I’m greatly concerned about this change… I have a significant investment in supporting and providing non-Sangoma phones and using Phone Apps with my clients. Does this mean if I purchase the Phone Apps commercial module after this weekend for other FreePBX installations that it wouldn’t work for non-Sangoma phones?
If for example, Digium, Yealink or Mitel/Aastra comes out with newer phones, they will not work with Phone Apps?
The models of “supported devices” for Phone Apps is also not up-to-date or comprehensive… which concerns me that if say a Mitel 6873i phone that works on Phone Apps today, would it not be supported after this weekend?
I feel like this a forced move. The thing I’ve liked about FreePBX is the openness and flexibly to chose different options of hardware endpoints regardless of brand and this is severely limiting that.
I would definitely pay more for a Phone Apps module to devote resources to keeping it up to date and compatible with other non-Sangoma endpoints than just blanket limiting myself to only one brand.
We are getting ready to send out our latest Newsletter tomorrow stating that effective July 1st Phone Apps for 3rd Party Phones will enter End Of Life with End of Sale being Oct 1st 2017 in accordance with Sangoma normal EOL policy as found here http://www.sangoma.com/support/end-of-life-policy/. It was not a easy decision but its becoming way to expensive and hard for us to manage.
We get very little support from most the manufactures that we had included at one point for Phone Apps. Bugs keep coming up weekly that are out of our control and we have users doing Credit Card charge backs after purchase because things dont work with X model of phone or X manufacture correct.
After a full evaluation of our options and cost it became evident we were spending more money on this with Development cost than we were bringing in Revenue. This has been the case for over 3 years now and has not improved at all and each June we evaluate all of our products. We only have so many resources to allocate to things and this just doesn’t make the cut anymore.
Phone Apps have not officially supported those other manufactures and users were not understanding this since they paid for it they expect it to work and be supported.
FreePBX is all about Freedom of Choice and we still provision over 300 unique devices for this reason.
Would it be possible to have an additional charge to keep 3rd party phone apps in development? Something like a commercial module for “3rd party phone apps” to help make up the revenue difference?
The reason I ask is that I just begged and begged my boss to redo our entire phone system less than a year ago. I told him all of the bad things about the previous system and all of the great things about FreePBX. He said “yes” and everything was redone with a new FreePBX system. We use the phone apps heavily on all of the Digium and Mitel 6869i’s in house. If the apps stopped working he would be furious with me in indescribable ways.
Could there be an option to at least purchase Phone Apps for non-Sangoma phones in some sort of Legacy or reduced support format?
I have a few prospects in my sales pipeline for new PBXes… this kind of throws a wrench in things if I can’t even buy the same module I have running on other FreePBX instances.
I guess lets see what the reaction here is. I can tell you internally we did not expect much as their has been very few sales of it this year. I am talking less in revenue this year so far then you pay yourself at a reasonable rate of even 20.00 a hour for the last 6 months. If users truly want it we do not want to take away any sales but we just have not seen the demand. If we were to sell it and market it as 3rd Party Phone Apps what would you the users be willing to pay for it with and without support?
The issue of the with no support is people still buy it and when it doesn’t work they demand it be fixed and when we can not fix it they do Charge Backs on their Credit Cards.
The apps would not stop working. You bought them and if they work today they will work tomorrow as long as you do not start upgrading firmware and things which today is the same risk as firmware keeps breaking things that we have to keep fixing or working around.
I did just correct a mistake in my post that said end of sale being July 1st. That is when the notice goes out but you have 3 months to continue to purchase it.
Currently Phone Apps 25yr License is $175 w/ 1yr Maintenance Renewals at $31.50
If this was marketed as a 3rd Party Phone Apps Module (w/ Legacy Functionality), I’d be willing to pay up to $300 for the 25yr license and $50/year for maintenance renewals.
Unless you are speaking of continuing support for future 3rd party phones, then I could see this being maybe community fundraising (or a bounty) based on interest to pay for the development hours to create this. For example if the FreePBX community wanted support for a Polycom VVX phone, then fundraising (or crowdsourcing) the development and support of that phone.
OK thanks for the info. No what I envision is the existing phone apps still being sold as they are today but with official support and it could only include the manufactures we have direct relationship to with our certification program which would be Digium and Yealink at this time. Neither Mitel or Obi are Certified Partners and would take pressure from the community to them to become certified.
The real cost here is the constant maint it takes to keep things working so if we brought it back it would be sold as a 1 year only license that you renew yearly and would need to be close to 200 a year I would think for us to be able to justify the time it takes based on the current sales of the past 5 years of the module.
How will this affect renewals for existing implementations. I have several that are Aastra/ Mitel 57i centric. It won’t be practical or acceptable for me to go to my customers and tell them they have to replace all their phones.The apps work great right now. The customers are very happy. My fear is that you guys will release a future version that might break these installations because you no longer feel obligated to maintain some level of compatibility with endpoint other than Sangoma’s.
For the record, I really like the Sangoma phones and will build future deployments around them.
Also, I realise 3rd party phones are technically unsupported but when I bought these apps and the Aastra phones, they were approved or certified or whatever based on information on your wiki. Aasta devices were chosen based on this functionality and these decisions were made before Sangoma was part of this puzzle.
Since, to my knowledge, the apps have always worked on the Aastra 57is, What ongoing development cost is associated with supporting them? I think I might have submitted one related bug report in the last five years. Can’t imagine it being that much. Maybe pick a app and firmware version for widely used models and freeze them there…
As far as how it works for future upgrades. I am not sure to be honest and you should stick with a version that works for you after our End of Support period in 2018 kicks in as releases after that date wont include support for those phones anymore.
As far as approved or Certified Aastra/Mitel was never certified by us. Yealink and Digium are a Certified Partner which helps when issues arise wiih Phone Apps but Aastra and Obi we do not have that relationship with.
You get that already. By not upgrading they are froze on what you have today installed. That is all controlled by you and what you decide to upgrade. The 57i is a bad example as its a EOL phone from aastra for years but that is a example where things get hard as it holds back the whole development of phone apps as newer models add new things and now we have to add exceptions everywhere which makes maintaining the apps really hard since for example Call Flow is a single App and it behaves differently on different models and firmware and what is causing us lots of grief is because of things like this. Us supporting a phone that is not even supported by the manufacture anymore is kind of crazy for us.
True the original version is EoL but they just won’t die
We have used the 6737 on newer deployments and have had the same level of success. I just want to make sure those older deployments don’t suffer as a result. For instance, I have one I’d like to bring to the new distro in development. Will Sangoma’s decisions to end sales and “support” for these apps restrict my ability to stay current and supported? At some point my installation would no longer be supported due to inability to stay updated even though I bought the 25 year license and continued to renew maintenance. Leaving the customer with the option to replace working phones or abandon functionality they’ve come to rely on.
We aren’t there yet, but I can see this as the obvious eventuality and it puts both of us in a difficult position.
So for PBXact Units we have yealink phones and we run the firmware updates only as we are suppose to do. We have a few hundred yealinks deployed across many deployments before we changed to Sangoma Phones. Can I no longer update my phone system?
Or am I understanding that Yealink and Digium phones will continue to work since they are a certified partner?
For the next year they will continue to work as we provide 12 month support notice. After that their is no guarantees that updating will not break things and more importantly as the manufactures change firmware things with phone apps on those manufactures will break by them and we will not be changing the code in phone apps to accomodate.
