Mudita Pure: Important update about the production calendar

In the last update, we informed you about the current progress and our predictions regarding the shipping dates of Mudita Pure. Most of the crucial elements and processes were going according to schedule, which made us feel confident about the shipping date.

Unfortunately the production process sometimes brings unpleasant surprises which are outside of our control. Last week, we came across an issue which has forced us to revise our production calendar. The latest tests with the molding form for the body part revealed a serious problem, which we need to fix before starting the mass production.

Together with our partner, responsible for constructing this injection molding form, weā€™ve come up with the solution and prepared the plan for correcting this flaw.
Now, the manufacturer of the molding form will need to redesign the injection molding form and repeat the process in order to fix the problem. The most complex procedure, with 7 additional trials, means we will see the end result in April. However, we hope to solve this problem faster.

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Summary: :sob::broken_heart:

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Soā€¦ April 2021 essentially. Sorry to hear. Hope yā€™all are able to release earlier.

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@Jose_Briones Dig your LP2 videos, mang!

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Appreciate the transparency, but this update sucks a lot.

It does not answer the only important question every single reader of the email will have, which is: When the hell am I getting my phone?

You should read how companies like e.g., Interactive Brokers, communicate bad news. Status, impact, new timeline. Explanation of why all this happened and apologies after.

Now Iā€™m gonna what? Sit and wonder when Iā€™ll get my phone? I have more questions, 'cause YOU raised them, and then you totally didnā€™t do anything to answer them.

Big-time BOO.

Hi Stephen,

thank you for your comment. I understand that you are not happy with the latest update. I feel you. All people at Mudita are working hard to deliver a high-quality product that we will be proud of. We were very close to the final result and now we need to take a step back. This feeling sucks, but we will go through it and go back to working extra hard to deliver the project that we all are waiting for.

We could give some artificial date somewhere in the future, but we didnā€™t do that on purpose. We presented the process and the approximate timeline because we respect all backers of our project who trusted us and paid their hard-earned money. They deserve to see exactly what we are going through, even if itā€™s not convenient for us because we value the trust of our backers higher than our convenience.

As soon as we have the first results, we will share them with you.

If you have any additional questions, I will be happy to answer them.

Best,
Lukasz

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Hopefully the software team will be hard at work in the meantime to continue hammering out bugs and working on features? I see no reason not to be able to work on having predictive text ready on launch day if release has been pushed out another 6-7 months.

And of course, as always, there is the fear of never getting the finished product. I do hope that thereā€™s eventually going to be a phone waiting at the end of this tunnel and not bankruptcy or buyout.

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Hi @boneblack,

Yes, of course, we will be continually working on the operating system until the release of the phone. We will use that additional time to extend testing, improving existing features and we will also add more stuff. As we have already promised in the previous update, tomorrow we will have some more news regarding MuditaOS so stay tuned!

Best,
Lukasz

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Too bad the batteries are made in China. The CCP is like the worlds greatest violator of human rights. I hope you change your supplier as soon as possible. I donā€™t want my money helping the regime over there in even the smallest way. One of the main reasons for me wanting to support Mudita and paying a premium, is that you promised ethical sourcing, which this is notā€¦ :disappointed: Really disappointedā€¦

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Thank you for addressing the issue head on and for communicating with such forthrightness and transparency. Delays are a bummer for everybody, yet this may well be a blessing in disguise. This is a first release: I hope everybody appreciates how hard it is to do risk mitigation and time/cost estimation with a totally new thingā€”an object never-before-built and unlike anything in existence. A silver lining: this delay creates space for greater refinements and improvements (as detailed in the post). Consumers like me will have a better experience thanks to the additional iterations and extended schedule. More time and care should mean software that is more stable and usable and hardware that is more durable and friendly.
:wheel_of_dharma:ļøŽ :heart:

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Hi Marcin,

Iā€™m sorry to hear that. We are fully transparent about all.the components. We canā€™t satisfy 100% needs of all the customers. Itā€™s nearly impossible to develop a hardware product nowadays without a single Chinese component. (Especially without adding one more zero the price). Not that we didnā€™t try. Even leaders in a sustainable supply chain like Fairphone ended up producing batteries in China.

With the current buying power, itā€™s difficult for us to do everything in a perfect way, but we will get better at it.

Cheers,
Lukasz

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Thank you @zmvictor for your kind words, they mean a lot! We are constantly learning how to be better at what we do, even if these are hard lessons sometimesā€¦

Cheers from Warsaw!
Lukasz

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Appreciate it! Iā€™ll be making Mudita ones once it comes out :slight_smile:

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You guys keep rocking it!! Thanks for the transparency and doing the best you can :slight_smile:

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Hi,
Firstly, thanks for the updates they are always appreciated, and iā€™m very much looking forward to receiving the finished phone next year.

Like someone else mentioned, it is unfortunate that Mudita have had to implement Chinese batteries. One of the major positives going for this phone is that fact that it is ethically made, and made in Europe. Personally Iā€™ve been burnt too many times over the years with cheap Chinese garbage products to have much faith left in them, not to mention Chinese working conditions and the impact this has on not only Chinese, but manufacturing industries across the globe. Its just so unfortunate that we now have to perpetuate the 'nesessity 'of made-in-china manufacturing further.

One more thing, This Molding form that has turned problematic, it wouldnā€™t happen to the the 1-out-of-7 molding forms that Mudula have also had to get made in China would it ?

Thank you again though for continuing to push on with what is still shaping up to be a great product.
Cheers,
Rumpole

Thanks for the info.
Iā€™m looking forward to see how the Mudita Software team spends the additional ~6 months to improve the software.That is a lot of additional dev cycles to get stuff done!And all without hardware changes! Any SW developers wet dream.

What is to come out of it?
T9 predictive text input (all patents are now expired)?
Signal Client for secure communication?

Or maybe it is time to finally take the plunge by moving the OS to Open Source on github and be surprised on just how positive the results will be:
An OS that is peer reviewed by global talent for additional security.
Committed enthusiasts, that will go ahead and develop features they feel are missing (see above) themselves, published on github so the mudita team can pull them into the main OS tree if decide its up to their standards.
And last but not least, additional sold units to all those people that will not touch a device if they are not able to compile the OS from source code.

BR Robert

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Iā€™ve been avoiding commenting on the delays because I can only imagine how difficult it is to design, fabricate, and test all aspects of a new device. Iā€™ve been a fan of Mudita even before they launched the Kickstarter.
However, this new update has left me with a sour taste.

Iā€™ll bring back Update #21 for starters.
When looking at your development status charts it almost immediately felt as if the Pure was further behind schedule than stated on some items which sound quite important such as Injection Molding Trials and Optimisation, PCB Production for Final Product, and even the Assembly Trials and Optimisation, not to mention the what I consider to be insufficiently advanced Certification acquisition process. Numbers from 20% to 40% progress in these areas with few-months remaining before first batch delivery didnā€™t seem realistic at all to me; the necessary QA/QC before first batch wouldnā€™t have been sufficient.
However, I let it pass, because I have no experience with putting out a new device on the market.

When it comes to Update #22, I have some skepticism accepting the fact that this production issue wasnā€™t discovered before making the previous Update.
The buffer time allocated for production testing seems insufficient in this case. It gives a feeling of being rushed.
If I interpret both updates in a certain way, from April earlier this year to Fall delay is about 5-6 months, and then December to April 2021 is a similar time span. These delays seem arbitrary or standard.

These elements do not give an impression of good planning. It makes me feel as if there are things happening behind the scenes which are not shared.
Also, keep in mind that it is simply an impression. I do not know how the fabrication companies work, nor the inner workings of Mudita, and the covid situation makes everything more difficult.

To close this, I want to specify that what upsets me is NOT the delay, but rather the impression of inadequate planning and preparation for all the production steps (hardware, software, certifications), plus a feeling of having things rushed (felt like a difficult promise to deliver first batches in december when in the timeline the final development phases were less than 1/3 complete).

I may be wrong about all of this, and I would be happy to be proven wrong. I can also understand obstacles appearing along the way, even those unknown unknowns. However, for such a long development time, these delays are increasingly difficult to pardon.

I am not looking for answers from Michał, Łukasz, or Tomasz, because their time is better spent elsewhere. What I want is for them to simply consider my opinion and act upon it internally.

What these delays and updates do is that they set higher quality expectations; but these delays are only in place to fix issues and complete the development of the quality promised one year ago.

I donā€™t know what to think at this point. Iā€™m still a fan of the philosophy behind Pure, but I canā€™t help but feel disconnected from it given these updates.

Can we get some reviews from people who have been testing the earlier non-optimised versions of the phone? How did those improve over time?

I just want to get a better feeling of the holistic user experience, where it started and where it is going. I feel we are receiving less updates from the human aspect of it and more from the technical part - which is also valuable - but in the end people who want to use the phone are not as interested in the technical details, rather more in how it will make them feel.

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Thank you @rumpole for your comment!
No, it has nothing to do with it. The form that we need to improve is developed in Poland.

Cheers,
Lukasz

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Hi @Filip_Popescu,

thank you for investing your time in this long comment! I donā€™t take it in a negative way, if you have some concerns there also might be more people who think similarly, and speaking about all the problems, even if itā€™s tough, A.) builds trust B.) is fair.

Hardware production requires trials and iterating over them. I wish we could have known earlier about the delays - believe me, it would also save a lot of our time and stress internally preparing for the launch.

Mudita Pure is our first hardware product. Was everything perfect? Of course not. We made some decisions a few months ago to make sure that we deliver the product on time. Some of the ā€œbetsā€ that we made were successful, but as you can see some of them werenā€™t. We learned a lot in the process and for the upcoming products, we are more conservative in terms of timelines. The problem with hardware is that you canā€™t plan everything, because you see the final result only when itā€™s ready and you canā€™t always quickly iterate to fix things and get the outcome you wanted. As I mentioned, we know today a lot more about the production of consumer electronics and the challenges that can appear and we already use that knowledge to give you also some pleasant surprises in the near future.

Unfortunately, some of the problems we encountered were visible only when we started putting things together and connecting all the dots - things like that are hard to predict.

I agree with your opinion about the user experience, this is why we decided some time ago and announced today that we are releasing our operating system to the public (open source).

Thank you and have a great day!
Lukasz

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@blennemann itā€™s going to be Open Source!!! So happy!

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