Fair, fair.
** EVERYTHING BELOW THIS IS SPECULATION. FEEL FREE TO THINK “DAVE IS CRAZY”, BECAUSE I PROBABLY HAVE NO CLUE WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT **
…buuut, if you assume that GF has fairly limited resources (they are a startup. Well funded yes, but a startup.) then it’s arguable that the choice to spend resources on an iOS app means a opportunity cost in some other part of their development efforts. It’s possible that both arms of development operate relatively independently and are clipping along at full scheduled resource levels, but anything we might try to guess is exactly that… a guess.
So, my guess: they are not where they wanted to be UI-development wise because they are still struggling with making good on their promised features that turned out to be much harder than expected. Why else would they not have some of the flashier things (e.g. autofocus, passthrough, item recognition like macbooks) that they promised ready if they didn’t turn out to be a minefield to actually make? This has led to a pretty bad developer resource crunch, and thanks to the double-headed monster of limited financial resources (see above re: startup) and the mythical man month, they are – to put it delicately yet succintly – hosed.
And by proxy, to a smaller extent, so are we.
That being said, I love my glowforge, and it does what I want it to do. I wish the UI were more in line with my sensibilities, but I’m a software developer and we are annoyingly self-confident bunch when it comes to this stuff. “Everyone else’s code/UI is garbage” – every software developer ever.