

Color, the new amazing mobile app that crashes your phone within minutes - arnorhs
http://arnorhs.com/2011/03/24/color-the-new-amazing-mobile-app-that-crashes-your-phone-within-minutes/

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spolsky
Boy, there are a million reasons to hate on Color, but the fact that their 1.0
app crashes is the least convincing and the most mean-spirited. Everybody's
1.0 app crashes.

~~~
credo
_> >Everybody's 1.0 app crashes._

No, that is wrong.

My 1.0 apps don't crash (as per itunesconnect which says "No Crash Reports"
for my last 3 iPhone/iPad apps which are all on their 1.0 version).

One of them was recently ranked #1 on Apple's top charts for its category. So
this isn't a matter of trivial apps with a low user base.

~~~
gcb
Everybody's who is in it for a big exit pile of money 1.0 app crashs

~~~
gcb
*big pile of exit money

i blame phone on-screen keyboards. Give me back my clickety keys!

------
Goronmon
Am I the only one who is annoyed at apps that require GPS to be enabled? I can
deal with it for things like Navigation where I can plug my phone into my car
to keep the battery up. But for general use, it just sucks up way too much
battery and is easy to forget to turn off.

The result is that I just avoid apps that require it.

~~~
Zev
Location-based apps requiring GPS to work is a surprise to you?

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bradgessler
This seems like a classic, "OMG TC IS SCOOPING US!" reaction. They rushed to
get something out ended up throwing some real crap over the wall. This is
going to hurt them a little bit, but $40mm will help that pain go away.

Color would have been much better served by a "Give us your email address"
page like <http://lifepath.me/> to drum up excitement.

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dangero
Jokes aside, I bounced the concept for colors.com off of some people and they
didn't like the idea of automatically sharing pictures they take with people
who are nearby. While there is something interesting to this concept, I think
it could go either way. It could be a lot like Google Wave. It is certainly
innovative, but I'm not convinced it will catch on. Maybe it will...

Thoughts anyone?

~~~
moe
I'm sure it will catch on, it's a just a pretty obvious thing to do. But I
wonder how color plans to maintain market dominance?

I can't see enough of a first-mover advantage here to justify such a big bet.
- But perhaps they have something awesome up their sleeve that we don't know
about yet?

~~~
dangero
It's funny you say it's obvious. The whole elastic network concept wasn't
obvious to me at all until they explained it. It's somewhat engenius in my
opinion, but maybe I'm slow and this idea is obvious. Like I said though, I
think the concept has some mainstream acceptance problems and I'm not sure it
will work.

~~~
moe
Well, I should clarify that I think the concept of grouping photos (videos,
chats, etc.) by GPS is obvious. It's been done before and so far this is not
much more than a logical progression (making it easier and more fun).

I don't even know what "elastic network" is supposed to mean, but yes, they
better have a lot of that, for $41M...

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alex_c
Nitpick: there's a big difference between an app crashing (which is what this
sounds like) and an app crashing your phone (rendering it unusable or forcing
a reboot).

~~~
ootachi
The app actually _is_ crashing phones. It turns out that it's quite possible
for apps to crash most Android phones, either by making the phone so
unresponsive that a watchdog kicks in, or by using so much RAM that the OOM
killer goes to town.

~~~
jbrennan
If it's possible for an application to bring down the system that sounds like
the system was poorly designed.

~~~
burrows
And... you've essentially discredited windows, linux, and os x.

~~~
deadcyclo
Really? Not once have I had an application take down GNU/Linux. Sure an
application takes down X once in a blue moon, but never the whole Os. And I've
been using it for about 15 years now. The few full scale crashes I've
experienced were due to hardware errors.

Only once have I experienced a full crash on android. The phone simply
rebooted. No idea why.

I have never used OSX or windows after XP, so I can't say anything about them.

~~~
burrows
I'm not sure if this is meant to be a serious comment, but not only is it
misleading, it's also naive. As you try to lead the conversation into talking
about an actual kernel halt or panic as opposed to what the OP actually said.

This was the original claim that you responded to. "by making the phone so
unresponsive that a watchdog kicks in, or by using so much RAM that the OOM
killer goes to town."

Crashes obviously happen on linux systems all the time. That's why this exists
<http://linux.die.net/man/8/watchdog> and why we have reports like this
[http://www.unix.com/aix/106921-process-crashing-aix-due-
memo...](http://www.unix.com/aix/106921-process-crashing-aix-due-memory-
leak.html) and this <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6059> etc. Are you
claiming that such a situation can't arise on linux.

The same is obviously true on Windows and OSX.

Pivoting the conversation isn't the best way to make your point.

edit - Not to mention you attempt to use anecdotal evidence to support a
general claim. Such has no place here.

~~~
deadcyclo
First of all: Sorry for the late reply. I somehow didn't notice your post
before now.

I was actually replying to jbrennan who said "If it's possible for an
application to bring down the system that sounds like the system was poorly
designed." and burrows who said "And... you've essentially discredited
windows, linux, and os x.". I didn't notice what ootachi said until you
pointed it out. I consider "bring down the system" to main exactly that,
kernel halt or panic.

The links you provided where about processes crashing and/or processes with
memory leaks, which I could in no way consider to be "bringing down the
system" (unless it's a very poor system where such things actually do bring
down the whole system), and it would be completely insane of me to claim that
processes cannot crash on _nix.

My point was simply that kernel panics or anything that "brings down the
system" very rarely occur, and normally occur due to hardware errors on _nix
systems, and as far as I know on newer Windows systems as well (again, never
used OSX so I have nothing to go on there).

Simply put: When jbrennan said "bring down the system" that, to me at least,
means anything that the _only_ recovery from is a reboot of the system, no
more, no less, and that is what I was responding to.

------
dmauro
Sequoia did not give them 41 million.

~~~
raganwald
Was it "only" M$25, with other investors having put up the remaining M$16?

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PatrickTulskie
I tried it out and while it worked fine and didn't crash, I struggled to find
the purpose in my day to day life. It might be great at a concert or
something. Also, I'd like to just share with a subset of users - not share
with everyone.

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aresant
"They have so much faith in this product, that they’ve pumped 41 million
dollars into the company . . ."

I think the right assumption is that "they have so much faith in the team."

Chief Scientist @ LinkedIn, Founder of Lala, Founder of BillShrink, etc

------
shasta
Working link to the hilarious slideshow, anyone?

~~~
pixelbath
[https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ajdtctfhv4hn_264g329...](https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ajdtctfhv4hn_264g329gwcc&pli=1)

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st3fan
Why so negative?

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fabiandesimone
This might get down-voted to oblivion, but here it goes:

OP, cool it down with the link bait headlines. It seems like fashionable to
bad mouth Color right now with their monster financing, etc, but if you have
ever built anything (and it looks like you have) you know damn well how hard
it is.

And V 1.0, 40 million or not, always stinks and If it doesn't you shipped to
late.

So, let's give this guys some time so we can understand why Sequoia gave so
much money to Color.

~~~
geoka9
_And V 1.0, 40 million or not, always stinks and If it doesn't you shipped to
late._

Whatever happened to beta releases?

~~~
jgh
I don't believe Apple will allow you to release a beta product on the app
store.

