Our customers deserve stable apps on cloud

General
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#1

Hey All,

Lately it has started to feel like Atlassian product development has gotten further and further away from the ecosystem. To us it seems like the Atlassian PMs are building out features in Confluence and Jira without having a clue about the ecosystem and how the vendors rely on the integration points and the REST APIs.

Two things we have noticed lately:

  1. Documented REST APIs are frequently broken when changes or new features are rolling out.
  2. When new features are introduced, the ecosystem is not considered. The latest example was when the presenter mode in Confluence Cloud was released. Basically, no third-party macros were working.

From the customer’s point of view, they expect the native functionality of Confluence and Jira to match the functionality available to the ecosystem. Hence our customers are blaming us when our apps are not working or when the functionality is limited. It’s impossible for us in the ecosystem to do stable, high-quality cloud apps. We also deal with a lot of support that should have been directed towards Atlassian.

For us to continue to build successful apps on the cloud and to meet the customers expectations, Atlassian needs to close the gap between native feature development and the APIs. Ideally, release the new functionality and the supporting REST APIs at the same time.

I would like to hear if other Marketplace vendors share the same pain points as we do.

40 Likes
#2

I’m one of those customers that you talk about (I think we actually use your software). Yes, we do deserve that you get a chance to update your systems to take advantage of the new Confluence/JIRA features, or I can’t use those features for a number of months after. When I see something new in Confluence I figure I’ll try it in about 3 months time, when you have had a chance to catch up with the changes. I get where you are coming from and feel bad when I have to report something that has broken, and it has clearly broken due to a Confluence change.

Sometimes its the ecosystem that makes the Atlassian product usable for us - Atlassian appear to no longer want to support some features and are therefore happy to push that support out to the ecosystem. If that is Atlassian’s intention then they need to support the ecosystem better.

3 Likes