For a hardware company, the most expensive screen is the pairing screen
For a hardware company, the most expensive screen in the product is the pairing screen.
The device is designed, tooled, certified and boxed. Then a customer opens the companion app, gets permission prompts in an order that makes no sense to them, taps the wrong thing, watches discovery time out with no explanation, and puts the box back in the return pile.
Nothing in that sequence is a hardware problem. Nothing in it shows up in firmware tests. All of it happens after every expensive decision in the company has already been made.
That is what makes it your problem rather than your team's. By the time the app is being built, the tooling is paid for and the units are committed, so the last variable that can still move your return rate is a piece of software everyone has been treating as the final mile.
The teams that get this right settle the permission order, the retry behaviour and every visible failure state before anyone writes the app. The teams that get it wrong learn it from their reviews, which is the slowest and most public way to find out.
https://lnkd.in/eUz2W2St