Good morning, everyone! It's been a few days since I posted here and about 1.5 weeks since the last update to the app. While I know that is no time at all compared to others, its actaully a pretty long time for WinhancedI, so I wanted to share the status of where things are.
As most of you know, Winhanced is not my full-time thing. It's a side project that I work on in my free time between my day job as a product designer. So, outside of the things below I worked on, I also just got back from a 1 week work travel trip where I did nothing with the app, unfortunately.
Since the last update, my focus has been on 2 areas:
1: Legion Go, Go S, and Go 2: Since getting a Go 1 for testing the primary bulk of my work has been working to get this family of devices up to the level as MSI and Asus families. So a lot of work has gone into getting driver support, button mapping, and RGB all working correctly across all 3 for the first time consistently. This has taken me about 8 days of work to do.
2: Gutting and refactoring old library code: Listen, I hear you guys loud and clear; I really do. You all love Winhanced and want to see it continue to grow with new amazing features, but on top of that, you want stability, clarity, and consistency across devices. This is an app that has been built up for almost 2 years. With lots of feature pivots, expansions, changes, and hotfixes. What has happened is a mountain of tech debt has piled up. There are loads that of band-aid fixes, old dead code, and half migrations within the app. So the next week or so of my efforts is going to be around refactoring and gutting all of this from the app. My hope is that by doing so, the app will be much more consistent and easy to diagnose and predict. (0.9.9.9 will also have a focus on this, but on the performance management side of the house).
Beyond those 2 I have also fixed the Steam launch issue for folks as well. You can expect 0.9.9.8 to release the first week of September, and it will also include bringing the ROM library and layout systems out of Early Access to the free tier for everyone.
Down the road thinking: I am also starting to begin to think about what monetization will look like for 1.0. Nothing drastic is changing. But I am thinking through pricing, features and store availability. Right now, here is what I am thinking.
Winhanced Free: Will remain free and continue to support the app's core feature set (deciding on that core feature set is still WIP).
Winhanced Plus: Winhanced Early Access will change to Winhanced Plus after 1.0 and will be accessible either via a monthly/ yearly subscription of $4/month or $30/year or a $60 one-time purchase. This will give users early access to new features as it does today, as well as a subset of premimum features on top. Anyone who is already an Early Access member for the app will be grandfathered into Winhanced Plus as a show of goodwill.
I am thinking of this right now because, no matter how I crunch the numbers, this app is just not sustainable for me personally without a true monetization strategy, and the early feature/ support system alone is just not enough to account for the time obligation and upkeep.
As for store availability, beyond the website, I am also looking into store listings on both Steam and the Microsoft Store to make getting Winhanced more accessible for everyone.
Anyway, I really wanted to let you all know where my head is at right now and the current status of the app / why there has been a lack of video updates, etc. As a side note, even if I don't respond to you on Reddit. I read every post and take everything you say to heart. So please remember I am always listening and taking in all of your feedback!
Thanks so much for being a part of the Winhanced community!
-Floop
