Usability expert's feedback concerning EteSync iOS & macOS in June 2020 compared to Mid 2019

[porg]

When I tested it in mid 2019 on the Mac, that was really early alpha. Really only for die hards. The main developers did not even know the supported platforms. Maybe a handful of interested folks tested it and gave feedback I'd say.

Then read that iOS shall be tackled. A grant came in. Great! Looking forward.

Now June 2020: One see's the progress! Kudos! Initial setup on iOS and macOS is not completely for the experimental/hackers type personalities. But at least suited for the tech-savvy. Although still with hickups (see #139). Still did not get it up on the first run. But hey, now only ca 2h until creating and sying my first cal-events, compared to 10-15h back in 2019, already failing with far more rudimentary things beforehand.

But honestly: Still far away from really having a similar convenience and robustness level as the main centralized cloud calendar systems of Apple, Google & Co.

To name just a few:

• iOS requires manual push after each event creation. Big convenience bummer. Even experts surely will forget about that occasionally and then wonder: Where is that event?
• #135
• #137
• #138

Apart from that, also for the community building there are some quick wins:

• #136
• https://github.com/etesync/ios/issues/31

[porg]

With joy and hope I read this: 2020-09-10 https://blog.etesync.com/etesync-2-0-ready-for-testers/

Could you state which of these issues are addressed in Etesync 2.0 ?

• I already gave Etesync two tries with the stock contact/calendar apps on macOS and iOS, but both times failed and gave up eventually. But instead of just giving up I filed issues to make clear where specifically I failed. And I hope that at least some of these reports/proposals made it into v2.0
• Hope that my third attempt will be the momentum where EteSync get's ready for normal day to day usage.

[tasn]

Thanks a lot for all the feedback. I'm sorry for not replying before, it's not that we've been ignoring it, we were just head-down working on EteSync 2.0. We made quite a few improvements to the iOS client in 2.0, though still haven't fixed the manual push. It's an Apple limitation unfortunately. We will potentially create a "siri shortcut" so it can be launched faster, and we have some ideas on how to maybe improve it.

The DAV bridge has also improved quite a bit, and we will address your points one-by-one in the near future, I hope.

Thanks for taking the time for reporting all of this. Even though we haven't been replying, we have been reading everything posted here on Github and taking into consideration, so thanks again!

[porg]

Hi @tasn, thanks for the info!

• Could you offer me the following?
  • You give me and my partner user initially an unlimited free account. I test it with every new iteration. As soon as it hopefully finally works trouble free in daily use for me and the partner, I will proactively request a normal paid account.
  • Because until now it was a bit of a hassle to always re-register for every new attempt of update and test. Because on macOS and iOS and its stock apps etesync was not ready for normal use, was experimental only.
  • That free account would be forthcoming, and encourage me to give it another and maybe yet another try until it hopefully finally works out for me.
• I would ofc report back what works and what not in a clean and useful form, as I have hopefully have proven.
• And as said, as soon as things really work acceptable, I will proactively go for a paid account.

[porg]

Hi @tasn could you please give an update here with the current state 12/2021 regarding all the bullet points from the initial post? Curious to see what progress has been made.