A hundred kind emails, and the one that stings.

On the last day of my holiday, WhatsApp shipped an update that broke sending from Franz entirely. Every message failed, for everyone. The hotfix went out from a hotel room, tested against the real thing before it shipped.

This isn't a complaint. Franz sits on top of other people's platforms, they change quite often without asking, and fixing what breaks is just part of running the app. I knew that going in.

Then came the support mail. Close to a hundred emails over that fortnight, from people whose messages had just stopped sending. They had every right to be annoyed. Almost nobody was. Almost all of it was friendly and civilized.

What people forget, and there's no reason they should know it, is that one person reads all of it. And close to a hundred good emails vanish from my mind the moment one shitty one arrives. It stings. I try not to take it personally, and I'm not good at it.

But the fortnight I want to remember is the other one: an inbox full of people being friendly and civilized about broken software. Anyone who's ever run a support inbox knows how rare that is. I talk to my partner about it quite regularly, because ten years in it still feels special. The Franz community is a truly great bunch, and I'm grateful for every single one of you. That part I have no trouble taking personally.

Two verifications.

The rest of the summer went into paperwork. Two verifications, both about mail accounts in Franz, both sitting on somebody else's desk.

Google first. Before an app is allowed to connect to your Gmail account, Google requires an enormous, paid, third-party security assessment of how the app handles your data. It's called CASA Tier 2, and it's about as thorough as it sounds. That assessment is finished. It's the reason a Gmail account can live in Franz Mail at all: nobody lost access to anything, the feature just didn't exist until the work was done.

Microsoft second. On paper, the simple one: a standard publisher verification, everything submitted, everything in order, for months now. Still not verified. The case keeps being handed from one support rep to the next.

The hard one is done. The easy one is not.

Confirmed.

Speech-to-text is out. Hold the key, talk, and the words land where you were about to type.

The Mac App Store listing is live. First time in ten years.

This is where the summer went.

On the workbench.

The Windows Store. Last dispatch I asked where you actually want to get your apps, and the vote came back a perfect three-way tie. Which fits: most people don't care much where they get their apps.

So why do the store work at all? Here's the part the industry doesn't like to say out loud: it's free visibility. A store is the one place where somebody who has never heard of Franz can type messenger into a search box and stumble over it, without me buying an ad. My website only reaches people who already know the name. The tie was never going to decide this, and I probably should have said so when I asked. The Windows Store stays next on the bench. If I ever get out of the verification jungle ;)

I'm curious how often it goes the other way.

The cable is always open. Reply to any dispatch, about anything, and you are writing straight to me.

— Stefan, founder of Franz