Hey there @turbo2ltr – my name is Will, and I just wanted to thank you for providing honest feedback on the experience you’ve had with our developer tools so far. It sounds like it hasn’t been the experience you were hoping for, so I’m thankful that you took the time to provide so many examples where we could improve.
Regarding each opportunity you cited where we could improve:
Setup
We agree that mobile setup can be a pain. Native mobile setup is difficult to maintain as a small team, especially because there is enough variation between Wi-Fi environments without adding additional complexity of different versions of mobile operating systems, especially with Android. Our Android app has a bunch of known issues, but we’ll be releasing a new version in the next 2 weeks that should address most of the setup issues you might have run into.
Our setup process using the CLI is pretty good, and in general we recommend the CLI for pro users like yourself. We’re also launching a beta version of browser based softAP setup in the next 2 weeks that we intend to become the new default setup process for the Photon.
Documentation
Sorry you had trouble finding the Firmware API reference documentation. Because we have both firmware and Cloud APIs for developers, we tried to differentiate them by the part of the stack they live in. Good feedback on expected vs. actual labeling.
Web IDE
The Web IDE is one of our first and oldest developer environments, and there’s definitely room for improvement. We’re continuously trying to bring the development experience there more in line with our Desktop IDE and CLI, and agree that the navigation could use a facelift. Expect to see steady progress here over the next several months.
Photon connectivity
The reliability of the connection is an area where our platform usually shines. if you’re seeing stability issues with your Photon, please reach out to our Customer Support team who can help diagnose any issues you might be having and help with a replacement in the event that there’s a problem with the hardware.
USB serial
We’ve got a quick fix for this one! If you download the Particle CLI and use the particle serial monitor --follow command (a community pull request!) it will automatically recognize when your device comes back online and restart the flow of serial commands.
Thank you again for such a comprehensive summary of your frustrations. We’re a very small team of engineers trying to provide support for a wide variety of development interfaces, SDKs, documentation, and cloud infrastructure but actionable feedback from customers is what helps ensure we continue to point our efforts in the right direction!
If we’re not where you’d like us to be today, I hope you’ll revisit our tools in 3-6 months to see the progress we’ve made. Cheers from Particle!