Apples & Androids

iOS 6

Apple released the latest version of their iOS operating system yesterday – there’s a few exciting additions – I like the VIP inbox, which lets me easily surface mail from my wife, our CEO, and my trouble-maker friends. iOS 6 Maps has been an interesting change for Apple to make – the street that Xero HQ is on in Wellington has disappeared – hopefully to return very soon. We’re very keen to see how Passbook evolves.

Unfortunately, iOS 6 appears to have caused some problems with the most recent version of Xero Touch, which is affecting access via the iOS app and via the browser. We’ll be submitting an upgrade to fix the problem as soon as we can and it will be available as soon as Apple approves it.

UPDATE: The problem is now resolved. iOS 6 unexpectedly changed the behaviour of its browser. In short – this caused things to break quite badly. We were able to do an update that didn’t require a release to the App Store, but if you experienced problems with the Xero Touch app in the last 36 hours, you may need to reinstall Xero Touch to resolve the issue.  If you haven’t updated to iOS 6 yet – thankfully you should have no problems with Xero Touch when you do.

Android

Meanwhile, we are coming to the end of testing our Android release for Xero Touch, and we aim to have it in the Google Play App Store within the next few weeks. It’s been an interesting experience creating an Android app for the first time, a lot of lessons have been learned, not the least of which is that different combinations of hardware, OS versions and browser can result in a markedly different experience – and some very tricky device-specific bugs. Developing for Android is certainly not yet the polished experience that iOS development is.

We have something that’ll work on most devices from 2.3 upwards, and have tested on as many devices as we could get our hands on. Our aim is that if you have a popular, modern handset, such as a Samsung Galaxy S2 or S3, a Google Nexus or an HTC Sensation, Xero Touch for Android should work well for you.

Thank you for being patient with us.