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Has your launcher pro expired? Read this lifehacker article.

While this affected some people very minimally or not at all, I don't think it is very insightful to downplay this issue, make excuses, or blame the end users for using the software "wrongly." (That's a Steve Jobs move... I couldn't resist.)

I stopped service on my Droid several months ago after losing my job and now use it only as a PDA. The down side to this is that I only have internet on my Droid when at home over my WiFi. I was hit with this program flaw when I was far away from my home and was unable to access my calendar, contacts, or anything else of use on my Droid. I couldn't even change my WiFi settings to select one of the numerous free hotspots that are around. Now while this was a bit of an inconvenience for me, I made due. I would have been very pissed if my Droid was my only phone however, and I was unable to make/receive calls because of this.

I was only able to fix my phone after returning home and downloading an updated version of launcher. Now I don't remember the EULA word for word but I'm pretty sure there was nothing in it that said "if you don't buy my software within a set period of time, I will make your phone completely unusable." This program flaw essentially made the ENTIRE pone unusable. This is not a minor issue, something to be glossed over, or an "accident." This is not an acceptable method of program design. While the dev may be a good guy and all, if you are going to release code you need to do it responsibly, especially if you are expecting people to trust you and give you money if they like your product, which was the entire point of this version of this software.

I think I was less upset prior to reading the comments minimizing this issue than before. Just because it wasn't a big problem for you doesn't mean it wasn't a big problem for others. I like LP a lot, and I may even continue to use it, but I'm going to look elsewhere first and see if one of the other launchers can meet my needs/wants. It just isn't worth it to lose the use of my device in the future.

-M
 
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I think I was less upset prior to reading the comments minimizing this issue than before. Just because it wasn't a big problem for you doesn't mean it wasn't a big problem for others. I like LP a lot, and I may even continue to use it, but I'm going to look elsewhere first and see if one of the other launchers can meet my needs/wants. It just isn't worth it to lose the use of my device in the future.

fully agreed. while talks of lawsuits etc are more of a joke, this was a serious problem for many.

speaking of Launcher Pro, their website seems totally screwed up. can't access the mainpage and the forums seem to have been taken over by spambots: LauncherPro Forum • View forum - General Discussion
 
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As a relative noob still (I've only had my phone a little over a month) I feel compelled to say something in Federico's defense. I don't think anyone ever stops to think how hard these developers work on these programs. On another forum I read where Federico posted (a while back) how he had been working for weeks (without a dime coming in) on the LauncherPro Plus before he released it. As it turns out he created a great program and IMO it is deserving of being a 'paid for program'.

So, how long after someone releases a 'free version' should a developer have to wait for it be allowed to expire? Should it always be free?

With so many users loving LauncherPro, it appears he is a successful developer and perhaps lacks some communication or business skills which he will hopefully and probably improve on in the future.

Just my two cents worth... :p

As a developer myself I can safely say that part of the responsibility of being a program developer is to make sure that if all else fails, your program doesn't turn malicious. By essentially making people's phones completely unusable LP dropped into the malicious category. I realize that malice by definition has an element of intent, and I also realize that the dev most likely didn't intend for this to happen, but he did intentionally program the expiration into his program, and he did intentionally tell the program what to do when it expired. Bad choices were made here.

-M
 
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As a developer myself I can safely say that part of the responsibility of being a program developer is to make sure that if all else fails, your program doesn't turn malicious. By essentially making people's phones completely unusable LP dropped into the malicious category. I realize that malice by definition has an element of intent, and I also realize that the dev most likely didn't intend for this to happen, but he did intentionally program the expiration into his program, and he did intentionally tell the program what to do when it expired. Bad choices were made here.

-M

I would add on that once you know about the issue, it becomes intentional when you decide to not fix the issue itself for months. I do not believe having a warning notification suffice for a fix.
 
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I was only able to fix my phone after returning home and downloading an updated version of launcher. Now I don't remember the EULA word for word but I'm pretty sure there was nothing in it that said "if you don't buy my software within a set period of time, I will make your phone completely unusable." This program flaw essentially made the ENTIRE pone unusable. This is not a minor issue, something to be glossed over, or an "accident." This is not an acceptable method of program design. While the dev may be a good guy and all, if you are going to release code you need to do it responsibly, especially if you are expecting people to trust you and give you money if they like your product, which was the entire point of this version of this software.


-M

That misunderstanding was probably why folks didn't update. Either they didn't read the warning properly (update to get newer version) or assumed that it was asking them to pay and they didn't want to pony up the money...Either way, the user didn't read the warning properly and was part of the problem.

If I understand correctly, the warning was to let you know that you should *update* the software not "purchase". So not updating the software in a timely fashion after being duly warned is at least 50% the user's responsibility.

I don't see anyone on this board say, "Darn, I was warned 2 months ahead of time...mea culpa that I didn't update in the 60 days I was warned and could have saved myself this hassle."

While I feel your pain, the software user has to own up to their part in this problem. It is not 100% the dev's fault. He obviously made a mistake and is now taking a hit on that, but that doesn't absolve the owner who doesn't read and understand warnings or instructions properly.
 
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While this affected some people very minimally or not at all, I don't think it is very insightful to downplay this issue, make excuses, or blame the end users for using the software "wrongly." (That's a Steve Jobs move... I couldn't resist.)

I agree, it was a huge problem and the dev went too far. Having this happen to one good user makes it a huge problem - personally I judge problems by impact, not scale of occurence.

Did the dev test that nifty little lock-down feature? I'll betcha he did. Why didn't he foresee the consequences? Because on a dev testbed it's easier to test for success rather than non-failure and those are different animals - usually not clear to most developers in any field until something like this bites them. Most devs glaze at testing as a small thing rather than a full discipline - here's the result.

He shoulda put a separate warning screen on install just for this. He shoulda made some other warnings. He shoulda had a working recovery system. He shoulda left the early copy just running. You shoulda read the warning. You shoulda updated. You shoulda bought it.

Shoulda, shoulda, shoulda. The word itself just leads to blame instead of understanding and solutions.

I simply disagree that it need rise to the level of lawsuit, and question that it wasn't a combination of circumstance rather than dev malevolence.

I've read of many people who put the launcher on their friend's phone and sent them on their merry way.

I know both types - the helpful and the needful. And those friends together have no responsibility to share in this?

The situation is unfortunate, for the users that suffered it, for the dev that made a product so great that the users were happy with it until the time bomb went off now taking a hit on their reputation and livelihood.

It still doesn't mean the dev was incompetent or malicious - mistakes were made.

We shoulda had a crystal ball?
 
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As a developer myself I can safely say that part of the responsibility of being a program developer is to make sure that if all else fails, your program doesn't turn malicious. By essentially making people's phones completely unusable LP dropped into the malicious category. I realize that malice by definition has an element of intent, and I also realize that the dev most likely didn't intend for this to happen, but he did intentionally program the expiration into his program, and he did intentionally tell the program what to do when it expired. Bad choices were made here.

-M

I would add on that once you know about the issue, it becomes intentional when you decide to not fix the issue itself for months. I do not believe having a warning notification suffice for a fix.

+1 to both. I know he didn't mean it, but the lack of response that is easily accessed really has made a bad situation much worse.
 
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fully agreed. while talks of lawsuits etc are more of a joke, this was a serious problem for many.

speaking of Launcher Pro, their website seems totally screwed up. can't access the mainpage and the forums seem to have been taken over by spambots: LauncherPro Forum • View forum - General Discussion

I doubt that the dev wants his website to be useless. That has to be work of others.
There has been a huge increase in spam coming from .ru domains, among many others. On another forum we've had to seriously curtail new members' ability to join, nevermind post links. The spambots have been seriously busy!

I know both types - the helpful and the needful. And those friends together have no responsibility to share in this?
No one said they didn't - but the final responsibility for usability rests with the developer. He really screwed the pooch on this one.

I do wonder why his forum is so badly managed right now - I hope he hasn't given up.
 
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Originally Posted by Jazziette
As a relative noob still (I've only had my phone a little over a month) I feel compelled to say something in Federico's defense. I don't think anyone ever stops to think how hard these developers work on these programs. On another forum I read where Federico posted (a while back) how he had been working for weeks (without a dime coming in) on the LauncherPro Plus before he released it. As it turns out he created a great program and IMO it is deserving of being a 'paid for program'.

So, how long after someone releases a 'free version' should a developer have to wait for it be allowed to expire? Should it always be free?

With so many users loving LauncherPro, it appears he is a successful developer and perhaps lacks some communication or business skills which he will hopefully and probably improve on in the future.

Just my two cents worth... :p


As a developer myself I can safely say that part of the responsibility of being a program developer is to make sure that if all else fails, your program doesn't turn malicious. By essentially making people's phones completely unusable LP dropped into the malicious category. I realize that malice by definition has an element of intent, and I also realize that the dev most likely didn't intend for this to happen, but he did intentionally program the expiration into his program, and he did intentionally tell the program what to do when it expired. Bad choices were made here.

-M

Hmmmm....your response gives me food for thought. On a daily basis I am asked which launcher is best or if I could recommend one. I have continued to support LP and now I'm concerned that I haven't been doing the right thing. Just yesterday another poster asked me why LP (the free version) was causing them probs with their phone and I recommended they buy the pro version. Your post causes me to rethink what I am doing. Users are still having problems. I helped another download the free program from the internet yesterday because they could not access the market through their phone, due to the old program. In doing this I saw where this one site was reporting that LP (free version) had over 250,000 downloads. When you do the math @say $1.99 for pro, that's $500,000 if all those users upgraded.

he did intentionally program the expiration into his program, and he did intentionally tell the program what to do when it expired. Bad choices were made here.

Greed can make people do a lot of things. This makes me now question the basic character of this developer and if I want to continue to support him when he apparently DID deliberately program the free version to do malicious things to people's phones when it expired. I was giving him the benefit of the doubt but I can no longer do that.

Thank you for taking the time to point out his apparently obvious intentions because now I can see that what he did really was pre-meditated and really was malicious.

I'm not going to recommend LP to anyone from now on. For me personally, having a low end phone like the Huawei Ascend, LP+ makes a very big difference on my phone. It has made it much more fun and enjoyable. But I am going to go with GO Launcher now and I won't be recommending LP to anyone from now on.

If I were Federico I couldn't get myself to each of these forums to apologize fast enough. If I were Federico I would have never handled things the way he did.

Basically....after all is said and done. There is no defense. It is unforgivable!

I'm done with LP now.

Thanks again, ZeroAlligator!!!
 
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@Alligator

Can you for sure 100% say that he intentionally coded it to "brick" phones? I mean as a budding programmer myself, there are sometimes commands/methods that I think do one thing, and then end up doing something else because I made an honest mistake of not fully researching what it does but just implementing thinking, "well, I know this method should probably do this, but I don't have time to test it properly or I assume it's documented/named properly". What if that is the case here? A bunch of you are all bad-mouthing Fede saying he intentionally did this and that but how do we truly know if he intended it to "brick" the phone vs. just disable the app but made a mistake like I've made before when programming?

Unless someone breaks it down for me in code and shows me, he called this API and it's very clearly defined on what it does, the jury is still out for me. I think LP is great, I've tried others including ADW and GoLauncher but they just haven't appealed to me the way that LP has in terms of functionality (gotta love the Plus widgets) and performance. Granted, I was unaffected by the problem and that's because I'm an update-a-holic in that I obsessively check for app updates but I can understand some people's rage in having their phone appear "bricked" but I'm still undecided if he did it with malicious intent as you say he did.
 
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@Alligator

Can you for sure 100% say that he intentionally coded it to "brick" phones?

I realize you were addressing Alligator, however; NO ONE could say for 100% that he did or did not intentionally code it to "brick" phones. The fact is it did!

I am reminded of the old saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
 
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I realize you were addressing Alligator, however; NO ONE could say for 100% that he did or did not intentionally code it to "brick" phones. The fact is it did!

I am reminded of the old saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
I have yet to see it Brick anybody's phone. It may have temporarily rendered the phone unusable until it was either updated to the new version of launcher pro, or until launcher pro was removed and the phone reverted to its stock UI. But one thing it did not do is brick anybody's device. Your phone is only considered Bricked when it is forever dead an permanently unusable.

I myself had one friend come to me because of the problem, and inside of one minute I had his phone back to his stock UI.

There have been plenty of solutions to the problem posted in this thread, but they seem to have been overshadowed by a lot of ranting and raging.
 
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^And that's why we're trying to separate into discussion (here) vs how to fix it over in this other thread

And in event this helps those speculating about the dev's point of view on this, from the article in the first post:

As for the expiration problem, that's partly an oversight on my part. See, the expiration comes from the beta days of LauncherPro, where I had that in place to keep people from using stalled/unsupported versions of LP. The intention was never to "take over" the phone, when LauncherPro starts, it checks for expiration, and if it's past the expiration it will close itself and send the user to my website to download the latest version.


That's where my mistake was, because I didn't realize that if the user has LauncherPro set as the default launcher, after closing itself, it will try to open again, creating a "loop" of closing and opening again.


I should note that the expiration was already removed in the latest version available (0.8.2), so the problem is only affecting users with older versions of LP. Expiration is gone for good so this will never happen again.
 
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I realize you were addressing Alligator, however; NO ONE could say for 100% that he did or did not intentionally code it to "brick" phones. The fact is it did!

I am reminded of the old saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

It's only fooling you once if he did it intentionally. That's the point I'm trying to make. What if it's an honest dev mistake? It goes without saying that no code is perfect and that no dev is perfect, show me one and I'll show you one that's unemployed ;)

Are you going to forever place him in the "bad hacker" dev list forever? That's the point I'm trying to understand.

Being mad is one thing. Telling everyone that Fede is a malicious dev is another.
 
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It's only fooling you once if he did it intentionally. That's the point I'm trying to make. What if it's an honest dev mistake? It goes without saying that no code is perfect and that no dev is perfect, show me one and I'll show you one that's unemployed ;)

Are you going to forever place him in the "bad hacker" dev list forever? That's the point I'm trying to understand.

Being mad is one thing. Telling everyone that Fede is a malicious dev is another.

I see your point. No, I'm not going to 'forever' place him in any category. It's too easy to jump on the bandwagon and normally I don't do this so I'm just gonna back out of this now.

I do think that LP is a very cool program and I hope that it continues to work well for everyone and there are no probs in the future along the same line.

The last thing I want to do is falsely accuse someone of something they are not guilty of doing.

Who am I to judge?

Nuff said. Thanks for coming back to me. :)
 
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I don't condemn Fede to the bowels of hell for making a mistake (and I do believe this was a mistake, not something done with malice aforethought). I do think he made a second major error in not getting out in front of all of this with a huge public push to make sure everyone who has a 'broken' installation of LP on their phones knows how to fix the problem along with profuse apologies. He's writing a major update, I hate to think people will miss out on a great upgrade because of hard feelings over all this.
 
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@Alligator

Can you for sure 100% say that he intentionally coded it to "brick" phones? I mean as a budding programmer myself, there are sometimes commands/methods that I think do one thing, and then end up doing something else because I made an honest mistake of not fully researching what it does but just implementing thinking, "well, I know this method should probably do this, but I don't have time to test it properly or I assume it's documented/named properly".

No, of course I can't say for 100% certainty what anyone did, and I do understand the thinking behind having a program expire and requiring a user to upgrade. I'm just a little perplexed that the dev never considered that someone would make LP their default launcher... um, isn't that the point of his program? This seems like a fairly simple "bug" to test for prior to releasing code into the wild.

I know the old adage goes, "all software sucks" but not all software needs to. Coding is complex yes, but before you release something and especially before you ask people for money for your works, you should make sure that it will do no harm. Just my two cents.

I forgot to ask you. What product/products did you develop? I want to support honest and ethical developers like you.

I've developed a number of in-house security based products, but nothing that you could support, thanks for the thought though.

Originally Posted by Jazziette
If I were Federico I couldn't get myself to each of these forums to apologize fast enough. If I were Federico I would have never handled things the way he did.

Basically....after all is said and done. There is no defense. It is unforgivable!

I'm done with LP now!

I didn't post here to get people to stop using LP or to hate Fede, I posted here to get people to think a little. Is LP a good product? I used to think so. Will I use it in the future? Probably not. Why did this happen? In my opinion, lack of foresight, inexperience, or something else. We won't ever really know, all I can do is look at what happened, gauge the damage done, and make my own decision on who I want to support in the future. The use of my phone is important to me, how important is it to you?

If nothing else, if you are developing software for something as important as a phone (important? yes, they are useful in emergencies, in order to get job interview call-backs, find out your wife is in labor, etc.) then please do a bit of testing to at least make sure that if all else fails, your software will not make the phone unusable.

-M
 
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I know the old adage goes, "all software sucks" but not all software needs to. Coding is complex yes, but before you release something and especially before you ask people for money for your works, you should make sure that it will do no harm. Just my two cents.

I hear you. I can't say what he's like or what happened.

But I catch our staff pulling these stunts in software all of the time.

They really, really don't get it. So I didn't see it as weaseling.

I really saw it as a case of the shoulds.

To which Dr. Demming, world's most famous process control statistician (and the guy that made the Japanese car industry what it is, single-handedly, no fooling) always said when asked why didn't designers see this or that:

How could they see it?

First time I heard him lecture and say that, I thought he was a charlatan - later, I found there was no clearer expression of a simple truth.

The same guy that cannot see to not release anything less than ready for primetime or even a beta that is survivable in his own mind is the same guy that cannot foresee the consequences of his protective lockout.

How could he?

People - all people - have natural limitations, the largest most often being not being able to see the forest for the trees.

I'll bet that's applied to each and every one of us in some major way.
 
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