A bug saved the company

Am I the only one who thinks that describing this as a "bug" sounds a bit off? Most bugs don't come with their own updated alert text. It sounds a bit more like they had planned to switch to a different trial method and enabled it earlier than they expected? Or maybe a "rogue" employee added the feature as an experiment and didn't tell anybody?

Possible, but they almost certainly had functionality to automatically convert from a number of seconds to text like “15 minutes” for rendering.

I think the alert text was supposed to only appear starting after 15 days. The bug was that this limitation began immediately.

Option 1: they had a minnutes and days funcion and someone typed days and minutes.

Option 2: they chech every 15 minutes if the trial time is over, so an inmediate expiration is notuced 15 days later. And 15 days - 15 minutes is a coincidence.

> Am I the only one who thinks that describing this as a "bug" sounds a bit off?

Yes, you are the only one, because you've misunderstood.

> Most bugs don't come with their own updated alert text. It sounds a bit more like they had planned to switch to a different trial method and enabled it earlier than they expected?

No, the bug was simply that the trial period ended after 15 minutes instead of the intended 15 days.

> Or maybe a "rogue" employee added the feature as an experiment and didn't tell anybody?

There were no employees. At the time this happened, the company consisted entirely of the 3 cofounders. In fact the bug, that is, the shortened trial period, is what allowed the company to grow and hire employees, although the company is still relatively small.

The text in the alert says "You've reached the recording time limit" and "Once you register, the recording length will be unlimited." That requires more than just changing the time variable. They went from "show this after X days" to "show this after X recorded minutes." It's a completely different metric that is reflected in the alert text.

From the article:

> After 15 days, Audio Hijack will nag you to register at launch and will quit after 15 minutes.

Before the bug: after 15 days, the 15 minutes alert would start to appear.

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From the article:

> In version 1.6, we accidentally broke the intended 15 days of unrestricted usage. Instead, from day one, the app was limited to 15 minutes of recording.

After the bug: the 15 minutes alert started to appear on day 1

You're still misunderstanding. Here's how it originally worked:

(1) For the first 15 days, you could make recordings of any length.

(2) After 15 days, you could use the app for only 15 minutes.

(3) If you paid, then you could once again make recordings of any length.

The bug was that "15 days" in (2) accidentally became 15 minutes, so that after only 15 minutes of trying the app, you were limited to using the app for only 15 minutes, which of course would happen the first time you used the app.

Perhaps you're confused because there were two factors both with a value of 15.

I think you're right. I think what confused me was the phrasing here:

"After 15 days, Audio Hijack will nag you to register at launch and will quit after 15 minutes. Additionally, the recording feature will be disabled."

"Instead, from day one, the app was limited to 15 minutes of recording."

My brain didn't make the jump from "the app quits after 15 minutes" to "the app is limited to 15 minutes of recording."

I had the same interpretation you did, and the same confusion. Great minds (???) think alike?

I think this is actually slightly incorrect.

> The bug was that "15 days" in (2) accidentally became 15 minutes

My understanding was that the 15 days became zero. If 15 days became 15 minutes, then depending on implementation it could run 30 minutes of first run? Or could be identical. Hard to know.

But, my reading is that the 15 day timer broke, allowing the other timer to take over, not that days became minutes.

This is clear. This is not clear in the original blog post. I did not care too read the original blog post additional times to clarify or click the links in it to clarify. The people who wrote the blog post could learn a thing or two about technical writing, and writing for the Internet from this post. The end.

15 days/15 minutes is not a coincidence at all. They were both present in v1.5. For 15 days, usage was unlimited. After day 15, recordings were limited to 15 minutes.

In v1.6, the 15 days was inadvertently removed. This meant that the 15 minute limit was in effect from day 0.