Studifutter Update

A few years back, when the App Store just opened we began to develop this little app called Studifutter. We thought it would be a nice project to start with this new platform as it would present information we as students needed every day: the menu of our cafeteria. Back then, it was only the website (which looked terrible on the phones most students had back then) and our own little website, Studifutter’s predecessor, which parsed the original website to present the menu in a more smartphone-friendly manner.

Once our app was ready we pretty soon began to realize that just parsing the website is not that easy. They’ve been changing it a couple of times during Studifutter’s lifetime which often caused in breaking the sync and the students not seeing the menu anymore. We pushed a few updates to fix these problems but it has always been some kind of chasing game.

With the next update (2.0.2) we’re using a new API. For the first time we’re caching the data in our own database before shipping it to the app. That does allow us to manually edit the entries when needed. Since this happens like every other month we hope this will improve the user experience a lot. Nothing’s worse than an app does not meet it’s promises.

With that update our hobby project also drops support for iOS 5. The move to require iOS 6 so shortly after it’s launch might be considered a bit too early. But the iOS adoption rates show that after the first day about 15% and after about 10 days 60% of all iOS devices (or at least of the iPhones) were updated to iOS 6. So we’re sorry for those we’re leaving behind. We hope to update the API for you once again to support you with your local menu.

Studifutter 2.0.2 was submitted to the App Store on October 5th and we’re currently waiting for Apple to release it.