Hi all...
I wanted to give an update on the problems that our app users have been facing for the past few weeks, what has happened, and what we're doing moving forward to improve the apps for everyone.
Apologies that this is long, but I wanted to be transparent and give as much detail as possible due to the number of problems that we've been facing.
What has been happening
When we launched the new website just over a year ago that necessitated everyone who uses the mobile apps to login again.
When a user logs into the apps, we generate a token that the app uses to know that the user is logged in. Without this token, features in the app that need you to be logged in (Threads I'm On, posting threads and replies, etc) ask you to log in.
The token that is provided has an expiration date, and when the expiration date is passed, the token is removed. The app detects that the token is no longer valid and automatically asks for a new token.
Unfortunately, there was a bug in the app's code which meant that it didn't do this, and tokens were passing their expiration date, causing them to be removed.
This was compounded by a further problem with the app's code which meant that when the token became invalid, the app still showed that you are logged in, but attempting to post a thread or reply would fail.
Logging out of the app and logging back in again would correctly get a new token, and the app would then work normally.
This is why we've been asking our users to log out and log back in again over the past few weeks.
What we did
When we diagnosed the underlying problem, we made a change that would extend the lifetime of the tokens indefinitely. This meant that any tokens that were currently valid would not expire and the problem we were seeing would be isolated to as few users as possible and the problem would stop as users who were affected logged out and back in again.
Unfortunately, this introduced an unintended problem that meant that all tokens were removed yesterday. We didn't notice this initially as the effect was the same as the expiration issue, and we incorrectly assumed that it was the same problem.
It wasn't until 4pm yesterday that we discovered the deletion had taken place. We subsequently restored all of the tokens from our backups and fixed the bug that caused the removal.
This restored the normal functionality for the vast majority of users.
We understand how frustrating it is to be asked to log out and back into the app. However, we're confident that if you are having problems with the app doing this once will fix the problem.
What we're doing moving forward
We've been running a survey for the past few weeks about our mobile apps and have had hundreds of responses from our users.
We know that there are multiple problems that need to be addressed, and features that exist on the website that aren't available in the apps, but our current app infrastructure makes this difficult to achieve.
Behind the scenes, we're actively working on improving the app experience to address all of these problems, and to provide a more stable, robust app that has parity with the features available on the site.
You will start to see this work come to fruition over the coming months.
Once again, we're truly sorry for the problems that have occurred over the past few weeks for our app users. We're confident that we've fixed the underlying issues now, and that logging out and logging in again will resolve any lingering issues for the small number of users experiencing them.
Thanks
Matt