@Andrew Henderson his end goal is to understand why companies are behaving like this and where the legal limits for such behaviour are. He didn't rant and he doesn't have to specify all the bugs he is experiencing because we all can imagine that there are just too many to list. Even after the 2.0 update there are still some sync problems if you use a daw on windows and Stuck notes and stuff like this.
Edit: take everthing I worte with a grain of salt, I don't know how arturia is organised, neither am I a dev with experience in hardware development, this is just my personal experience from working as a software dev for years. Also don't buy stuff directly after it was released if you don't want to be a beta tester.
@agodzilla I'm working as a software dev in a very different field but still think that the same mechanics apply for me as well. So generally it isn't nececcarily the fault of the devs. You just can't predict how long it will take to implement feature A or B. Sometimes you need 10x longer than you thought. This happens not that often but I wanted to illustrate how easy it is to go off the chart. Modern devices and software is often quite complex, way more complex than older stuff thus the chances of getting bugs are way higher and the chances of not seeing those bugs are rising as well. The devs programming the software are (usually/often) not the ones who test it that deeply. You develop a feature, test if it works as intended and then give it to your test department if you have one. You will not test it in every possible use case, so that really is a big problem if you don't have a test department. Also even if they find a bug it can be hard to narrow down where it is coming from. That is the reason modern software has metrics and there are beta phases, this just increases your chance of finding out what is going wrong precisely. This is just not going to work on devices though (imo), you have all of these hardware limitations and investing in more storage so you can constantly log everything just doesn't sound feasible.
So imagine you have a idea for a product, you think it should take amout of time x to develop and put amount of time y on top to be safe.
First hardware prototypes emerge and the software begins to cover the really basic usecases. The marketing department now starts working on the marketing. They will a release date with the devs and project manager, and will use this date from now on in every public post. The marketing gains traction and people get excited for this product. But the development seems to be slower than expected, there are roadblocks nobody could've seen coming ahead. Now you have to decide what to do. Loose the hype and potential customers because you want to publish a finished product, or do you want to loose customers because you publish a unfinished product but you've already got some money to invest in the further development? From my experience, if the company in question isn't drowning in money they will choose the later, which is quite logical from a busieness standpoint.
This happens all the time: Video Games, OS(Win 10 is a great example) etc..
I think modern development is just getting to expensive to finish work completely before releasing anything. And this is ok, if you communicate that to your customers. Which Arturia didn't do. So I would argue that that is more of an issue that releasing an "in development" product. If it would have been labelled as such, I think it would have worked out better.
TL;DR:
Modern development is really complex, if you don't have enough capacity for inhouse testing, you will find yourself in a ocean of bugs, company needs money to improve product, everybody is doing that more or less. Arturia is just really bad at communicating.
P.S.
I'm angry at how this went down too. Arturia here is to blame for a lot. But that stuff just happens.
Other companies might not f**k up their launches that hard, but you never know until you try.
Oh and imo devs are never ever the ones who are really ok with releasing something unfinished, it is more complex than that.
