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Hansel.io for Android apps — Deploy hot-fixes and UI changes in real time for your app
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Instantly make changes and deploy fixes to your Android app. Reduce crashes and fix problems faster for your mobile users. What more could you want? Check it out if you've got an Android app and bug them about adding iOS support ASAP!
@hnshah Thank you for hunting us and for the kind words. Honored. And iOS support is coming up, very soon :)
@hnshah
If you're looking for an iOS solution that works *today* and does the same thing (Instantly make changes and deploy fixes to your iOS app) you should check out https://Rollout.io (where I work).
We've supported objective-C apps for over a year and Swift support will be ready in about a month.
Kudos to the hansel team for making a very cool android solution!
First impressions and questions:
- This looks interesting but looks like it's still in private beta. Maybe put that on the home page and not after a user has signed up? Developer Docs also don't appear to be publicly accessible either.
- How dynamic is the UI update feature? Does every single UI element need to be "tagged" by hansel during compile-time or does it perform introspection of the UI during runtime? If it's the latter, what kind of performance hit does that take?
- No native code injection -> This means that if the hansel SDK itself has a bug, it can't be fixed over hansel, right?
- App updates to the Play Store usually take less than an hour, so why shouldn't I just push app updates all day long instead of using hansel?
Thanks!
@nachowski Thank you for the feedback and questions.
1. Apologies for the experience. We have gone public beta. Can you please try refreshing again.
2. Hansel doesn't need to tag the UI. We have provided some helper functions for the UI. You can pull the UI by finding the UI element from the activity by using R.id.. Hence there is virtually no performance hit.
3. Yes you can't modify the SDK code at runtime.
4. Every upgrade is a drop off point. Every bug fix release means you're pushing your actual product roadmap execution out of gear. Even if you do make an update, people in the older release will never get the newest bug-free experience.
My tech team + customer service team are going to love this. Excited to see how this is going to improve our user retention stats going forward. Looking forward to iOS support :)
Hey all,
I am the co-founder of Hansel.io. Let’s talk about crash-free and bug-free experiences on native mobile apps :)
I am happy to take any questions and feedback from the community.
@nonstopnewsense This sounds great! A little more about how it works? Will we be violating any store policies in using it? Also, will this work with SDKs too? (We build hotline.io and can see great value from something like this for us and our customers to make changes on the fly)
@srikrishnang Thanks for the question.
Regarding how we work:
During the Android build process, we add interpreters, exception handlers, and flags to your byte code.
At runtime, when you hit a problem, you can choose a hotfix from the dashboard. This triggers the exception handlers/function flags/function data manipulation at runtime.
On the store policies, we do not violate them as we do not inject native code or modify the APK at runtime. Think of this as pre-built triggers and code execution similar to React Native apps.
As of now, we do not have support for SDKs yet. That said, the fundamental principles of the product will still remain the same for SDKs and will be a natural expansion. Will keep you posted.
Awesome product. Gives so much power to the developers to fix issues at runtime in a live app, much better than traditional crash reporting and similar services. Keep it up !!!
Developers are going to love this , takes the strain out of going through endless cycles of testing,deployment, thanks for making this guys.
@iabhilashj Thank you Abhilash. Something that our customers vouch for, is the peace of mind, while making new releases :) Do spread the word. Thanks.
@hussein_shtia Thanks Hussein. There are some very cool things planned in the next few months :)
We are using it at galleri5 and has been big boost to us - helping us fix issues faster than we have ever before. Great job Hansel team and waiting for your iOS version!
@cemedericarak Yes you got it right. You can't push in new features as you can't create new classes and functions, however you can hotfix any existing function. We can have an elaborate discussion if you like. I am available at mudit@hansel.io
@muditkmathur @hansel Sounds good! I can hit you up from there. My worry is with Apple. They like control so they might oppose themselves to this. Lets hope not.
@cemedericarak @hansel We have got you covered on this. For Apple (iOS) it works the way React Native works, where Javascript is fetched from the URLs at runtime and executed over WebKit. Please do check our compliance section of FAQs, where we have tried to answer more questions on compliance. You would also find the exact guidelines of the appstores, along with one of these answers, which will further clear the air. http://help.hansel.io/hc/en-us/s...
@muditkmathur @hansel great thanks for taking the time to send me this! I like your stuff a lot. Best of luck!
Our fire-fighting situations became less worrisome because of Hansel. Kudos to super responsive Hansel team!
Couple of questions:
1) Could you walk us through a counter-intuitive product decision you've taken while building Hansel? How that paid off?
2) What's on the roadmap next?
@abhilashi Thanks for the endorsement :)
1. Well, quite a few. But one interesting event was more a product UX decision - When we started out, one of our hypothesis was that developers are discoverers and exploratory in nature and would relish open platforms. Counter-intuitive to us, we hit some usability roadblocks very soon. It's only when we started boxing use cases up, which was a drastic UX change, did we see a big jump in usage.
2. Well, in the near term, it is support to more platforms - iOS, and gaming platforms!
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