Honestly where do I start with this..
Basically the dev announced publicly he would do a free release and said it would be with us by a certain date (can't remember which). Said it was going to be free, with no ads. Wanted to do paid, cos he had heard rumours Google would open paid apps for devs in Dubai, which turned out to be just that - a rumour. So he decided he may as well go free.
A week before release and without telling anyone, he decided to make major design changes. He effectively blamed this for the delay of the app, said he only wanted to release a perfect app and accused other Twitter apps (Boid in not so many words) of copying some of his designs as revealed in images he'd released of the app. I think the complaint he was making was using icons for the column headers, which is hardly revolutionary stuff.
Up until the day of release he was still saying he *might* release it on time (His language had went from definitely releasing on time to 'should' in the week leading up to the big day... I could tell something was up). Only after he missed the deadline (and about a week after) did he put up a post on G+ explaining the delay and the big design changes. As any project manager knows if you make big changes to something a week before deadline, you won't make deadline. He must have known this, but still kept us all in the dark and didn't fess up. After this went down a bunch of people got annoyed because the dev has missed deadlines and said 'real soon' on countless occasions, barely communicates the status of the product and expects you to have read his sporadic individual replies to tweets about the status of the products even though he hasn't tweeted them with a . at the front so people following him on Twitter can see the content of the replies, nor has he maintained a product blog or google doc or anything else which might answer frequently asked questions. Something the Boid guys have understood since day one. Dev then gets annoyed at users feeling entitled as it's free and he is under no obligation to release.
What he doesn't understand is that we don't like the fact that someone creating a communication/social app has zero to little interaction with the community and cannot use Twitter effectively to communicate goals/status updates which would actually help him by maintaining the hype and giving him credibility. At this point anyone who complains about the lack of the app or his awful communication style is a troll. Anyone who apologises on his behalf is ok, but still no news on Carbon. He is now saying he won't say anything at all until the app gets released.
Honestly the guy doesn't know shit about how to communicate with his customer base or to creating goodwill for his app. In the meantime Tweetlanes and others are making major steps forward. Whilst I believe the app is real (major names from the android community have been in the beta) I am doubtful if it will ever release given Twitters new rules re 3rd parties.
In short I think the developer may make great apps but has appalling PR skills and can't plan and deliver effectively.
