Why Path Members Stick Around Despite Major Issues Affecting the Service

Path's recent troubles with its latest version highlights an issue that many developers face when releasing a major update to their apps or services especially if it contains brand new features that redefines the app. When the company released Path 3.0 a couple of weeks ago it immediately ran into unexplained down times affecting both the primary stream updates as well as its new messaging network. This is reminiscent of when Apple botched the switch from MobileMe to iCloud back in 2011. Path's members however, are sticking around.

As we noted previously, Path has been having regular connectivity issues over the past year, especially on weekends, which prevented people from loading their streams, posting updates, and even logging back in if they log out during or prior to the connection failure. For a lot of irritated members, Path's release of version 3 seemingly ignored the stability issues that's been facing the network for such a long time.

Down times have become such a regular occurrence on Path that many people began to accept it as part of the package. However, despite these issues, people are sticking to Path similar to how people were sticking to Twitter back in 2008 when the service was inundated with the famous Fail Whale as well as the not as famous worm and ice cream message.

TechCrunch recently reported that mobile consumers have a low tolerance when it comes to using online services and apps. They expect launch times of two seconds or less and the majority of people surveyed will not give a third chance if an app fails to work the first time.

79 percent report that they would only retry an app once or twice if it failed to work the first time. Only 16 percent said they would give it more than two attempts.

Path's excellence in design perhaps played a key role in keeping those irritated members around. Because the app is so well made, actual usage issues became little more than a nuisance that are expected to be solved win a reasonable amount of time.

Tees and Gantibaju co-founder Aria Rajasa said he didn't want to use Path at first because "it was so buggy". He didn't return to Path until recently and it was also because his friends were on it. "I didn't wanna be left out of the gossip".

On a more serious note, Rajasa said that deploying new features on apps and services can certainly be managed to avoid clashing with each other. In certain cases, a modular system can be used to separate new features from existing ones so that the resources don't necessarily step on each others' toes.

According to Abu A'la Almaujudy, co-founder of Jakarta-based app development company Better-B, Path's problems may have been a scalability issue. "As more users began to hit the servers, it's resources became overloaded and as a result, they took the entire network down", he said.

Sanny Gaddafi, entrepreneur, mentor, and one of the principals at Founder Institute Jakarta, said that Path may have been far too sexy for its members to abandon when they face usage issues. With such a high attraction rate, the value of design and privacy may have been far too strong for Path members to even consider leaving the service. There simply aren't any other service that serve this particular need. Facebook certainly has little respect in the way of privacy even if it has built in privacy control settings and continually reinvents itself on the design front.

Sebastian Amudi of Singapore's Trade Hero loves Path's latest update. "Path 3 is very cool, I like it a lot. Reliability was an issue last week, but not anymore, and it's much better than ads and annoying pop-ups throughout the year."

Path is an app that offers a unique proposition in that it combines a private space for people to share their stories and experiences, with enough control to determine their audience, packaged in a well designed environment. In Indonesia, there is nothing like it. This is something that news reader apps or messaging apps don't enjoy.

With large numbers of substitutes to choose from, apps like Zite, Flipboard, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Skype, Google Current, and others have little room for mistake. Any significant and long term problem experienced by their users will easily cause a shift and get them to move to competing apps.

This exclusivity in its field allows Path a far more forgivable environment in which it can operate and deploy features without fearing of a major backlash resulting in an exodus.