iOS Update looks great.

Marty

Really like the iOS update. The Liquid Glass and just the overall robustness. It's really nice to have calendar to look for recordings. Thanks for the great update.

Marty

Ben

Hi Marty - great to hear that! Thanks for reporting back.

jamesconnolly

Hi Ben,

Spotted a potentail minor bug in new iOS app. I emailed the support email.

On my iPhone, if I'm out and view my cameras it works, however if I return home and use my local wifi network, after about 2 minutes it errors for access denied. If I kill the app and restart it, it works again and the error does't come back. See email.

Regards James

Ben

@jamesconnolly - this is an unusual one - we'll test here to see if we can reproduce, and will then reply to your support ticket.

BlakeNZ

I can no longer use the app as it doesn't support the version 4 and reports I need to update the server, thats fine but notification of this change would have been nice.

Nothing is mentioned in the version history on the app store and I can't find anything on the main site about it.

Ben

Hi @BlakeNZ - Sorry about this, but SecuritySpy v4 was discontinued 5 years ago. We've maintained support in the iOS app for all this time, but it's getting impractical to continue to do so unfortunately - in order to support some new server features, the minimum server requirement is now 5.5.11.

In terms of notification, there is no mechanism by which we can push messages to users via SecuritySpy itself (this was added in v5), and the majority of the email addresses we have for v4 customers are defunct, being between 5 and 9 years old now. A mass-mailing attempt would have mostly failed and may have damaged our email server reputation, as it would probably have been unwelcome to the handful that did get through. The minimum requirement is stated in the App Store description, though I understand that this is easy to miss.

In addition, Apple does not make it possible to obtain earlier app versions from the App Store - if it were possible then we would make it happen, but there is no way around this.

So I hope you can understand our decision here.

Jerry

An easy solution would have been to create multiple versions of the ios app. Create and name the app "SecuritySpy v5", then v6, v7, etc. to match the generation it works with. That way those of us with auto-update turned on wouldn't have been blindsided with having a working app be effectively rendered useless. It prevents Apple from overwriting old versions and it would take zero effort on your part. Even if it gets removed from the app store for lack of updates, those with it downloaded would still get to keep it.

Better to keep what we have with no support or updates, than have it taken away.

Ben

Hi @Jerry I understand your frustration here, but that's not a great solution. This would be far from zero effort, would be ugly, and would involve leaving a trail of discontinued software on the App Store, likely causing user confusion and attracting negative reviews. It's not clear whether Apple would even allow this according to their guidelines.

Anyone stuck in this unfortunate situation please email us and we will provide an extra discount for an upgrade to the latest v6 SecuritySpy version.

BlakeNZ

I completely understand that support has to cease at some point but if version 1.8.4 is able to tell which version of software I am running then why could 1.8.3 not do the same but with a warning that support was about to end?

Ben

Hi @BlakeNZ I agree that a notification in the old version would have been useful, however it was not known at the time of 1.8.3, which was quite a long time ago, that we would need to remove v4 support in the subsequent update. This only became apparent while working on 1.8.4, which turned into quite a major update. Again, apologies for the inconvenience, I understand that a pre-warning to users in this situation would have been helpful. We'll make sure to do this in the future if/when we need to remove v5 support (but that won't be necessary for a few years).