Foreflight - major layoffs

Dana said:
I'm happy to have navigated a 44 year engineering career without ever have been "promoted" into any kind of management. Good thing, I'm pretty good with the nuts and bolts but would have been a terrible manager.
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Hopefully my ****ty job performance as a middle manager is a function of my awesomeness doing the work. Not sure lol
 
Lindberg said:
Does Facebook treat its customers well? Microsoft? Google?
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Apparently Facebook and Google do…customers buy users’ personal info, and it’s gladly provided in bulk.

I’m not sure, but I think Microsoft’s target customers are businesses who want to pawn off system security to an outside vendor.
 
jayhawk74 said:
Herb Kelleher when he ran Southwest said the following

If you treat your Employees right they will treat the Customers right
A Customer treated right will be a returning Customer
Returning Customers will be what treat the Shareholders right.
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Sounds smart
 
StraightnLevel said:
So, is it possible to port a FF logbook to iFly or GP?
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G Pilot for sure and probably any other electronic Logbook that allows you to Import. On FF, log into the Website and go into the Logbook. In the menu across the top, click on Export and then the little blue Export button.

If you have CFI signatures in your FF Logbook, after the Export finishes, Click on Reports and then print a PDF copy of the Complete Logbook Report (2-Page), this will give you all the entries, certificates, endorsements & category/class which can be printed out later if you ever do need it. Be sure to keep copies of that PDF in multiple places. So not necessarily in all of these places, but at lest maybe 3 or 4: your computer, in the Cloud, on a backup drive, on a couple of relatives computers, on your phone, etc., etc.

The Export gave you a .CSV file (basically a type of Excel file) and if whatever electornic Logbook you're going to probably also deals with .CSV files. They may have a process where you say you have a FF file and just Import your file. Or, they may have their own Template and you can manually copy the data out of say the Total Time and then paste it into maybe what they call the TTime column. But the bottom line is you take the info from the way FF Exported it and just put it into the right place so the new Logbook can import it.
 
Lindberg said:
Does Facebook treat its customers well? Microsoft? Google?
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I think they would define that as delivering the best product to the user. And the answer is yes, which is why they are 3 of the most successful companies in the world.
 
Ed Haywood said:
I think they would define that as delivering the best product to the user. And the answer is yes, which is why they are 3 of the most successful companies in the world.
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No. Facebook, Google... the user is the product. The advertisers and the the companies they sell your data to are their customers. And yeah, I guess they serve their customers well.
 
WDD said:
Yes, if a company sacrifices customers, they will loose profits in the long run, company will loose value, and fail.
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Loose? (Sorry, I couldn't hep myself).
 
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Dana said:
No. Facebook, Google... the user is the product. The advertisers and the the companies they sell your data to are their customers. And yeah, I guess they serve their customers well.
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They have two products. The first is the consumer product they provide for free to users. That generates the second product, which is targeted advertising capability they sell.

Their success is driven by their free user product. When people stop using them, the cash cow dies.
 
AlphaPilotFlyer said:
beside FF, what are best alternatives
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That's the problem. There isn't anything at the level of ForeFlight. Garmin Pilot is the next-most feature-complete, and I have a subscription to GP just for Database Concierge. I've tried to use it for flying and it just sucks in comparison to ForeFlight unless you're already used to it.

RyanB said:
Foreflight? I’ve been a Garmin Pilot user since day one! :)
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Condolences. :D
 
AlphaPilotFlyer said:
beside FF, what are best alternatives
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Depends on what you need it to do. If you have a FliteStream 210/510 and want to continue to use it, there's only FF and GP. I THINK the same is true for Garmin ADS-B transponders. Otherwise, I'd take a look at 8Flight. All the others I've tried that people enthuse about are klunky IMHO.
 
Um so has FF now stopped working or something? Based on comments must be so.

Are there a ton of missing features users are clamoring for? Have 15 years experience with FF mostly on IFR flight plans instantaneously filed through FF and find it just works. Since ADSB it's also a great fish finder at busy airports.

A few of us remember paper charts paper plates VOR crossing radials on FAC for distance no moving map no GPS and so forth. FF is just brilliant.
 
172andyou said:
"No, that's a popular throw away line, but it's false. Users are still one of the customers. Arguably the most important one because the platform doesn't exist without them."
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Look at the income statement, show me any revenue from users of FB. Google has a small amount from some premium services.
Customers provide revenue, users are the product that customers want to buy (with small exceptions noted above)
 
Hang 4 said:
Look at the income statement, show me any revenue from users of FB. Google has a small amount from some premium services.
Customers provide revenue, users are the product that customers want to buy (with small exceptions noted above)
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That's certainly one definition, but it isn't the only one. And it's unnecessarily narrow.

OED has this one, that goes back to 1542:

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Again, I'm well aware of the pithy phrasing that's used to try and make online services look exploitive, but just because people are paying with their attention instead of their credit card changes nothing. The platform is the product. One set of customers pays with attention and another pays with cash. It's akin to saying that TV viewers are the product because they don't pay in cash.
 
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172andyou said:
"No, that's a popular throw away line, but it's false. Users are still one of the customers. Arguably the most important one because the platform doesn't exist without them."
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You need to keep the animals in the zoo fed if you want the customers to pay to see them.
 
172andyou said:
"No, that's a popular throw away line, but it's false. Users are still one of the customers. Arguably the most important one because the platform doesn't exist without them."
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I would argue that for platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter the users are the workers. The companies benefit from the (mostly) unpaid labor of their users.
 
JScarry said:
I would argue that for platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter the users are the workers. The companies benefit from the (mostly) unpaid labor of their users.
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I think that's true, and I think it's especially true when explicit user input is used to derive value, e.g. liking, subscribing, up-voting comments, etc...crowd-rating more valuable content to get more eyeballs.

I also believe users are the product particularly when they are directly providing the data for which ad revenue can be based (e.g. email, photos, videos, etc.), especially now that LLMs can be used on all of this data. To me this is the key difference between traditional ad-driven radio and TV.

Or maybe I'm just getting old and cynical. :)

To the topic at hand, even Foreflight has a little bit of this in the FBO and airport comments. Funnily enough, this is one of my favorite features to use when deciding on fuel stops or lunch visits. I hope the remaining engineers and POs keep the product running well. I prefer it to the options and I have a Sentry I don't want to "throw away". However, having seen directly, first-hand what _can_ happen with PE, I'm only hopeful, not expectant.
 
I haven’t seen any comments about what features are missing for GA users that require dozens of engineers to implement. They certainly need some people to verify the data they get from the FAA and a bunch to make sure Apple doesn’t break their app with updates. But what features are missing for us that they need dozens of engineers to implement?
 
JScarry said:
I haven’t seen any comments about what features are missing for GA users that require dozens of engineers to implement. They certainly need some people to verify the data they get from the FAA and a bunch to make sure Apple doesn’t break their app with updates. But what features are missing for us that they need dozens of engineers to implement?
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I don't know about new features, but it's pretty easy to underestimate what it takes to keep something like this running. It's not a stand alone game, it's a production system with live data from dozens of data sources in a marketplace where people have no tolerance for failure.
 
172andyou said:
I don't know about new features, but it's pretty easy to underestimate what it takes to keep something like this running. It's not a stand alone game, it's a production system with live data from dozens of data sources in a marketplace where people have no tolerance for failure.
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Yet we rely on a consumer piece of equipment that shuts down when the sun hits it.
 
172andyou said:
I don't know about new features, but it's pretty easy to underestimate what it takes to keep something like this running. It's not a stand alone game, it's a production system with live data from dozens of data sources in a marketplace where people have no tolerance for failure.
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How true. I don't pretend to work on something as complicated as Foreflight, but "bit-rot" is a thing. As a "coder" for longer than I'd like to admit, I can't count the number of times this phrase is uttered after a production update: "But we didn't change that part of the code. There's no way this is a bug." Lo and behold after several hours of hair-pulling, "Oh *&$#! We updated a third-party library which changes how <fill in the blank> works."

This is what gives me hope that all-AI solutions will fail, and humans will remain relevant. Having used the cutting-edge AI tools of today, it even makes the same mistakes and will argue that it's correct! And, if companies like Foreflight are too careless, they'll reduce the headcount to a point where new features or competitor parity are impossible while engineers are just treading water against bit-rot, bug support, etc.
 
Not disagreeing that you need a core group of developers to keep any code base working—especially if you make software that runs on Apple’s devices. I’ve had to rewrite software multiple times when Apple changes processors. Right now I have 230 deprecation warnings on my iDevice apps. They still compile and run but at some point they won’t I’ll have to decide whether the time spent updating the code base is worth the revenue I get.
 
mark.staggs said:
How true. I don't pretend to work on something as complicated as Foreflight, but "bit-rot" is a thing. As a "coder" for longer than I'd like to admit, I can't count the number of times this phrase is uttered after a production update: "But we didn't change that part of the code. There's no way this is a bug." Lo and behold after several hours of hair-pulling, "Oh *&$#! We updated a third-party library which changes how <fill in the blank> works."

This is what gives me hope that all-AI solutions will fail, and humans will remain relevant. Having used the cutting-edge AI tools of today, it even makes the same mistakes and will argue that it's correct! And, if companies like Foreflight are too careless, they'll reduce the headcount to a point where new features or competitor parity are impossible while engineers are just treading water against bit-rot, bug support, etc.
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At my pervious job, they implemented an "AI" code reviewer. We were told we were required to address every comment it made... At one point it told me its name was Claude, so I started addressing it as such. The next morning in my daily meeting, my off shore team told me everyone off shore was freaking out and asking them if they also needed to start addressing it as Claude since they saw me do it.

JScarry said:
Not disagreeing that you need a core group of developers to keep any code base working—especially if you make software that runs on Apple’s devices. I’ve had to rewrite software multiple times when Apple changes processors. Right now I have 230 deprecation warnings on my iDevice apps. They still compile and run but at some point they won’t I’ll have to decide whether the time spent updating the code base is worth the revenue I get.
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I wish you luck. Especially next year with iOS 27 and the forced Liquid Glass
 
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