Hello everyone, main Honeyside developer speaking!
I know that many of you are waiting for the Clover v3 release. Most of you are excited about the new features, some of you are (with good reason) getting impatient. First and foremost, I want to apologize. I am sorry, not only because we kept you waiting so much, but because we wrongfully set expectations on a timeline that exceeded our capacity.
Honeyside is a small enterprise, made by a couple of Italian developers who decided to start creating and selling a software product on their own. However, we do not have much funding and we are not able to dedicate ourselves 24/7, at least for now. Each one of us has a 9-5 main job. Sometimes, we are required to work overtime hours and we can not say no. Sometimes, we are bound by personal, health or family issues. Even after that, disasters can happen:
- All of our services were hosted in the OVH Strasbourg data center that went on fire. We quickly moved all services to a backup server on March 11 and kept monitoring such server. On March 22 (today) our main infrastructure is back online. Luckily, our physical server was not affected by the fire.
- Our region is back in red zone, with COVID-19 cases sharply rising. Some of our relatives were hit by the virus (though in a mild form). This made organizing work harder.
This will in no way excuse what happened here with Clover v3. Our mistake is that we never should have provided a timeline on the release, being that we are so unsure about the amount of time that we can put into development. For that, we are deeply sorry. We are also very thankful to all of you for being patient and staying with us.
We set a deadline for the v3 release: March 28. On this date, we will close the pending tasks and proceed with the deployment of the update. You will be able to download the update or pull from Github (for those who requested access) on March 29.
After v3 release on March 28-29, we will no longer provide a development timeline. There will still be updates, we’ll never stop! We will keep working to make this product better, enterprise-grade. We will keep working towards the release of a mobile app. However, there will be no ETA and no deadline. We don’t want to make promises that we can’t live up to anymore.
A small note about the upcoming mobile app (the Android / iOS app).
We know how hard it can be to get a mobile app approved. We also discovered that Apple and Google do not in any way condone “app clones”. We can not sell nor distribute the full mobile app source code, because we can not allow hundreds of customers to publish the same app, with the same functionality. Therefore, we will be publishing Clover mobile on our own, but we will let buyers connect their self-hosted Clover installation and customise the look of the app via admin panel settings.
We will consider releasing a Clover React Native SDK (just the API, meetings included, without UI). This will make sure that users who want a high degree of customisation will get the source code they need, while users who just want the meetings app as it is will not have to worry about the app stores.
The bees are here, they are working and they are committed to reaching enteprise-grade quality. We thank you for your support. Together, we will reach the stars!
With love,
Delta