I’m sure many people would’ve been happy to get their act together and deliver a functional solution for the community had they though that they had a .01% chance of succeeding in getting their solution adopted.
I’d point out that @Groupus and @TELTECH also built solutions and were active and engaged with the community, and that GroupItUp (claims) they only didn’t open because another service was arbitrarily promoted. Others had ideas as well, as I’m sure you came across if you read these forums.
That doesn’t take away from what anyone else did, but from what I understand some people are frustrated that this seems to have been a back channel solution - as they were hoping for something more open, and for community/user input to be considered. Obviously, companies are entitled to do as they did, and I understand the hesitations about opening something like this to the public, nevertheless some of the concerns expressed with a proprietary approach remain, namely we don’t know anything about our data security, our privacy, or if expensive premium phones are going to turn into ad farms. We also can’t build out additions or features which would have been nice.
I will definitely be using Tzibbur, and it seems beautiful in simplicity, however I took the time to write this post because your comment of “stepping up instead of just standing on the side complaining” seems almost a dig at people who are (somewhat justifiably) frustrated that they could not help when they wanted to, and at the loose ends in the solution (like privacy for example). It’s easy to be flippant if these things do not concern you, but this solution is aiming to service a huge population and it does concern others.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.