Its Groundhog Day - time for another repeat of “any day now” on app availability. Come on- when will you supply the app which was promised waaaay back when…
@aarthur Thank you for the feedback! I’ll bring it up to the team, they’ll be glad to hear this input.
As a general piece of feedback… you guys really need to learn to set expectations.
As it stands Anova announced that the App would be released in early January.
Then on 15/16 Jan (Thurs/Fri) you said the app would be submitted “this week”.
Now on 3 Feb we learn that it wasn’t submitted until the following week (20 Jan)
It’s no big deal to have delays with a new product like this. But the communication above is problematic for a couple of reasons:
- It shows a pattern of over promising and under delivering - an amateur PR misteake. Each time you make a commitment that turns out to be untrue, you lose a little bit of credibility in the consumer’s eyes
2)You only make announcements after a few people shout for more information. It makes it sound like the consumer needs to chase you for an update.
It MUST have been apparent that the mid-Jan milestone was not realistic well before we hit 16 Jan. If you had sent out a message on say the 10th of Jan saying “Sorry guys it looks like we won’t be able to submit the app before the end of Jan” you would have been on the front foot. You would have provided an accurate update before people got frustrated and demanded it and people wouldn’t be left wondering or feeling like they had to chase you for information. You would have retained some trust and credibility, and retained the chance of delivering more than you promised (if the app was released earlier than promised). That would have been a much better story from a PR standpoint.
tl;dr - More conservative announcements, more often.
Its Groundhog Day - time for another repeat of "any day now" on app availability. Come on- when will you supply the app which was promised waaaay back when......
@FrankP999 We hear you, we want to get the app out and can’t wait for word on approval! We’ll let you know the moment we’ve received confirmation and until then, we’ll be counting the days along with you and working in every way possible to get it through the process more quickly.
@JordanHouston another thing I find slightly annoying about the app is that most of the recipes are called "sous vide" whatever. I think everyone gets that the recipe is using sous vide.
No doubt their SEO consultant had them do this. And, wow! It worked really well! #1 for “sous vide recipes”.
@celltech On the other hand, the venn diagram of sous vide circulator owners and iphone owners probably overlaps more than that for android users. :)I respectfully disagree, the customisability of Android software seems to attract far more self-professed ‘geeks’ than Apple’s walled-garden ‘locked-in’ approach, which is great for people who just want to use something, not play with it.
I think that there’s a good argument there, and that it certainly applies to the people using SV last year or the year before, who hacked their machine together with a beer cooler and a thermometer. But look at the primary Anova video (with the attractive asian woman in nice kitchen talking about how you can “set it and walk away”). I guarantee Kara is an iphone owner.
@simulacrum Thanks so much for your input, you raise an excellent point with which we agree. We definitely had some unavoidable setbacks which affected our planned timeline and we apologize for the miscommunication.
App is in the store.
The App is now available in the iTunes Store. It looks good, but I have not tried pairing it with my device. It does contain a lot of recipes, though with pictures and directions. Congratulations, Anova! I’m sure it will have been worth the wait.
How much QA has been done on the app? The very first recipe I just looked at for Asian Chicken Wings, the recipe temp (160F), doesn’t match with the direction temp (140F). Also there are multiple entries for the same recipe
I find the app to be quite limited in terms of functionality, and I have some suggestions.
First, include the functionality that is in the 3rd party Android app “Anova Remote.” This allows the user to send multi step instructions to the device (i.e. 45 degrees for three hours, then 55 degrees for 40 hours).
Second, include the temperature record data that is in the Anova Remote app. This allows the user to view a graph of the temperature over time.
Third, allow the user to set a new temperature and time without having to stop the device. Currently, if the device is running, and you select a new temperature or time on the iPhone, the only way to send the new temp/time to the device is to press the pause button on the app, which stops the unit from running, and then press play again, which restarts it.
I contacted the developer of Anova Remote to see if/when he would make an iPhone version, which I would happily purchase given the limitations of the Anova company app, but he said it would be several months away.
Anova should concentrate on releasing SDKs for other developers, who can then focus on the UX and features.
@brosen72 Thanks for your feedback! I’ve shared this with the team - we’re carefully reading through all of the input we’re receiving and making note of it as we continue to develop and improve the app. Please let me know if you have any other thoughts on the app - thanks!