Feature Needed: Staggered Rollouts

[JoshuaStrobl]

Hello,

As someone building an Ubuntu Touch application and recently taking part in the Q/A at http://summit.ubuntu.com/appdevweek-1403/meeting/22130/give-us-feedback-on-the-software-store/, it came to my attention that the Ubuntu Touch Software Center / Store does not have the ability for developers to have staggered rollouts / limited betas.

What is a staggered rollout? A staggered rollout is essentially a method of launching a new product, service, etc. and/or an update to said product, service, etc. in an incremental way that allows the developer to gauge feedback or catch issues that may have only been noticed by end-users, improve on said feedback then incrementally rollout the update(s) to more and more of the userbase.

I think it is important to implement this feature to allow developers to more easily gauge user feedback or catch unnoticed issues without releasing said version to 100% of their userbase. This staggered rollout feature currently exists in the Apple App Store as well as the Google Play Store (this is relevant as I'd like to think the Software Center experience should be on-par, if not better, than existing stores).

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

This was implemented for packages in the traditional archives in Ubuntu 13.04.
<http://qa.ubuntu.com/2013/08/07/phasing-of-stable-release-updates/>
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PhasedUpdates>

[JoshuaStrobl (joshua.strobl)]

Right, traditional archives with what seems to be an automated process for rolling out updates / packages. I'm talking about it from a purely manual point where the developer is in control of the percentage of people that get the app update (it's initially set to 10%, which I think is too high), when an update gets rolled out (as in specified date / time), etc.