Because I’ve read the manuals etc., I understand that mixer firmware rev major.minor and app mixer.minor versions must be synchronized for the apps to work. This also triggers a recommendation in the manual that you disable automatic updates for these apps.
However, as far as I can quickly tell, Google Play (and maybe other app stores) don’t let you select the version to install. So right now, as the 1.6 release is in Google Play and I haven’t upgraded our mixer to 1.6, I’m not actually sure I can get my musicians using SQ4You because they don’t have any way to get a 1.5.* release of the app. And if I were a sound engineer who used multiple sites’ SQs, if they were ever to not all be on the same firmware major.minor – well, I think I’d then be in real trouble because I couldn’t have multiple versions installed at once.
I totally get why you have this syncing requirement. But I think copying it into mobile app versions, when version updates are generally presumed to be routine and permanent and nonbreaking, just doesn’t play well with the app store versioning processes.
It would be much better for users if you shipped entirely separate, side-by-side-installable apps per firmware major.minor. Users wouldn’t have to disable auto-update. Users could easily install the particular version for their mixer, even if the mixer weren’t on latest firmware rev. Users could work with multiple mixers that aren’t all on the same firmware rev.
I get that this would be more hassle for your release-engineer people and all, but it would be a heck of a lot better for users.
That’s an excellent suggestion!
Although ‘multi-version capable apps’ would be a better solution, that could be an easy way that solves a lot of problems.
Subsequent research says app stores don’t allow “spamming” an app in multiple varieties this way. So I guess the multi-version capable way is the only one that is actually possible.
At that point I’d just have the login screen require specifying firmware version, then completely clone all the innards in order to do as absolutely little changing of old firmware support as possible. The apps would bloat notably with every new firmware major.minor rev, but who cares about a few tens of megabytes or whatever? Nobody, if it makes things cheaper and less likely to be broken on modification.
Mixing Station DOES support different FW versions … and as a programmer myself i don’t see any reason (aside of bad design and/or lazyness) why the apps shouldn’t be capable of this…
I mean, sure – but every deeply nested version-check is another opportunity for bugs. I don’t blame them basically just forking the entire app for every new minor firmware version in order to eliminate the chance of accidental firmware version mismatch bugs, other than that old versions become close to unavailable shortly after the new versions release.
Mackie has separate apps for multiple OSes
That’s what i REALLY would never recommend.
That’s a gateway to hell… 
Just simply “fork” (at runtime) at the highest level of the app: Work on seperate copies (the old versions doesn’t need any maintenance anymore) for every FW-version.
… like the app already does! But instead of exiting with an error message jump to the old application.
The App doesn’t need to support more than 2-3 versions and i don’t think it would be a big problem.