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Compared to MetricWire

Abandoned Old Version, Stealth New Version​

Our review of Metricwire has been based on their publicly available documentation, located here. While the content lacks details, it provides a good understanding of the features MetricWire offers and matches their publicly available Android and iOS apps.

However, even though the documentation and the apps were publicly accessible, the content was outdated, and the last update to them was 18 months ago.

Upon further research, we learned that MetricWire has abandoned this app and documentation and has switched to a new application called Catalyst, available on Android and iOS. All new studies are asked to use Catalyst, and the documentation is also provided to researchers privately.

Therefore, our assessment is not and cannot be accurate because the details of the new application are kept in stealth.

Our hypothesis is that the old MetricWire app was implemented using native tool sets for Android and iOS. While this approach provides a more reliable app, it makes development slower as everything should be implemented twice: once for Android and again for iOS. MetricWire team switched to platforms such as Flutter or React Native, which helps speed up the development at the cost of reliability1.

Because these two approaches are incompatible, the team had to release a completely new application and deprecate the old app. But as the old app still had users, or due to uncertainty about this major change, the old app and content are not fully removed and are still kept on the Internet. That's why users can access the old app and content, and unless they pay close attention, they will not know that they are dealing with deprecated content.

Feature Category Comparison​

As we do not have access to the latest documentation of MetricWire, we do not comment on how Avicenna compares to MetricWire in each feature category. However, for comparison with the old version of MetricWire please check the comparison spreadsheet.

  1. Please note that this is one plausible hypothesis. The main reason could be something else or a combination of factors.↩