@amir Will this Matter Controller be a separate product customers will have to pay extra for in order to use their Flic Twists with an ecosystem? Or will it be a firmware update to existing Flic hubs?

All of this seems like critical information that you could have included in the "now shipping" announcement about the Flic Twist. A large part of my annoyance with the current state of the Flic Twist is your failure to properly set expectations prior to delivery. Own these limitations and disclose them up front rather than leaving each user to have to dig them up and pull them out of you in your forums. At the very least, this information should be included in a FAQ on the Flic Twist product page (or the feature comparison grid on that page).

I would have been content to be able to use my Flic Twists without the dimming feature until that feature is available. But currently my Twists are completely useless to me. I backed this product with the expectation that the Twist would at least have feature parity with the Flic 2 Smart Buttons that I have been quite happy with. At no point did you disclose that this was not the case.

When will the official Mac app support the Twist? Maybe you could update the app prior to supporting the Twist to inform customers that the app does not yet work with the Twist to save people the frustration of futilely attempting to pair their Twist with an app that does not yet support it. Maybe you could update your documentation anywhere about this.

@Emil I am sympathetic to the difficulties of effectively communicating product complexities. These implementation details you provided are interesting to me personally, but they are not particularly helpful to an average customer. It really feels like y'all have not carefully considered the types of questions a customer new to any of your products might ask. e.g. "I have/am interested in this product; does it have this capability?" or "I already have a Flic Button, can I do the same things with a Flic Twist?" Customers expect a certain level of consistency between different products from the same company. When you fail to deliver that consistency—and you do not effectively document the differences—it leads to frustrated customers.

The product matrix on the Twist product page comparing the Flic Button and the Flic Twist seems like a good place for some of this information. You already have a "Compatibilty" row in that matrix where you could explicitly list "Flic For Mac app" in the Flic Button column, and omit it from the Flic Twist column.

In the Flic For Mac app itself, on the "Add Flic" page next to the Flic Button illustration you could show a picture of the Flic Twist encircled by the crossed out sign.

Meanwhile, the Flic For Mac app page does not explicitly mention that it cannot configure a Flic Hub. That seems like a good place to mention that, especially when it is perfectly reasonable for a customer to assume that it can. Maybe add a feature matrix somewhere comparing the respective capabilities of the Android, iOS, and Flic For Mac app?

@Emil How often is the settings UI collectively opened that this traffic could genuinely be a concern? This could be a super lightweight request, even just an http HEAD method to a CDN cached response that includes the version in one of the headers.

But let's say that even this traffic is too much, and you must avoid any network activity on Settings load. As soon as the "Check for New Firmware" button is pressed on the settings page, you could initiate this version check call to get the most recent version number. The next page should tell you either 1) that a new version is available and ready to be installed with an "Install" button (also showing the current version, the new version you will be installing, and a link to the release notes), or 2) that you already have the latest version with a "Back to Settings" button (e.g. "4.2.13 is already the latest version"). If there is a network issue, you could report that here with a "Retry" button.

If you are already checking and automatically updating the firmware every 24 hours, that information should be shown in the interface, too. Maybe an info button next to the "Hub Version" on that settings page that explains this. Ideally you would also show a log of the last N firmware updates, or the timestamp of the most recently installed update and link to its release notes at the very least.

@Emil I have a Flic Hub. It is not clear that having a hub is a necessary but not sufficient condition to use the Twist with the Mac app, which is why it is important that this is unambiguously spelled out in the documentation.

When will the official Mac app support the Twist? Maybe you could update the app prior to supporting the Twist to inform customers that the app does not yet work with the Twist to save people the frustration of futilely attempting to pair their Twist with an app that does not yet support it. Maybe you could update your documentation anywhere about this.

Is there no support in the official Flic Mac app for the Twist? Why are you so bad at disclosing the limitations of your products? My initial experiences with the Flic Twist have been incredibly frustrating due to your poor communication about this very basic stuff. Did you really not learn anything from the rough early experiences of your other products? Communicate!

Regardless of whether a firmware update is actually available, the "Check for New Firmware" button available from the hub "Settings" page will always report "Ready to Install! This will update your hub firmware to the latest version" with a confusingly labeled "Check Firmware" button (didn't I just do this?). When pressed, this results in a "Could not update" screen with the text "Firmware already latest version".

This experience is confusing and has unncessary steps. Instead, you could automatically check for the existence of a new version on page load and show the result of that next to or under the current version on the settings page (preferably with a link to its release notes), changing the "Check for New Firmware" button to "Install Update".

@amir Will this Matter Controller be a separate product customers will have to pay extra for in order to use their Flic Twists with an ecosystem? Or will it be a firmware update to existing Flic hubs?

All of this seems like critical information that you could have included in the "now shipping" announcement about the Flic Twist. A large part of my annoyance with the current state of the Flic Twist is your failure to properly set expectations prior to delivery. Own these limitations and disclose them up front rather than leaving each user to have to dig them up and pull them out of you in your forums. At the very least, this information should be included in a FAQ on the Flic Twist product page (or the feature comparison grid on that page).

I would have been content to be able to use my Flic Twists without the dimming feature until that feature is available. But currently my Twists are completely useless to me. I backed this product with the expectation that the Twist would at least have feature parity with the Flic 2 Smart Buttons that I have been quite happy with. At no point did you disclose that this was not the case.

@amir I strongly disagree that the battery hatch comes off easily by simply pushing the tip of a screwdriver towards the center of the Twist, especially with the typical angle of a small flathead bit. There is a certain finesse to it; I have to "dig" out the hatch after releasing the catch. Maybe if you happen to have exactly the correct size implement, it would be easy. I have seen a lot of battery hatches over the last half century, and regardless of what design constraints you may have had with the Twist, there must be a better way to have done this.

@amir I have no problem with your choice to not pre-install the batteries; that seems like a great decision based on the factors involved. But that is not the source of my criticism here. All it would take to address my gripe with the out-of-box experience would be better instructions on the packaging. Step 1 of the setup instructions should not be "Connect"; it should be "Install batteries". I appreciate that changing batteries is likely to be a rare occurence, but it is the very first experience customers have with your product, and it is a poor one.

The out-of-box battery experience is not great, either. The included batteries are not immediately visible in the packaging, so the "Batteries included" text with an arrow that appears to be pointing to the Twist itself together with set up instructions that omit any step about inserting the batteries had me thinking the Twist was broken until I found the batteries hidden in the packaging.