Loafware is two people in Raleigh: Jordan Reyes, who writes the code, and Nell Abbott, who designs it and bakes most of what appears in the screenshots. Their app, Loaf, times a sourdough from starter to oven and has 61,000 bakers using it each month.
Version 2.4 was the largest release in a year. It rebuilt sync so that a bake started on a phone would show up on an iPad propped against the flour bin. It shipped on a Tuesday morning.
Four reviews before breakfast
Wednesday’s email arrived at 7:00 AM Eastern with four new reviews, where a normal morning brings one. Ascent groups reviews by the version they were written against, so all four sat together under 2.4. All four were from iPads. Three contained the word “sync.”
“Any one of those I would have read as somebody’s Wi-Fi,” Jordan says. “Four in a row under the same version number is a bug report.”
The cause was a timer that started on one device and was treated as stale by the other. Jordan had a fix in App Review by lunch.
Replying while the fix was in review
Nell answered each review from the inbox that afternoon with a saved reply, edited to name the device and promise a version number. When 2.4.1 went live, 26 hours after the first complaint, she replied a second time to say so. Three of the four reviewers changed their rating.
Over that week the two of them answered 38 reviews without opening App Store Connect. Loaf’s average rating was 4.7 the day before 2.4 shipped and 4.7 a week after.
The release they did not have
The year before, a smaller bug in version 2.1 had gone unnoticed for nine days and taken the rating from 4.7 to 4.2. It took four months to climb back.
“Same kind of mistake, same two people,” Jordan says. “The difference was that the reviews were sorted for us before we were awake.”
Version grouping told us 2.4 broke iPad sync before the one-star reviews could pile up.
Jordan Reyes
Co-founder, Loafware
