Roku Developer Program

[cpawinsal]

Hi Roku_People. 🙂

I know the contest has rules that channels cannot be updated during the 30 days the contest runs. However, in looking at the forums as well as hearing from users myself, I believe that some users are getting turned off. If not turned off, they may be disillusioned. Meanwhile, myself and I'm sure a few other developers have found errors that should be fixed. I have made all the fixes in my code and am ready to package and submit. But, it won't let me package and submit due to the contest. Would Roku consider modifying the contest rules a bit? The trade off between upsetting people in the contest versus upsetting users seems obvious to me. I totally understand if Roku feels otherwise about this. But, from my perspective, it's pretty disheartening to know that a simple change is going to make some of my user's lives much better, I've got that change done but I can't do anything about it - I just have to leave them to suffer and draw unfortunate conclusions for the next three and a half weeks.

Cheers,
Al

[TheEndless]

I think it's probably a slippery slope. On the one hand, I agree that it'd be very nice to be able to publish bug fixes (especially for crippling bugs), but on the other hand you may have some developers who take the opportunity to add new features, or complete features they couldn't finish in time for the deadline. Without reviewing every change that's submitted, I think it'd be hard for Roku to enable updates fairly across the board.

[EngoTom]

Yea, it would be difficult to define what is a new feature vs. bug fix in many cases. Unfortunatly the user looses in the end. That be said ROKU looses in the end as they are the customers customer.

I too have a couple of minor tweaks I need to make client side. For instance the URL with timeout helper function I have found is too narrow for many users internet connection and I see multiple quieries in my server logs where one is sufficient. Fixed this one with a server side cache but it's not ideal.

[kbenson]

Someone (I think TheEndless?) mentioned in a post that private updates were still available. Having a thread in the general queue (announcement thread) that also has private codes listed for betas of the next version is probably a nice halfway point. At least the people that care enough for the app to check the forums will get to see updates being made and try out the changes.

It doesn't help much with people not in the forums, but that's the trade off. Roku might be willing to remove an entry from the contest if asked, and at that point I would think updates should work. I wouldn't make that choice, but I don't pretend to know all the facts and motivations behind the other developers.

[TheEndless]

"kbenson" wrote:
Someone (I think TheEndless?) mentioned in a post that private updates were still available.

When you upload a package, prior to submission, you are issued a temporary channel URL that can be distributed for beta testing purposes. I don't know if they've disabled that for contest channels or not.

[RokuKevin]

"Unpublished" or beta versions of your channel contest channels can still be updated.

--Kevin