I'm rather angry!

No, I did not ask users in general to do that.

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If the answer to the general user hate against the new UI and how this update was handled; which is what I am here as; is to fork the project, then yes that is exactly what you just did.

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There is no “general user hate against the new UI”. Some love it, some are indifferent, some hate it. No-one knows the value of these three different “some”. Numbers (which are more or less biased in either direction) has been presented already, but you still say “general user hate” nonetheless.
It is time to end the endless complaining. Over and out.

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K-9 is licensed under Apache 2.0 open source license. It seems to me you have not read the terms of the license before coming here to throw a tantrum. I highly suggest you take the time to carefully go through the text, especially regarding ‘Warranties’.

For your convenience: k-9/LICENSE at main · k9mail/k-9 · GitHub

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Public Service Announcement
These forums have a useful function allowing you to ‘Ignore’ specific users.

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And just to be clear, this is not censorship. The user in question can continue to post whatever they wish, but you don’t have to see whatever repetitive nonsense they insist on posting :wink:

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There are general users, and a significant portion of them hate the new UI.

So yes, you said it towards general users.

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I suggest you read up on ethics and the history of opensource.

“Without users, your program is not a program, it’s a pointless piece of code that you might as well throw away.”

Imagine if all opensource projects held the anti user stance that K-9 does and threw non warranty agreements in users faces anytime they asked for something. Those agreements are to protect the developers from being responsible/liable for downstream issues. Not to make them anti user.

No. I said it to YOU, Bun-Bun. Please don’t ever put words in someone else’s mouth.

  • plonk *
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I’m a general user. You said it to general users. As well as it has been to response from many others here. Which is an assholish response and anti user.

If you want to see examples of putting words in others mouths, see replies to my posts that twist my words and claim that is what I’m saying.

It’s not an anti user stance, it’s anti Karen stance. It’s not up to you or me or any other user to decide, much less demand what an app looks like or how it functions, that’s a decision made by the dev(s).

Nobody is forcing anybody to use an app they no longer like, and since K-9 was never a paid app (IIRC?) nobody can complain about not getting their moneys worth or any other silly reason.

Just move on already - those of us that like/love K-9 won’t stop doing so because of your tantrums, and those that don’t like it don’t need your tantrums either since they already made their choice. :roll_eyes:

The maintainer has received funding that allowed them to work full time on the project.

And yes, they hold an anti user stance. They have admitted it themselves on these forums and in the IRC channel. While taking money to work on the project and not being up front with their intentions.

Several people have contacted me, thanking me for letting them know about the situation and have moved on as a result. And that’s only the ones that have contacted me. You’re wrong again.

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The maintainer has received funding that allowed them to work full time on the project.

The funding from the Prototype Fund was to add JMAP support to K-9 Mail’s code base. The deliverables were the source code and a final report, nothing else.

And yes, they hold an anti user stance. They have admitted it themselves on these forums and in the IRC channel.

Not letting users decide on the roadmap of the project and an “anti user stance” are two different things. Users who report problems, request features, and/or describe the use cases they hope will be supported influence what future versions of K-9 Mail will look like all the time. Of course not every feature/change that is requested will be added. Yes, the final decision is mine. But mostly lack of time and nobody else to implement a feature are what shape K-9 Mail. Not a tyrannical maintainer who says no to everything.

While taking money to work on the project and not being up front with their intentions.

People who donate presumably do so because they derived value from the app in the past. I don’t think my “intentions” have changed since I started asking for donations. What exactly do you think people need to know?

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The funding from the Prototype Fund was to add JMAP support to K-9 Mail’s code base. The deliverables were the source code and a final report, nothing else.

Obviously not the only funds you have received. Still, I would be curious to know what they would think of how you manage the project. Especially considering their goal is to support public interest projects. Not self serving developers.

Not letting users decide on the roadmap of the project and an “anti user stance” are two different things. Users who report problems, request features, and/or describe the use cases they hope will be supported influence what future versions of K-9 Mail will look like all the time. Of course not every feature/change that is requested will be added.

There is a big difference between feature requests and regressions due to a massive UI/UX design departure.

Yes, the final decision is mine. But mostly lack of time and nobody else to implement a feature are what shape K-9 Mail. Not a tyrannical maintainer who says no to everything.

You seriously need to take a step back and look at how you portray yourself everywhere on this project. Tyrannical maintainer is exactly how you come across. From the very beginning of the UI change when you were given feedback your answer was no, this is what we are doing. You don’t care what your users want in this regard, you have made up your mind and are going in the direction you want. Full stop.

People who donate presumably do so because they derived value from the app in the past. I don’t think my “intentions” have changed since I started asking for donations. What exactly do you think people need to know?

I can’t possibly know the intents behind every donator, but I would hope they are donating to support an open source project that has the best interests of it’s users in mind.

What exactly do users need to know before supporting you? This.

Your anti user stance or whatever you want to call your description of open source development being only a self serving venture needs to be the first thing any perspective user reads on github/playstore/f-droid. You can disagree with me on how the K-9 project should be managed, but to not be upfront with the above is unethical. And no, open source development does not assume this stance and you are far from a majority in thinking this is what open source development should be.

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There is a big difference between feature requests and regressions due to a massive UI/UX design departure.

K-9 Mail is hardly the only open source project that changed its user interface. There are always users who hate such a change. If you believe the app was written for users just like you, it’s not hard to see why you believe the developers are destroying the app. But what if the app wasn’t written for you? What if the old version of the app just happened to work very well for you and now the new version doesn’t? Why should your opinion on what the app should be matter more than the opinion of the people actually building the app?

From the very beginning of the UI change when you were given feedback your answer was no, this is what we are doing. You don’t care what your users want in this regard, you have made up your mind and are going in the direction you want. Full stop.

Realisticly, you can’t have both versions of the UI. So no matter what decision you make, it’s always a “no” to the other option.

When we started discussing the UI overhaul there was mainly one person who was very rude and whose main argument was “Material Design is stupid”. On the other hand, there were many people excited about the change, and quite a few people actually contributing design mockups and/or code for the new user interface.

The initial negative feedback after the release was mostly “I hate it. Bring back the old version”. I tried to elicit more constructive criticism and asked Why was the account overview screen useful?. A couple of people were actually helpful so a plan could be formed.
But mostly people felt they were entitled to “their” UI and they weren’t particularly polite about it. If anyone wants to know why I didn’t make bringing back the account overview screen the top priority, I suggest reading some of the comments. Think about how motivated you would feel in light of all the hostility.

Your anti user stance or whatever you want to call your description of open source development being only a self serving venture needs to be the first thing any perspective user reads on github/playstore/f-droid.

I admit that my comment was bad communication and can be read to mean I only build the app for myself. But I wrote “having the app work for me is my primary goal”, not that it’s my only goal. I spend a significant part of my week answering support requests, reviewing pull requests, and thinking of ways to make the app easier to use for other people. If you honestly believe that I don’t care about users at all, you have not been paying attention.
Surely, there’s much that I could improve when it comes to communicating with users. But it’s just like with working on the app, never enough time to do a perfect job (or when it comes to communication even a decent job).

So do I care about users? I’d like to think so. Why else would I spend so much time trying to make K-9 Mail work better for others?
Do I think users have a right to the app never changing in a way they don’t like? No. I will do what I think is best for the app. Of course my decisions are influenced by what users want. But in the end it’s my decision. And there will always be users who disagree. I think you will find this is the case for many open source projects. I’d even say it’s unavoidable given enough users.

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K-9 Mail is hardly the only open source project that changed its user interface. There are always users who hate such a change. If you believe the app was written for users just like you, it’s not hard to see why you believe the developers are destroying the app. But what if the app wasn’t written for you? What if the old version of the app just happened to work very well for you and now the new version doesn’t? Why should your opinion on what the app should be matter more than the opinion of the people actually building the app?

Again, you’re ignoring the fact this change was a regression. The user interface wasn’t just changed in visual appearance, the behavior and workflows completely broke. And it’s not just my opinion. The feedback is near unanimous. Many of the UI aspects that made K-9 standout from the rest of the clients are gone and accessibility is greatly diminished. To say you don’t care about this is anti user.

Realisticly, you can’t have both versions of the UI. So no matter what decision you make, it’s always a “no” to the other option.

That doesn’t mean you need to completely ignore existing users and not even attempt to make the new UI function like the original UI.

When we started discussing the UI overhaul there was mainly one person who was very rude and whose main argument was “Material Design is stupid”. On the other hand, there were many people excited about the change, and quite a few people actually contributing design mockups and/or code for the new user interface.

There was more than one person, and there were some very specific examples about what was stupid about material and what was liked about the existing interface. On the other hand, I have seen zero attempts on your part to find out what the long standing user base liked about the old UI which is evidently clear by you flat out saying 6 years ago that you wanted to get rid of the overview screen and yet huge backlash resulted from it. Actually most of your list in that thread is exactly what everyone is complaining about.

Going by your own advice, if K-9 really didn’t suit their needs due to the UI, they (or you) should have forked it.

The initial negative feedback after the release was mostly “I hate it. Bring back the old version”.

Yup, that kind of feedback sucks. That doesn’t invalidate their opinion nor excuses you from ignoring the rest of the feedback that is there.

I tried to elicit more constructive criticism and asked Why was the account overview screen useful?. A couple of people were actually helpful so a plan could be formed.

Which you closed within 24 hours. By the time I saw the thread it was already closed and my points weren’t addressed anywhere in the thread. The github thread is locked, which directs discussion to the forums which the thread about it is locked. And anytime people bring it up on IRC you dismiss the conversation as being pointless. So where the hell am I supposed to give feedback to try and get what I need? It’s hard to tell by your short description on the github thread but it still sounds to me like you still don’t get it.

The same situation occurred 6 years ago when this all started. Where are people supposed to give you feedback when you dismiss it, discourage it and outright block it?

And as for it coming back, where is the communication on that? We have a thread with a very arrogant tone from you that sorta maybe suggests you are gracing us with the contemplation of it, but nothing clearly stated. Other than one of your mods rudely replying in a separate thread that it’s coming in 6.2.
“Locking this issue because in cases like this there’s always a handful of people who believe their comments are so valuable they have to ignore the request to take discussions elsewhere.”
I get it. Users are an annoyance to you. But come on now.

But mostly people felt they were entitled to “their” UI and they weren’t particularly polite about it. If anyone wants to know why I didn’t make bringing back the account overview screen the top priority, I suggest reading some of the comments. Think about how motivated you would feel in light of all the hostility.

Your focus is on bug fixes right now after a significant release. I’ve never once questioned that.

As for hostility, I know exactly what that feels like since hostile is exactly how you are to your users when they give feedback.

I admit that my comment was bad communication and can be read to mean I only build the app for myself. But I wrote “having the app work for me is my primary goal”, not that it’s my only goal. I spend a significant part of my week answering support requests, reviewing pull requests, and thinking of ways to make the app easier to use for other people. If you honestly believe that I don’t care about users at all, you have not been paying attention.
Surely, there’s much that I could improve when it comes to communicating with users. But it’s just like with working on the app, never enough time to do a perfect job (or when it comes to communication even a decent job).

So do I care about users? I’d like to think so. Why else would I spend so much time trying to make K-9 Mail work better for others?
Do I think users have a right to the app never changing in a way they don’t like? No. I will do what I think is best for the app. Of course my decisions are influenced by what users want. But in the end it’s my decision. And there will always be users who disagree. I think you will find this is the case for many open source projects. I’d even say it’s unavoidable given enough users.

The way you portray your self on github, the forums and IRC begs to differ. Outside of support/bug fixes you shoot down and dismiss anything that even remotely goes against your vision of the app.

And if you care about making the app easier to use for other people, then why are you dismissing our UI feedback to make the app easier to use?

You say you think of donations as money given for previous use of the app. Yet you actively seek and are receiving near full time money to work on the project for continued development. That’s a contradiction. Regardless of what you think, that does make K-9 a product to a point and does bear on you a responsibility to your users whether legally required or not. To continue on without acknowledging that or being upfront with your intentions is unethical.

Can you make every user happy? No, that is impossible. But you can make changes without causing intentional regressions and make most of them happy.

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This is what I found where cketti is announcing it officially - at least the way I read it.

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Many users are not geeks and do not wish to become one.
A phone is a tool chosen and used among others by professionals who don’t have time to waste in subtleties like unchecking things in the gogol space. An installed application is forgotten until it no longer provides the expected service.

GNU, free or other does not release the creator from respecting the users.
An update, even if it is automatic, has to be able to warn the user about what is going to happen and give him the choice to accept or reject these update.

The idea of imposing things to users of computer means has been insidiously imposed by the big computer companies and the arrival of myriads of more or less serious programmers in the android world makes it look like a very suspicious cesspool.

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Still largely buried.

Communication is poor, attitude towards it on behalf of the maintainer is clear.

In no way do I expect it to be their primary focus or given priority over bugs introduced by 5.8+, but communication on the direction of updates and expectations/intent is very unclear and lacking.

I’m also rather unhappy with the “new” ui. (Hasn’t it been this way for quite some time? I install from f-droid). It went from very attractive imho to bland and very unintuitive. It seems like the type of UI design that is geared towards being “user friendly” for dumb people that ends up just being less usable, like m$ windozeee…

During the beta development, the developer wouldn’t listen to the users when they tried to explain how the initial UI was better and more convenient, he simply brushed them off with their suggestions altogether.
I think he just wanted to show off with his flashy “superduper” ineffective sliding menu.
Had never seen such a conceited developer in my life.

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