Why does the infuse team seem to low key refuse every suggestion for new features?

One or two updates a month seems like active development to me.

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If you’re paying that sub then you can join TestFlight.
There’s a testing update every single week with fixes and often new stuff.

As for comparing with Plex if you mean on the Apple TV there is a maximum of one release a month for the last 6 months. Almost daily is just ridiculous.

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hey just wanna mention, am also a lifetime user of this infuse app and let me say this, this app is more polished than Plex and that’s why I have purchased the lifetime membership.
Plex had lot of issues and that was the reason I switched to Infuse in terms of video playback and what I mostly liked the video loading times are none when played via cloud storage and yeah they do release updates and you can get updates on it via their Twitter handle of infuse and yeah once or twice updates a month is great. :blush: :+1:

Do not get me wrong but infuse is way too much smoother and has better UI.
and yeah Infuse in-app family sharing is awesome.

and please @james @NC_Bullseye keep doing your work as we all love this app. please keep this app and forum working as we are here to support your work.

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The title, low key attitude of new suggestions, caught my eye.
When a suggestion is made and it is then attached to an old dead link, then told to find the first mention of the suggestion and add a like to it, seems like a dismissal to me.
An example is “smart list”, being suggested for years. Still none.
Because they fix bugs quickly and keep infuse working great is why I use it. What infuse does, it does well.
A few years ago I thought Kodi was great, now it’s infuse, a few years from now, who knows.

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As a software developer, I can somehow understand that it is not easy to prioritise the customer’s feature requests.
But it would be nice to have some kind of public roadmap, so customers can see which features are coming soon, and which are not.
The last few months I had the impression that the focus of development is on new obscure video/audio codecs that most people don’t need because their (older) A/V equipment can’t handle them anyway.
I have not seen improvements in the UI for a long time, like smart lists or the ability to hide watched content from the main screen.

This is here

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They have the upcoming features thread for immediate plans then tagging for the suggestion threads. I don’t think they need more than that, do you? What happens if they change priorities then just disappoint people.

Appreciate the feedback.

There is always work going on with something, and updates are usually released every few weeks (see link above). The update cycle gets a little bit longer when we are working on bigger releases (like 7.4, 7.5, etc…). These don’t always include dramatic visual changes, but IMHO that is not a bad thing if things are working well and the app is easy to navigate. I will say, the priorities will always be a bit biased towards providing excellent playback, even if the content type is newer and not yet included in everybody’s library. When you hit play it needs to ‘just work’.

With that said, the suggestions area is the best place to follow and support features you want to see added. There are lots of good ideas there, and while we can’t add everything all at once - seeing what is popular does help guide us when it comes to deciding on what to work on next. Also, keep in mind that everyone has different ways they use Infuse. A feature that is very important to one person may be something another person would never use (and vice-versa). Finding the balance here is tricky, and something we are constantly working to navigate. We may not always get this 100% right, but the app is constantly improving with every release - which is good. :slight_smile:

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I’ve used Infuse on Apple TV for quite a while. Like James said, not huge UI changes, so maybe it looks like “nothing new” is coming. But when I go to the Settings menu, there are a lot more options than there used to be. Do I use many or all of them - no, but I’m sure they help out individual cases and that’s good.

The only thing I have been hoping for that hasn’t happened yet is ATMOS playback from a .MKV file, but that seems to be an Apple limitation, not Infuse.

I really enjoy Infuse - it just works - no worrying about whether the file will play or DirectStream - I just point Infuse at the NAS and it works. That’s what I need and what the WAF (Wife Approval Factor) needs - Keep up the good work!

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The suggestion area seems to be the area users are upset with, not the app itself.
When you offer a suggestion area and users see suggestions being sent over YEARS and not considered important makes users upset and feeling ignored.
Removing this area would stop this topic, but I hope this doesn’t happen.

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I can understand that.

We migrated forum platforms back in 2020, and have been trying to merge duplicate suggestion threads since then. This usually ends up with the first ever mention of a feature being the original topic, with posts from other threads merged in after.

More recently, tags were added to give some insight to the status of various features. I suppose if you look at a topic that was originally created in say 2017 which is marked as planned, you might infer that it has been planned for 5+ years with no progress, but that isn’t quite accurate.

The new forum allows for not only voting but sorting by votes as well, which is something we didn’t have the ability to do before.

You can also use the solved topic filter in Suggestions to view all the suggestions which have been implemented in Infuse releases so far.

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I still think a road map is a better option than sticking things in a thread which get lost then people ending up duplicating the request, then the threads need to get merged. This is clumsy in my opinion and to be honest, I rarely read any of this because it’s just clutter but this caught my eye.

I’ve said it before but if you’re going to manage expectations in a professional way, you need to adopt a proper roadmap app. The online bank Monzo for example, utilise Trello (other apps are available). It shows what’s gone live recently, what’s being worked on, what’s in the future pipeline and customer suggestions on the filter bed but not yet prioritised or started. There’s no timeline (but there could be if needs be), just shows what is being given attention. It’s clear at a glance what’s going on and it’s professional.

It’s no wonder agitation arises when having to trawl through comments just to get to what you want to know. I’m sure you do a great job at moderating but there really is a better way for this.

That would still happen, even if you use some thing like Trello. The problem is there’re so many requests that you have to take time to search for the one that matches your requests. They are categorized using tags which is sufficient

It’s an education to direct everyone to an interface specifically designed at managing a filter bed of change and if directed enough times, I’m sure people would be happier at something that’s easier to navigate and see if their requests are 1) recognised and 2) whether they are in pipeline or not.

That’s your opinion which you are entitled to (even if my suggestion wasn’t directed to you). I could say the same about sticking post it notes all over a wall. It may be sufficient for some but is it efficient for the masses? That’s not a question I need you to answer by the way. I already know what’s a more efficient means of communication without the need to brown nose.

I agree. If we were starting from new there are probably better options out there for managing the roadmap and gathering feedback. However, at this point the suggestions area has 2500+ threads, with lots of discussion and votes attached to each. IMHO, the process of migrating all of this to another platform would be quite large - and IMHO, probably not all that different for the typical Infuse user.

We also have a separate internal tools we use to for planning, discussing, and tracking progress of features/bugs - but this can get pretty far into the weeds, and isn’t something we plan to make public.

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Fair enough but I think you have to start change somewhere otherwise it’s just a perpetual list of dead posts which have been merged with other threads and the momentum just gets lost.

I do think too much detail is overkill so I would agree with you on that score but I’d still prefer something like this…

It’s sufficient to see whether a suggestion has passed a feasibility stage and allows users to upvote and comment accordingly. It doesn’t have timescales as it’s obviously better to under promise and over deliver. Anyway, its just my opinion.

I’ve given up trawling myself via the forum directly but now and again, I’ll see what’s new using the DiscourseHub. I just find it difficult to navigate personally for the areas I’m interested in.

At least it’s better than the single suggestion thread we had where people posted on it for every new feature :laughing:

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Hey James :wink:

But maybe you could clean up the Tags, because at “pending” and “researching” are a lot of old threads, which are surely already fixed or not up to date anymore :wink::+1:

That would make everything a little clearer :blush:

With a few exceptions, most of the suggested ideas are feasible. It just comes down to whether it’s worth investing the time/cost for that one specific thing, or if there are better things to work on. Some of the suggestions are also personal preference type things (EG UI changes), which may or may not be desirable for everyone.

The search feature in the forum is pretty powerful, so if you’re looking for a specific suggestion then that is probably the best way to find it. Or if you’re just curious about what’s coming next this thread is updated regularly and shows what is currently in progress (or what is queued/planned for upcoming versions). You can also view this page for info on what has been added in past releases.

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I’m not but thanks.