Hi everyone,
We’ve decided to explain everything that happened in the last week about the iCloud Sync critical bug which went live with 3.1, hot fixed in 3.1.1 and cleaned up in 3.2
In Bamboo, we wanted to add iCloud Sync. For multiple reasons:
– xml export/import is a nice way to keep your data safe but it implies an update each time we update the data base. For exemple, Hand History gets a bunch of new fields in the data base and if we want to have them handled by the xml system, we had to write some code.
– xml export/import is not the way to sync data between multiple devices
– xml files can be lost
– xml export was not automated
For all of that, and because technically, Apple mades a great step forward between the first release of iCloud and iOS 7’s version of iCloud, we’ve said: ok let’s add this feature.
Everything went well from the release of bamboo until end of June. iCloud Sync was able to maintain your data in a safe place, let’s you have your data up to date on a new device or multiple devices at the same time. It was giving us the possibility to not update XML export/import to handle our data base updates.
Then 3.1 brought a data base update and did create a situation we didn’t seen before. iCloud Sync had a specific way to handle data base update and by a combination of two different bugs, the terrible “popup” started to appear. Telling you a iCloud back-up was found and asking you if you want to use it or not although you had your data up to date and didn’t need to see that popup.
If you answered “yes use it”, the popup keeps spamming you, and if you answered “no”, the app started to move your data in local and delete your iCloud data. Because this popup wasn’t planned to be displayed in this situation, any of the answer weren’t good for your data.
We discovered the bug a couple of hours after the 3.1 went live, due to a bug report. After another couple of hours, this “isolated bug”, as we thought in the beginning, was reproduced by another user. And finally we discovered it could be a general one.
We removed the app from the store 24 hours after the 3.1 release and submitted a 3.1.1 at the same time, asking Apple an “expedite review” for the first time. Normally, a review is 5 business day. An expedite review took 24h. So 48 hours after 3.1, a 3.1.1 went live avoiding any data deletion.
Then we worked a week to understand better what was wrong and discovered the bug combination: data base update and popup display at the wrong time. We corrected that situation in 3.2
Now iCloud Sync is working well and were able to retrieve the data to all (except two) the lost data from the users which contacted us.
This situation helped us to better understand the value of Poker Analytics data for our users and let us thought about what we can do to avoid any data deletion (and not just from our bugs).
So we will bring in the next release an automatic xml export of your data after ending a new session. This backup will be done in the background and will be another good protection for your data. This feature should be live with 3.2.1 version.
Poker Analytics’ Team