Dear Plex,
Look at the hassle your users are willing to go through to avoid using your new “Experience.”
When people are willing to stand up VMs and sideload old versions of the iOS app, it should signal that there is a severe problem in your requirements-gathering process.
“We hear you”-style blog posts isn’t really the right path to success here. You have to come out and say:
“Community, we ****ed up royally on this one. We are replacing this abortion of an app with the last working package on the App Store, which will be pushed to your devices as an “upgrade.” The new experience will be parked in TestFlight where we will continue to solicit your feedback and bug reports. We are sorry. Please forgive us.”
I think that the community would actually receive this well. So few companies actually come out and own their mistakes. So you have two paths you can travel down here:
Path 1, basically continue on your way with condescending posts from your outreach team while refusing to hear your invested user base.
Path 2, come clean and reset the relationship, showing your invested users that you actually hear them and own the fact that this redesign has been a massive failure.
I ask you to please take the road less traveled
