Dear Vignette user,

Please note that the following only affects purchases from the Android Market. It does not affect purchases from AndAppStore.com.

Because of an error on our part, we are no longer able to update the version of Vignette we published to the Android Market in October 2009. As of 24 February 2011, that version of Vignette is labelled "Vignette (deprecated)", and a new version can be found labelled "Vignette".

If you purchased Vignette from the Android Market before 24 February 2011, you will no longer receive updates for it from the Android Market. We have been working for the past few weeks to find the best possible solution, and these are the options we have come up with:
  1. You can purchase the new version from the Android Market, and uninstall the deprecated version. This way you will continue to receive updates from the Android Market, but you will lose your settings from the deprecated version.
    We have set up an automated process to give you a refund for the deprecated version if you choose this option.

    To ensure that you get a refund as quickly as possible: if you used the Market app on your phone to purchase the deprecated version, please use that to purchase the new version. If you used the Android Market website at http://market.android.com/ to purchase the deprecated version, please use that to purchase the new version.

    if you still haven't received a refund after an hour of purchasing the new version, please contact us with either, or both, of your order numbers, and we'll get it sorted out as quickly as we can. If you don't know your order numbers, you can get them by logging into Google Checkout with the same Gmail address that you used to register your phone on the Android Market.

  2. If you don't want to lose your settings, you can download and install updates from this page. Follow @VignetteUpdates on Twitter for notifications of new updates.

  3. If Vignette works fine as it is, and you don't want updates, you can continue using it without doing anything. The version of Vignette you purchased will not stop working.
We're sorry for the inconvenience. If none of these options are acceptable to you, please contact us, but be aware that we have explored every option we can think of. Re-publishing Vignette is a last resort, which will mean we lose our standing in the Market (in the top 25 paid apps, with 4.5 stars and 90,000 downloads). We're probably going to be inundated with e-mail as a result of this, so it may take longer than usual for you to receive a reply.


* All applications on the Android Market must be digitally signed using a cryptographic key owned by the developer. Google provide a "test key" to use during development, but applications signed using this key are not supposed to be published on the Android Market. However, we accidentally did exactly that, and our error went unnoticed for over a year. Recently, Google made some changes to the Android Market to prevent this happening, and in doing so stopped us from updating the apps we had already published. Google have not replied to our e-mails on the subject. Another developer has posted the replies they received from Google:
Thanks for writing in. We apologize for the inconsistent error messaging. As you have discovered, we've detected that your apps have been signed with test keys published in the Android Market Developer web site.
Publishing test-key signed applications can cause serious security issues on several devices. You should unpublish any test-keys signed apps as soon as possible, as Android Market will administratively suspend these applications in the near future.
To remedy this issue, developers will need to republish their applications with a new, securely generated set of keys. This means you will need to have a new package name.
Developers can not sign the same application name twice as it circumvents the implicit security model of signing.
The users, ratings, and stats from your prior application with the test-keys can not transfer to the new application. We understand this is not an ideal situation and we have made changes to prevent developers from publishing applications in this state going forward.
We appreciate your assistance.

... and:
Thank you for your reply. At this time, there is no method available to transfer new keys to users for a given app. As mentioned previously, you'll need to generate a new instance of the application and publish it to Market.
All test-keys signed applications will eventually be administratively unpublished or suspended from Android Market.