As a Formula 1 fan, while watching a F1 Grad Prix, I've been using real-time information feeds on https://www.formula1.com/en/f1-live.html pretty much since it was released. If memory serves me correct, that must have been around season 2008. After getting my first iPad (yes, the 1st gen one) in 2011, I went for the beautiful paid App by Soft Pauer flooding me with all kinds of information during the race. I assumed, that I had all the same information available as the TV-commentators.

In 2014 something happened. The app was same, but the publisher changed into Formula One Digital Media Limited, making it not a 3rd party software, but an official F1-product. At the same time, the free timing on the website was removed, causing a lot of commotion, as an example Why did FIA dumb-down the Live Timing on F1.com? Also, in a review (Official F1 Live Timing App 2014 reviewed), the paid app was considered very pricey and not worth the value. Years 2015 onwards, made it evident, that in loving care of the Formula One Group, they improved the app adding content, more content, improving the value and finally a TV to it. It was possible to actually watch the race via the app. All this ultimately resulted in a must-have app for every F1 fan.

This year, for Singapore weekend, they did something immensly stupid.

They changed this:

into this:

ARGH!

Did they really think nobody would notice? To put it shortly, their change was a drastical one. I ditched the new timing app after 5 minutes of failing attempts to get anything useful out of it. The people doing the design for that piece of sofware completely dropped the ball. Thy simply whipped up "something". Probably in their bright minds it was the same thing than before, it kinda looked the same, right. Obviously, they had zero idea what any form of motor racing is about. What information would be useful to anybody specatating a motor racing event was completely out of their grasp. They just published this change to App Store and went on happily.

Guess what will happen, when you take an expensive piece of yearly subscribed software and remove all the value from it. You will, but the authors of the software didn't.

IT MAKES PEOPLE MAD!

It didn't take too long (next race, to be exact), when they silently dropped the timing feature and released the old app as a spin-off titled F1 Live Timing. Obviously informing any paying customers of such a thing wasn't very high on their list of priorities. In their official statement they went for the official mumbo-jumbo: "The launch of our new F1 app didn't quite live up to your expectations, and live timing didn't deliver the great mobile F1 experience you previously enjoyed." By googling, I found tons of articles like Formula 1 makes old live timing app available again after problems.

As a friendly person, I'll offer my list of things to remember for FOM personnel in charge of those apps:

• Do not annoy paying customers. They won't pay much longer.
• If you do annoy paying customers, make sure they won't be really annoyed. They will for sure stop paying.
• If you make your paying customers mad, have the courtesy of apologizing about that.
• Also, make sure all of your paying customers know about new relevant apps, which are meant to fix your own failures.
• Improve on software design. Hire somebody who actually follows the sport to the design and testing teams.

Thank you.