A statement issued by projectFLY owner, Matt Davies, was issued with information as to why version 4 of the popular flight logging tool continues to face ongoing delays. The message also confirmed that v3 of projectFLY is now back online. On December 15th 2019, Matt made the decision to take projectFLY offline altogether in an attempt to migrate the platform from the old, costly, infrastructure to a new alternative. This process took place over a period of time with updates from Matt regarding the state of the migration.
Despite the best efforts of the team who worked around the clock, version 4 was never ready “enough” to be released. It was also admitted that even during the downtime for v3, testing on v4 wasn’t being done as “the testing team didn’t actually have access to a working copy of their version as the servers were down”. After about a week, testers finally received an updated Focus Group Build. However, once the new version was online for the testers, many new problems appeared. Matt went onto say “add Christmas to that mix where volunteers are unavailable & you’ve got yourself a tropical storm that won’t disappear.”
As a result, projectFLY v4 was in no fit state to release.
Matt has also said he felt that he gave the community a “false impression” of the application being almost ready. Matt did apologise for this and vowed that the product needs to be 100% ready before it can be released.
The original splash screen when the servers went offline on December 11th due to unpaid bills.
Moving forward, version 3 of projectFLY has been restored on the original servers (GCP) and no data from before the migration was lost. One big question that does come from this, however, is how it would continue to be funded – especially after various campaigns for donations. Matt has said that the current version doesn’t enable the platform to self-sustain, but the donations from previous crowdfunding rounds have covered the costs until “at least March”.
As for the future, Matt said in his message that there will be no timeline for when version 4 will be ready. However, he will be taking time to figure out a “solid development/testing process in place.” In the meantime, users can continue to use projectFLY as a way to track and log their flights via version 3.
Finally, Matt concluded the projectFLY message by saying that he will be “removing my ‘personal’ side from projectFLY & Mettar as a whole”, and will instead have a member of his team conduct communication.
