The version of HYDRA app we almost killed (luckily, we haven’t)
Yours truly never quite understood why app developers would go through all the trouble of writing useful software, only to limit it to a single platform. It just doesn’t seem fair, to say the least.
And therein lies the reason why we decided to make a Windows version of HYDRA in the first place.
At the time, we didn’t even have a single Windows machine at HYDRA Labs. We just knew there was going to be a Windows version.
We are now considering investing in a few more Windows machines. Because, in the meantime, we’ve also discovered that apparently you can run games on them too. Good god.
Built for real-world check-in.
See plans and choose what fits your workflow.
The slightly annoying child
Here’s the thing, though.
HYDRA has always felt like a natural fit for touch-based devices. You hold one in your hand, point its camera at a QR code, tap when you need to tap, and move on to the next attendee. Phones and tablets are practically built for that kind of interaction.
Windows is a slightly different story.
Yes, touch-based Windows devices absolutely exist. But they’re nowhere near as ubiquitous as they are on the other platforms HYDRA supports. The far more familiar Windows setup still involves a laptop or desktop, a keyboard, a mouse and, if you want fast QR scanning, then you need a scanner device.
So, perhaps somewhat naively, we assumed that the Windows version of HYDRA was destined to remain a niche option.
And maintaining a niche option still means building it, testing it and putting it through its own release process every time HYDRA gets an update.
So, eventually, the obvious question appeared:
Why are we still doing this?
At one point, we seriously considered removing the Windows version from the Microsoft Store and treating it more like our Linux build – available if somebody actually needs it, but not something we’d actively maintain and distribute alongside the mobile versions.
There was just one tiny thing we hadn’t done before reaching that conclusion.
We hadn’t looked at the numbers.
Well, this is awkward
So we did.
And, as it turns out, the platform distribution of HYDRA installations looks approximately like this:
Windows: 74%
Apple platforms: 16%
Android: 10%
Yes.
The Windows version we were considering quietly putting out to pasture accounts for almost three quarters of all HYDRA installations. It has more installations than every other platform combined. And by quite a margin.
So I guess either someone, somewhere, had a spare warehouse full of Windows machines and decided to invest in an equal number of barcode scanners or people still love Windows considerably more than I’m willing to accept.
There is, of course, a much less entertaining explanation.
A laptop running HYDRA with a cheap USB or Bluetooth barcode scanner can make a perfectly capable dedicated check-in station. For an event organiser who already has the hardware lying around, it actually makes quite a lot of sense. Whether that’s what’s really happening, we don’t know yet.
Which brings us to perhaps the most useful thing we learned from all of this.
Maybe check first
Installation numbers don’t tell us everything. They don’t tell us whether Windows installations are responsible for the same proportion of actual check-ins, nor exactly how people are using HYDRA on those machines.
That’s something we’d now very much like to understand. But they did tell us something considerably more important: Our assumption was spectacularly wrong.
We built HYDRA for multiple platforms because we didn’t want to decide which devices people should be allowed to use. Then, somewhere along the way, we almost made exactly that decision based on our own assumptions about how people were using it.
Luckily, before killing anything, we checked analytics.
So here’s today’s extremely sophisticated product-development lesson:
Before you decide nobody uses something, perhaps check whether anybody uses it.
You might save yourself from killing your most popular version.