About a week ago I released a brand spanking new version of Gratitude Journal. This one is fully loaded with all sorts of new features. It took me well over 9 months to create. I designed and redesigned. I tested it for hours, over and over again. Trying to think of every use case scenario. I shared it with friends and had them test it. I was sure it was ready for the world. Positive.

Then the emails started to come in saying “I upgraded and lost all my journal entries!” and “I used this religiously for 3 years and now almost everything is gone.”

My heart sank. I was devastated. I was sure the upgrade process moved all the old entries over. I tested it over and over. More emails poured in about performance. Again, it was snappy on my device. Why? None of my testers mentioned this. In addition to the emails were the reviews on iTunes. I choke up just thinking about them. It’s as if my intention of creating happiness had completely backfired.

After a week of sleepless nights and not seeing any rhyme or reason to this, my developer friend, Jiva, showed me there was hope. Using some snazzy tools and with the help of a few amazing users willing to share their data, we discovered that the entries weren’t lost after all. I cried tears of joy and let out a huge sigh of relief.

But then the performance. With hundreds of entries the app is almost unusable. It takes ages for a screen to open. I didn’t know this before because I delete my entries every now and again as a way of letting go. I have a fraction of the data of some.

So where does that leave us today? A fix should be submitted to Apple by the end of the week – I hope. The performance issues may take some doing. I’m not sure. But I do promise to get this fixed. I also resubmitted the old version to Apple for those of you who like the retro version.

I’m fully to blame for not testing the app with hundreds of records. I didn’t realized people used it so much, but am insanely grateful they do. I also hired the wrong developers who did a poor job and now I’m paying for it (more on that later).

I guess I was trying to please too many people in this release, listening to every request trying to make a super gratitude journal. If you use my app, you’ll know that it gives you a quote with each entry. The funny thing is that I got this quote in the middle of last week’s sleep-deprived-trouble-shooting-email-apologizing-is-it-all-worth-it-pondering fiasco:

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” – Bill Crosby