Delete Apps that don’t work

General Discussion
1

Crazy that this needs to be pitched, but I believe a better user experience would be for apps that just dont work to be removed from the listings. There’s a bunch of apps that simply don’t work (can’t list them all from the top of my head, please comment which ones yall have encountered as well)

I feel that that would help us feel like there are useable apps and a big plus is that it will declutter the app listings

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2

Agreed. And maybe we could also categorize apps that require paid API keys.

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3

I don’t think that your idea is controversial, but the devil is in the details with something like this. For instance, imagine if you spent time writing an application and then @mark just went in and deleted the code from the repo, or took it down without notice.

Here is some of the work that I would think needs to be done to accomplish your objective (ostensibly “improve the quality of the app store”):

  1. There needs to be a feedback loop in which users can review/report bugs on apps.
  2. Apps with low ratings/scores can be flagged for review by the Tidbyt team; or using GitHub Actions, an action could trigger to create an issue, assigned to that application’s developer to review app feedback, and/or fix relevant bugs.
  3. If no action is taken within X {insert logical but arbitrary limit here} time period from the developer, the app can be delisted from the app store. If no action is taken within Y subsequent time period, the code is removed from the tidbyt community codebase.

That’s how a formalized process may be successful. In lieu of that (not insubstantial) work being done, the community could (should) create GitHub issues and assign them to the related developers . And Matt and others could review whether or not there has been sufficient action/notification for the developer.

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Oh for sure, I get you. However, we as users at the moment, have little to no input about mentioning if things go wrong in the apps apart from what is talked about here in the forum (at least to my knowledge). At least there’s no such process for us common folks who have no idea how to code. Something simple. There are quite a lot of apps that people have mentioned countless of times that they do not work in a form or another. Can they be fixed? Maybe, I sadly don’t code or know much about it. But there are cases where some apps are widly known for not working, I seen posts going back months and months…and nothing has happened. They are still populating the app listings.

If just mentioning a couple of times that this app and that app is broken or dead and nothing happens…I don’t know how much hope there is if bureaucratic steps are added. I might be wrong tho

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5

This is where integration testing would pay dividends. Some kind of CI pipeline that tests the app nightly.

When my 2.0 arrives im going to look into this

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6

I agree - good idea !