A Direct Line to the Roadmap
Piqt now has an in-app feedback board and Founders perks. Here's what you get, and how I built them without asking for your email or an account.
In the previous Piqt release, I made good on the promise to provide special features for Founders tier members, but while I was at it, I added a feedback form in-app that anyone could use. However, in building those features, maintaining the privacy and security standards I’ve set for the app actually turned into some hard problems. I’d love to walk you through what you get but also how you don’t have to give up your privacy to get it.
Roadmap Visibility and Direct Feedback
I love feedback. Positive feedback is good, but requested features or needed improvements are great. I wanted to find a way that enabled any of Piqt’s users to send me feedback directly without having to create a new account, give up their email, or go to a third party page. However, Piqt has no servers or cloud services to store feedback, by design. In my last post, I talked about how not having any server backend protects both you and me. Therefore I had to find a service for feedback that also protects your information.
Ultimately, I landed on WishKit. WishKit includes a native SwiftUI SDK for in-app feedback, is open source, and has a great privacy policy. All feedback is sent with a scrambled ID that can’t be turned back into your Apple ID. There are options to send email addresses and additional user information to Wishkit, but Piqt does not use that feature. All I see is the feedback from a user.
The in-app feedback form powered by WishKit
What you get is a Feedback board (reachable from settings) where you can see what’s on the roadmap, vote on the things you like, create new requests and leave comments. It gives you direct visibility into what’s coming and a voice for what you’d like to see next.
It is worth noting that the feedback is an additional network call, and I’ve tried incredibly hard to keep Piqt’s network activity to a minimum. However, if you want to send me feedback, there’s no way around a network call. Piqt is now up to 4 total (iCloud for photo downloads, TelemetryDeck for basic telemetry, Apple StoreKit for purchases, and now WishKit). It’s still a tiny list and the privacy promises regarding your images or personal data are still intact. Also, WishKit only connects when you open the feedback board or Founders screen. If you never provide me feedback, you’ll never hit WishKit, but you might make me sad.
Founders Perks
The one stop for Founders perks
One of the bigger perks of the Founders tier, other than knowing you’re helping me keep Piqt going, is greater influence on the roadmap. This is something that WishKit enables me to see, but also poses a challenge. Even when you purchase, I don’t know anything about you, so I needed a way to identify your feedback as Founders’ feedback, but not identify you. To solve this problem, Piqt takes your App Store purchase record, mixes in a fixed value built into the app, and runs it through a one-way hash. Founders get a tag on that ID, so I can see which requests came from Founders without knowing who anyone is. Once again, it can’t be reversed to identify you at all.
In addition, founders get a fancy badge in the app with their signup date, access to beta builds, and access to a Founders mailing list. The beta builds and mailing list are strictly opt-in, because those do require you to provide an email and some more info. That’s up to you.
There’s more to come and as more Founders come on board, I’m going to continue to find ways to provide more perks. For now though, you’ve got the things above and ultimately my sincere thanks.
I can’t wait to hear from you
Whether you’re a Founders member, a customer, on a trial, or just using the free scanning I’m happy to have you use the app and get the absolute most out of it that you can. I want to hear where Piqt is helping you, how Piqt would be great if it just did that one thing, and when Piqt is frustrating the heck out of you (hopefully never). I’m just getting things started and there’s a lot more coming in the next few months, so stay tuned.