As you may know, the Soundbooth Theater tech team has been working hard for the better part of a year to rebuild our app from the ground up. As we prepare to unleash the public beta on the world, our CTO, Jacob Raccuia, took some time to reflect on what’s new, what will stay the same, and why we’re taking this crazy journey in the first place.
We’re pleased to announce that we’ll soon be releasing a new public beta of our app, and we’re excited to put it in your hands as soon as possible! For optimists, this might be the best news you read all day; while the skeptics in the audience might be thinking, “This sounds familiar…”
Why Another Rebuild?
Soundbooth Theater has grown and evolved so much from the company we were when we first started dabbling in the app business. We took our technology stack and pushed it to the absolute limit, utilizing our existing infrastructure to support technologies far beyond its reach. For the most part, the tech worked; but it also made our lives more difficult as we grew. Updates, bug fixes, and quality of life improvements required herculean amounts of effort, QA, and time to ensure we didn’t break everything, every single time.
The infrastructure baked into this new build will allow us to scale more easily and agilely without having to hold our breath each time we launch a new version.
What’s New?
On the surface, the new app will share some similarities with the existing one. We’ll continue to take the series-first approach, highly focusing on the worlds to which these products belong. The new homepage will still consist of buckets of content – but these new buckets will be dynamic and ultimately allow us to cater the content to each user’s tastes. And this does matter; as we add more and more products to our platform, we want to ensure you’re getting the content you want to listen to.
The biggest changes are actually beneath the surface, namely, smoothing out the purchase and playback flow. Ensuring that our users can immediately access their purchased products and listen to them is paramount. Furthermore, this new version will pave the way for many exciting features to come.
Enter: The Public Beta!
In the past, we have always tried to get the app completely launch-ready prior to sharing it with the world, i.e., removing all bugs, making sure everything works perfectly, etc. Unfortunately, as you may have noticed with our past launches, it simply isn’t possible to get everything right before putting an app in the hands of the public. Instead of delaying forever, we want to involve our community sooner. After all, we are building this app for you, and we want to do things right this time – for your sake as well as ours.
As the version launching soon is still in beta, there are some features we know will not be fully functional yet including car integrations, improved accessibility, and moments. Over the next few months, we’ll continue to flesh these features out and push them to the beta as they’re ready, so those of you who wish to do so can provide feedback on a rolling basis.
Please keep in mind that the beta version is part of an active development phase, so not everything may function as expected. However, we are committed to preserving your purchase and listening data to the best of our ability; if anything is missing, don’t hesitate to let us know and we’ll quickly assist.
Your Voice Matters
Your feedback is invaluable to us, and we deeply appreciate any insight you share with us. When we launch the public beta, we will be committed to making it easy for you to report bugs and share feedback, directly with our development team.
Thank you so much for your patience with Soundbooth Theater and our app. Your continuous support has allowed us to get to where we are today and will enable us to continue to grow. On behalf of all our authors, narrators, production team, and business team: we appreciate you!
We’re so excited to push the beta version of the new app live. To get up-to-the-minute announcements on when it will be ready for public consumption, please subscribe to our newsletter.