Friday view: Lessons from iOS8

Robert Fell, mobile product manager, Gala Interactive looks at the release of iOS8 and highlights some problems raised and lessons learned from the shift to the new OS

The core issues with Apple upgrading their operating system boils down to one area and then has a number of knock-on effects: the timing of the release of the GM Seed version of the OS being so close to the main public release date.

As an operator that constantly improves its product, we run two week sprints and deploy new code and features at the end of each sprint and we have to make sure that we support all of the top devices and operating systems that our customers are using.  We wanted to make sure that from day one when our customers download iOS8 on their devices that our product would work as well as it did before on iOS7.

Apple released a beta version of iOS8 on the 4 August which was full of bugs, so while we tested our HTML5 web apps and iOS native apps we didn’t know which bugs Apple would fix by the time the GM Seed and the public release version were out, or conversely which new bugs, such as the changes it made to Safari, Apple would subsequently introduce.

From the time the GM Seed was released we completed full testing passes on our existing apps and started testing the features that were due to go live from our current sprint. There was little time to complete all the testing, but the testing we did raised a number of key defects:

1. Safari changed the way it handles previous/next fields on form fields like registration forms (the < > buttons). We tested ours, our competitors and the likes of Gmail registration and found all were affected.  If you move using the < > between many fields (typical on personal detail/address capture) then it causes the device to crash.
2. Some of our key casino games from our suppliers failed to support Safari running on iOS8 – a lot of testing and 11th hour changes combined with a late night release made sure we were up and running with roulette and blackjack working at around the time customers started to install iOS8 on their devices on the night of launch.  The likes of Playtech and IGT have been working hard behind the scene to make sure their most popular games are now all supported.
3. Scrolling – we found what had been smooth scrolling of pages to suddenly become jumpy and erratic.
4. Selection of drop-downs – sometimes customer selections on drop-downs weren’t being picked up and this was also impacting key areas such as registration and responsible gambling and had to be resolved before any customer had the new iOS.

From the time we got to test the GM Seed version to the point Apple released iOS8 to customers we worked on the issues and released a number of fixes to give our customers a seamless experience, without diverting development resource to support the Apple release and also late night releases by software suppliers we would not have been able to give our customers this seamless experience.

But none the less we still informed customers through various media types (social media and push messaging for example) that it might be a good idea for customers to delay upgrading to iOS8.  The likes of Dropbox also sent push messages to their customers on the day of Apple’s release.

Another issue is the backlog in the Apple App Store.  Normally we see a very quick turnaround in apps being reviewed and accepted after submission but over the time of an iOS update we see the lead times pushing out. This too will impact casino operators with fully native applications and they may not have had time to fix the issues after testing on GM Seed, resubmitting and getting the App approved in time.  Luckily, with our model we have a wrapped app, so we can release our changes and not have to rely on Apple approving a new version of the App.

Overall, it was a rush to the line to get fixes in place that meant the main issues had been resolved. Following the public release we have made three or four further releases to tidy up other minor issues. We look forward to Apple releasing iOS8.0.1 to hopefully fix issues around Wi-Fi connectivity, battery life drainage and the Safari functionality and performance issues.