I just hit the kill switch on my own app…
🚀 Road to 1,000,000 #Votap users — Day 65 | Current: 1348
I just hit the kill switch on my own app…
And honestly… every app should have this.
Right after pushing the new update, I wanted to test it like a normal user.
Very soon I spotted a bug. Because of a concurrency issue, some users who already had a username assigned could sometimes see the picker again… and sometimes not.
That’s the worst kind of bug.
It works.
Until it doesn’t.
Completely random. Pure “luck” depending on what runs first.
So I didn’t risk it. I flipped the app into maintenance mode. Everyone sees a simple screen, no interaction, until it’s fixed. Not fun… but way better than letting users run into broken logic.
I always knew I’d mess something up eventually 🤣
This time it was concurrency.
If you’re building an app — have a kill switch.
You’ll thank yourself later.
Fix is already in app review.
Download Votap in the App Store if you want to try it out.
More tomorrow.
Replies
Are you using feature flags alongside the kill switch?
Votap
@violet_amelia That is something I am planning to do in the future maybe. Right now I can just enforce people to update to a new version of the app by me setting "minimal required version" remotely. So the flow here was - put app into maintenance mode, build the patch, put out the update, change minimal required version to the new one, turn off maintenance mode.
This is actually a really healthy engineering instinct. The kill switch isn’t about drama it’s about acknowledging that distributed bugs don’t degrade gracefully, they misbehave randomly, which is way worse for users. Flipping to maintenance mode is basically chossing controlled downtime over unpredictable corruption, and that’s usually the right call.
Votap
Good call on the kill switch, Alexandr. That instinct to protect users from a broken experience over keeping the numbers clean is exactly right.
Day 65 at 1,348 - building in public like this is underrated. Most founders avoid posting on the hard days. The readers who follow these daily updates are watching for the real thing, not the highlight reel.
Concurrency bugs are among the most humbling. They hide perfectly in staging and only surface at exactly the wrong moment. Good that you caught it before it scaled further.
Keep going. The daily log format is genuinely compelling to follow.
Votap
Hello Aria
Respect for writing this. It takes guts to pull the plug and even more guts to talk about it publicly. The part about sunk cost is so real - every founder I know has had at least one moment where they kept going not because the product was working but because stopping felt like admitting failure. Building Hello Aria, we have had moments where signals were mixed and it would have been easy to rationalize continuing in the wrong direction. What saved us was focusing on actual retention signals rather than vanity metrics. Users who kept coming back to WhatsApp every day to chat with the assistant - that told us something real. Hope whatever comes next for you is cleaner to read.
Concurrency bugs are a developer's nightmare. Everything looks fine in testing, but then production turns into a lottery. Flipping to maintenance mode was definitely the right call, a simple screen is way better than corrupted data. I've been there a few times myself and now always include a way to remotely disable features. Good luck with the App Store review!