@pixelhandler wrote:
So I'm thinking… What would motivate app developers to participate in some kind of beta feedback program?
I work on an app that has been around for 1-3 years (actually a group of apps with one API). Early on the team was able to use beta during development and on releases ship stable, and when building new apps use canary. Over time the code base grew. The amount of code is now around 45K lines of code for client apps about 35K for API and another 30K-ish for core libs used across the apps.
We we able to keep various apps at different versions until HTMLBars came along; then had one template compiler to rule the platform. This is when we no longer could keep up with beta testing. And, since we still had an old build pipeline (ember-rails) we run into a lot of difficulty with compatibility during an ember upgrade (ember-cli was not stable until 1.13.x which is very recent history).
We were not able to make to the 1.13 release at all. We made it to the 1.12 after 1.13 already shipped.
Personally I am very motivated to participating in testing beta and providing feedback. But I'll need to re-factor a large chuck of work into Ember-CLI to decouple the build dependency on the template compiler and re-think if I want templates at all in the core libs; those will become addons. I imagine that I will be able to participate in testing the Beta release channel again, toward the end of the 2015.
It was a great experience to be able to participate in the beta release cycle (for us that ended when template compiling becoming coupled to all the components in the system). For a small team it will take time to decouple all the parts of the system to again enjoy the privilege of participating in the beta releases. It was well worth it and soon it will be well worth it again for our team. It's really amazing to be able to build great apps with a small team and a great framework.
I encourage everyone to get involved with beta testing and give feedback to the core team. Maybe there could even be some official beta feedback channel for beta testing to become more attractive to developers who build a product.