Take a read of this post:
It seems to me that the Blynk team decided to take a different approach and the beta testing was effectively done in-house and with paying customers, otherwise the customers mentioned above would be running an alpha version.
I guess (and its only a guess) that the beta testing will be about testing the deployment of the public (free?) version of the system. Other comments by the Blynk team make me think that there will be some features that are accessible for free (or via an affordable payment/subscription) and others that are reserved for business customers. This might be because there is a degree of manual intervention required to set-up some features in the background, or because of the desire to create/maintain a two tier system that incentivises serious users to pay a bit (or a lot) more.
Personally, I’m fairly happy with the current version of Blynk.
I really only use Blynk as an app front-end to my Node-Red/MQTT logic engine, and I chose it because of the combination of ease of use, functionality reliability and low cost. Many of those reasons are still valid three years after making that choice.
Yes, it would be nice to have a desktop version, but not essential for me.
What would be more important for me are more tools to improve the app layout, with better granularity to place widgets, the ability to re-size widgets to be smaller and less clunky, and the ability to de-activate (grey-out) widgets in certain circumstances. From the comments above it seems that some of these are in the new version and some aren’t.
Probably the single most important thing for me would be Node-Red/MQTT integration with the new version, and as this was never an in-house piece of development it’s difficult to know if this would be encouraged/facilitated for the new version. There are workarounds to this, by using a device to act as a Blynk to MQTT bridge, but personally I think I’d seek-out a new app front-end rather than going down that route. The good thing about my approach is that it’s relatively easy to switch to a app front-end because none of my devices use Blynk specific code so it would just be a case of re-configuring my Node-Red configuration. It would even be possible to run two systems in parallel to a certain extent.
I think that those ‘old’ power users who wanted more from the app have probably already migrated to something else that was more suited to their particular needs. The rest of us are people who would probably have been happy carrying-on with Blynk as it was, but the green grass on the other side of the fence (in the form of the promised Blynk 2.0) has made people disillusioned with the current version.
Pete.