I’m proud to announce the project that I’ve been working on for the last few months. Backchannel is a tool for feedback inside your beta.
Instead of traditional feedback mechanisms that let the tester only communicate with the developers, Backchannel aims to open up that discussion to everyone. By allowing the testers to talk to each other and see what bugs have been reported, Backchannel removes the chilling effect of “ehhhh, somebody else probably reported this bug already”.
A feature that I’m really excited for in Backchannel is screenshot detection. When users want to report bugs, their first move is going to be to take a screenshot of the bug. When that happens, we’ll prompt the user and ask if they want to report that screenshot as a bug. If they indicate that they want to report a bug, Backchannel will show them the relevant form and attach the image for them.
Backchannel’s SDK is written to exacting standards. I’ve used a lot of bad SDKs, and I didn’t want to subject developers to another shoddy library. It’s open-source, so feel free to take a look under the hood at how the magic happens. Readers who’ve been waiting for an implementation of coordinators should definitely clone the repo and poke around. The Backchannel SDK a great citizen in your app, with no dependencies, no categories, and no swizzling.
Backchannel wouldn’t be what it is without the amazing people who’ve helped make it a reality. John Gruber and Dave Wiskus have helped tremendously in forming and focusing the idea. The design of the web site and management portal wouldn’t be possible without the design chops of Carson Andrews, as well as stellar front-end work by Dustin Horton and Chris Guittierez.
Backchannel is only in its infancy. I’m looking forward to feedback on what corners of the product need to be filled out more. There’s a long road ahead. Here’s to the start of a great journey.
