Avoiding A Botched App Release: Lessons From the Iowa Caucus

Watching the Iowa Caucus results come in — or fail to —  this Tuesday was a surreal experience. As the minutes ticked by, I realized I was witnessing the implosion of an app at the worst possible moment, in front of the entire world.

According to reporting by the New York Times and Vice, the app’s developer, Shadow, Inc. made several mistakes. It rushed to finish the app at the last minute, failed to test it, and deployed it to users through TestFairy, rather than through standard platforms.

These mistakes are not as rare as you think. Here are four things companies and app-makers can do to prevent similar embarrassments.

• Load testing. Releasing an app without doing this is like arriving at a marathon without knowing how many miles you’re going to run. You’ve never done it before, and you just showed up — recipe for disaster. In app-land, it’s crucial to know ahead of time how many users, how much activity, and what kind of activity a mobile product and the servers which support it can sustain.
• Transparency. When hiring someone to work on your app, make sure it’s a partner who tells it like it is, rather than hiding risks. If I were releasing a critical app and still coding it one week before launch, I would have a difficult conversation with my client about the chances that it might not arrive on time. How do you propose to move forward?
• Prepping alternative plans. When it comes to software, not all missed deadlines are due to incompetence. There are a million things that can happen to derail a project timeline, and companies and their partners should have good back-up plans. Those should be tested, too — unlike the Iowa Democratic party’s phone hotline, by all appearances.
• Vetting technology partners. If you haven’t previously hired software engineers or built a product, get an advisor or someone who has. Go with a company that has a presence and past products to review. Look at their live apps to see how they work, and read the reviews for those apps.