Smartlaunch Developer Blog

A little history

It comes as no surprise to anyone who’s followed the blog and forum that Smartlaunch 5.0 has been in development for a couple of years now. And while we haven’t officially announced a release date, we have speculated and mentioned possible release dates here and there that unfortunately have been exceeded every time. This is obviously a fault of ours and in hindsight we shouldn’t have mentioned any release date before it was final.

So where are we now?

We’ve put Smartlaunch 5.0 on hold.

I know what you’re thinking. It’s been in development for a couple of years and now you’re scrapping it!? No, we’re not scrapping SL5, but we have to be honest – it’s not coming along like we wanted. We wanted to release version 5 as a successor to version 4.1. More stable, more features and just generally better all-round.

However, we’ve taken a long hard look at the project and have come to the conclusion that this would not be the case. At least not if we release any time soon. There’s a lot of the 4.1 features in SL5 now, but there’s still a lot missing, and let’s be honest – with a new codebase built from the ground up, there’s bound to be a lot of bugs in the beginning. And probably a lot of bugs that are not in version 4.1 right now. And we don’t want to release a new version that’s inferior to the current version – even if it’s free for existing customers. That would just be wrong.

The future

So we’ve put the current version 5.0 on hold, but like I said, we’re not scrapping it. Instead, we’re re-thinking our strategy and will be focusing on other aspects of Smartlaunch that have been lacking for a while.

And as for the new SL5 skin from the design contest – well that may have a role to play yet. Stay tuned