FRC Spyder

[slickvic2252]

Does anyone know if FRC Spyder going to be updated in time for palmetto?

[Mike Soukup]

Originally Posted by slickvic2252

Does anyone know if FRC Spyder going to be updated in time for palmetto?

That's the plan.

[vhcook]

I woke up this morning to an updated FRC Spyder. Thanks, Mike! It looks awesome as usual.

One question: how did The Zebracorns get the nifty chess knights in their team name?

[Mike Soukup]

You're welcome.

I assume the chess knight symbol is a UTF-8 character that they included in their team name. That's pretty cool that it works.

[logank013]

Is there an update for iOS? I looked on the app store and saw no updates. I also tried refreshing it in app and that didn't work either. Thanks

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by logank013

Is there an update for iOS? I looked on the app store and saw no updates. I also tried refreshing it in app and that didn't work either. Thanks

The iOS version has been updated but it is still waiting on review by Apple. Unfortunately, Apple's iOS app review process is a black box. We have no insight into when they might start reviewing it or if/when they'll approve it. Obviously we're hoping it will still happen before matches start on Friday.

We'll keep an eye on it and worst-case if Apple doesn't approve it by then we'll see if we can populate 2016 data into the existing version of the app. This should work though the tiebreaker names shown in the rankings display would be incorrect.

[markmcgary]

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

Unfortunately, Apple's iOS app review process is a black box. We have no insight into when they might start reviewing it or if/when they'll approve it.

This site may provide some insight. We find it to be pretty accurate.

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by markmcgary

This site may provide some insight. We find it to be pretty accurate.

Yes, I use http://appreviewtimes.com/ regularly (it's the same site, different URL). It provides trends and averages, but it doesn't provide any insight into your specific app review time. It's generally accurate (and showing very fast review times right now), but I've had more than one occasion where my review inexplicably took 2x-3x as long as what everyone else was seeing on that site. There's horror stories out there of apps taking months to be reviewed, too. Obviously whatever process Apple uses for reviews, it's not as simple as a FIFO queue.

Also, we've followed Apple's direction to move everything to HTTPS, but that of course causes an additional review step of Export Compliance for Apple to review our encryption export authorization obtained from the government. It's not clear to me if this happens in parallel while waiting for a review or if our app is only moved to the review queue after export compliance has passed (FRC Spyder has already passed Export Compliance and is Waiting for Review), so I'm not sure if that added an extra delay for us or not.

Side note in case anyone is wondering why we'd care about HTTPS in FRC Spyder when all the data is publicly available anyway: among other things, we've seen some bad cases in the past few years where crummy WiFi portals at hotels, restaurants, etc. (unfortunately common in this case since a lot of FRC participants are obviously traveling) answer requests that were intended for our API with an HTML login page. That could end up causing our event data in the app to be screwed up as the app wasn't expecting an HTML response. HTTPS protects against that as it is not possible for these intermediaries to interject anything in our API calls since its encrypted.

[Mike Soukup]

I should create an Android Review Times page that's static text always displaying 0 days.

[scaryone]

Nice, Love Spyder.

Thanks Mike.

[AquaMorph]

Originally Posted by Mike Soukup

I should create an Android Review Times page that's static text always displaying 0 days.

It does take several hours though.

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by AquaMorph

It does take several hours though.

Anyone who does iOS work would be ecstatic if we could release app updates in a matter of hours Nothing worse than releasing an app that has a bug or something and there's literally nothing you can do about for days while Apple reviews it (even if it's just a one line change) and in the meantime your app gets flooded with negative reviews.