttons, compromise my design, compromise my simplicity, I’m actually going to have to make the app in certain ways worse in my opinion, in order to placate the one star review people, because I have no choice [snip] It is kind of frustrating as a developer to have to give your customers that much power over what you do.”
I actually agree with this, and don’t see this as out of harmony with any of the other observations. In my mind, I see all user feedback as containing a predicate phrase along the lines of “…and if this doesn’t get fixed, I’m going to seriously reconsider [renewing my subscription | buying this again | recommending this product to others].” Yes, it’s purely transactional at the end of the day - but the experiential fuels the transactional.
My question is whether you believe this is unique to apps, or that this is a recent phenomena - because I don’t. I think this applies to everything from phone apps to power drills to macaroni & cheese. I remember two decades ago my dad telling me about a bunch of HVAC contractors that got together to write a letter (envelope & stamp - actual mail 
) to a furnace manufacturer to itemize off the problems they were having with a brand of furnace. The Internet has reduced the friction around it, but the practice is old.
I would be shocked if the prevalence of the expectation isn’t well over 50%. The fact that not everybody vocalizes their expectation doesn’t mean they don’t have one.
I would argue that at least part of the reason for the additional vocalization in this area is the lack of fungible alternatives. Not the lack of alternatives en toto, but the lack of fungible alternatives. If my Milwaukee drill breaks, that sucks - but I can go buy a DeWalt or a Ryobi and it will drop into my workflow with very little adjustment on my part. Likewise, if I don’t like the macaroni & cheese I bought, I can just grab a different brand off the shelf next to it.
There’s no software that’s a drop-in replacement for Overcast (or Pocket Casts, or Castro, or Apple’s podcast app). They’re all different, and migration from one to another is a process of not only moving the data, marking as played, etc., but learning whether features you use even exist, what the “bugs” in those features might involve, and how to use them.
In other words, an investment in an app is much more than a monetary thing. We’ve discussed this elsewhere when we talk about the switching costs to, for example, change out a task manager. At the point I’ve been using an app for years, I’m invested in many more ways than just financial.
I agree here too. Opinionated design (which inherently alienates some users) isn’t actually the problem. Pretty much everybody who uses Overcast uses it because of opinionated design, not despite it.
The challenge is that when a developer changes their opinions, they’re changing core reasons people use the product. And making those changes in such a way that you’re not taking fire from a dozen different directions simultaneously can be tricky.
This is, oddly enough, why there are best practices for these sorts of things - to help developers offend people for the right reasons, not the easily-avoidable ones.
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I think we largely agree, and thanks for such a thoughtful answer.
I’m not convinced by the 50% level of expectation, though you might be right about Overcast, Castro etc… I think the expectations thing requires a level of understanding and engagement with the product. I can see HVAC engineers writing to a manufacturer wanting changes to a product, but not the people who want their homes to be comfortable. It’s not new, but we certainly have much easier means to communicate (and bully and support), especially in tech, so the bar to participation is so much lower.
I taught various kinds of business application software (including MS Office) for a while. I was used to working with students who were interested in tech and software, but had to do a deep re-think when I realised that this cohort of students absolutely were not. They wanted to get letters and reports written and researched and just wanted the “magic tricks” to make the software do what they wanted with as little effort as possible. They wouldn’t have been able to tell you what the software was even called, and were uninterested in any features beyond what they needed to use right now. I know many people whose relationship with tech is at that level, even if they are on their smart phone all day and night and would die if the internet stopped working. They wouldn’t have the faintest interest in how software is developed, how it could be improved or why it might need to change. I know plenty of people who don’t even know that they are using “apps”: they are on Facebook, or WhatsApp or sending messages or shopping. It’s partly why I am tech support for my wider family: “it’s your sort of thing…”(i.e. not theirs)
I suspect that’s why Apple Podcasts is so far ahead in terms of its user base: it’s there on the phone and says it’s for podcasts, so why would anyone look for an alternate app?
Marco has not helped himself. This is not new. He’s managed to upset people fairly regularly through the life of the app. Almost anyone choosing to use Overcast has the understanding and motivation to care about the “nit picky details”: he wouldn’t have a market without people like that. Of course they are going to have a view on any development of the app. It’s understandable that any single developer would struggle to cope with the volume and range of often contradictory feedback, but I don’t think it was a good strategy to shut it out in order to do what he felt he ought to do and fix any problems afterwards. Apart from anything else, it’s his strategy that’s created the situation in which he feels forced to do things he doesn’t actually believe in, because too much negative feedback hurts business.
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