Appreciate the criticism and we take it in stride. I respect everything you and others post, both good and bad. Sometimes raw emotional responses can cause gut check reactions of "you're kicking my baby" but I don't let myself see it that way. You're obviously passionate about our project or you wouldn't be here pointing out all the ways in which we can do better. I also respect not wanting a refund and I look forward to the day when I see a post from you saying, "ok, this was totally worth it and I'm glad I bought."
💯 Agreed. Our CTO has a proposal for us this quarter to do exactly what you're talking about. It's premature to share but know that we are on the same page and intend to do this. We intentionally built the global HexOS messaging system for this back with the Q2 release. We now want to expand that to include notifications for app-specific issues like this. But keep in mind that was not the original plan for 1.0 so the scope is no increasing, which is fine, but we still have other projects and objectives to hit, one of which is the Local UI which is a much bigger project than I think anyone realizes. It's complicated by the fact that our actual footprint on the ISO today is very small and we do not want to bake any of our UI into that ISO either. Instead, we have to build a full container/app for this which we are doing, but it's a huge project and we have a senior dev completely focused on it right now.
I feel like a broken record saying this, but a big part of our struggles this year is bootstrapping the business. Money doesn't solve everything, but it sure as heck would have helped to hire a lot more developers and app specialists right at the beginning of this year, but we opted for a more fiscally conservative approach to hiring to ensure we don't grow too big too fast and make commitments to employees we can't keep without proving our business model first. Expansion is a big part of our plans for 2026 and will help us get more focused on individual layers of the software.
Sure, but that comes with its own set of challenges and problems. Again, everything is still in flux and user data is not at risk. The worst anyone should have to deal with is reconfiguring immich from scratch which of course isn't ideal, but let's be honest here, it's also not the end of the world or an unrealistic expectation given the beta nature of both us and Immich itself.
Comms of course could be better, always. But we are doing the best we can with what we have for now and we would just ask people to be patient while we work through it. This was all part and parcel of participating in the beta and if that's not going to work for anyone, waiting to deploy until more polish is applied would be the right approach.
I've already spent hours reading and replying here and the more we try to get ahead on comms, the less time we spend on building and getting to a release. Every hour is a choice and often there are no options that will satisfy everyone. Still totally understand the frustrations, but this is the last I'll be commenting on this today so I can get back to work with the rest of the team.
Our new docs site is a great place for us to put a guide for immich issues and resolving them in the future. Stay tuned for more, but know that we don't have the ability to always drop everything we are doing to shift focus to an issue like this when we are in the middle of other projects. There can be a lag time and that is something everyone here will have to accept while participating in the beta. Again, if that doesn't work for anyone, wait for the polish to come before deploying.