Firefox 87 landed on March 23, 2021, unfortunately introducing a new issue for SquadCasters. SquadCast has fully supported Mozilla Firefox on desktop and mobile (Android) since v2 landed on July 22, 2019, largely without incident until recently. SquadCasters began reporting primary audio recordings with much shorter durations than had been recorded. Not good. Our Support and Engineering Teams jumped in to learn more, identify the cause, and collaborate with SquadCasters to arrive at a solution. We learned that…

  1. The primary audio recording duration issue was limited only to SquadCasters recording on Firefox
  2. Firefox 87 had landed a few days earlier
  3. The open source community that maintains Firefox had also identified the issue
  4. Engineering for a solution was already well underway
  5. Firefox 88 would land with the solution on April 19, 2021

We are committed to transparency at SquadCast, and this was a great opportunity to practice communicating the facts to SquadCasters with an email, tweets, posts in our Facebook Groups, and support conversations. Our Engineers discussed the issue and thought through potential solutions, but decided because…

  1. backup recordings were unaffected by this issue
  2. the Firefox community had already taken ownership of the root solution
  3. SquadCasters had been notified and could use other web browsers

…that a short-term, in-house solution was not the move. Instead, we decided to invest our Engineering resources into testing SquadCast in beta releases of the web browsers we support (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, & Brave on desktop and Android), and move towards platform independence.

Platform Independence

The Web Platform is where SquadCast will always have its roots, but it can sometimes introduce barriers to our mission to amplify collaboration. Some examples include…

  1. regressions and issues like we experienced with Firefox 87
  2. throttling of browser tabs that are not in-focus
  3. browser extensions changing the experience in obscure ways
  4. two-factor media permissions model that are confusing
  5. limited support for (media) web standards in Safari/WebKit/iOS.

For these and other reasons, we are mobilizing our team’s efforts to develop, maintain, and support the SquadCast Platform beyond the Web.

We are committed, in the coming months, to delivering world-class full-featured apps for iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows, and Linux that empower SquadCasters to record studio-quality podcasts from anywhere.