Forge background processes keep running for older versions (maybe disabled/uninstalled too)

Forge
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Hello everyone,

With Forge set to become a paid platform in a few months, several concerns have come up.
All of them are related to the consumption of background processes (event listeners, scheduled triggers…) in instances that haven’t been updated for a long time, and also in instances where the app has been disabled or even uninstalled.

We suspect that these kinds of instances that are no longer using, or have stopped using, the app may still be generating costs because those background processes keep running. In our case, the clue that led us to this topic was that we started receiving errors from instances due to unsupported Node versions. These versions are very old in our app, yet we can still see installations running them in the Developer Console.

We believe there’s nothing we can do on our side, especially when customers are using old versions of the app.

I’d like to gather some feedback from other partners to see if you’ve experienced something similar:

  • Have you noticed that Forge app customers are slow to update? Do you have any way to improve the new version adoption?

    • Do you think a good practice here can be to make every tier pay for the app so they will stop the subscription if they are not using the app?

  • If you have background processes, do you get errors when they’re running on old app versions that use unsupported Node versions?

  • Have you observed whether background processes keep running for clients after they stop their subscription or even remove the app?

Thanks,
Álvaro.

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Updating has always been a pain for Forge apps.

Customers don’t have any incentive to update, and they usually don’t even know there’s an update, because the update button is only shown deep in the admin panel, where people don’t generally go.

AFAIK we didn’t have issues with disabled or uninstalled apps, but old versions are a constant source of worry.

We try to show it on our own UI when there’s a newer version on the marketplace, but it’s not an ideal solution.

The one thing you can do - and I recommend doing it - is the bulk-upgrade function in forge cli.
That can help a lot with bumping up old versions, but it’s not a silver bullet, because you can’t update to app versions with new permissions for example, without user consent. That is of course understandable, but it’s still a major pain.

You can also backport some changes to older versions, if you have some time you can waste on this problem. Not a real solution, but it can help in some cases.

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Hi @alvaro.aranda , thanks for bringing this up. We are aware of this issue of apps without entitlement being still active. We are currently looking to introducing a fix.

I am however surprised to hear that you also see apps consuming background processes when they have been uninstalled and would like to further investigate this use case. If you could provide us with more details this would be helpful

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Hello @JuliaDaehne ,

Thanks a lot for confirming you are just working on it. Is there any place where I can track and watch the progress?

I do not have an evidence of uninstalled / unsuscribed installations. But, I can see there are some Jira instances that have been removed because customers deleted them (sandboxes mainly, I suppose) and the installation is still there in the Developer Console. That moves me to think about this kind of corner cases that may be surrounded by the same problem: these processes will still be there generating cost for the partner for no value to the customer.

I hope this will be completely reviewed and fixed before Forge becomes a paid platform :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot @JuliaDaehne

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