Well, I’m not going to defend, or criticize Lime’s processes, since that’s a sausage factory I don’t happen to work inside.
But I have worked inside many other sausage factories over the nearly 4 decades of my career.
I can tell you that because a demo appears to work just fine is no guarantee that it’ll work just fine in another apparent instance of the same thing.
The combinatorics become staggering pretty quickly. I’ve seen several different APPs mentioned in this thread and others, let’s call it a half-dozen. Multiply that by let’s say 3 recent revs of Windows, and perhaps only two revs of whatever libraries Lime stuff depends on. That’s 36 different test scenarios, and we haven’t even entered the “operating parameter space” of each application yet. Now in larger companies, they actually do this kind of stuff, they have a combination of QA monkeys and QA test-script writers, and automated testing. Your QA department doesn’t work for adulation and exposure…
Then, we move on to Linux, which is a massive combinatoric explosion all to itself. Everyone has their fave Linux distribution, and there are, conservatively, perhaps 10 “top distributions”, and usually several different revs “in the field” for each distribution.
I have no idea how many folks Lime/Myriad have working on this stuff, but I’m going to guess that at U$299.00/board, none of them are getting super-well-paid. I’m also going to guess that they have been completely taken by surprise on the magnitude of sales, and the diversity of the community that is using them. They will almost certainly need to tweak not only the usual things–fixing bugs in the hardware/software, but perhaps more importantly, look at their overall process for doing this thing.
I also have no idea how “collaborative” Lime/Myriad have been with APPs folks, in terms of giving/lending devices for dev and testing, answering those devs questions, etc. Many of the APPs we’re talking about are open-source, and free. Most of the devs of thse APPs have other work they do to put catfood on the table, and making their stuff work with yet-another-new-piece-of-hardware may not always be top priority.