Those issues are very nearly worked out, and we are reaching a point where people can be comfortable with synchronizing their genealogy information and not worrying about losing data. It became especially difficult the larger your family tree is (getting into the tens of thousands and above), and this new service was found to have some issues, including negatively impacting the performance of other infrastructure.

Additionally, because it was a new service from, it had to be debugged and had to be checked to guarantee that people would not lose data when synchronizing between their local family trees and their online trees hosted through. A lot of people do not realize that FTM 2017 is using a new synchronizing service that rolled out (to replace the older service), and it could not be tested until the older synchronizing service was shut down. However, that synchronizing is exactly why a lot of people use FTM. If you remove the synchronizing of the family trees with, I believe Family Tree Maker 2017 could have been released in March of this year. Note/Commentary: MacKiev (and by proxy) continue to receive a lot of criticism in regards to the delayed release/launch, and the length of the beta testing. If you look at the FTM 2017 Release Page, you will see that they are currently in the midst of the Test Drive 2.0 release, and are looking at a Jrelease date for everybody, as in it will be out of beta. Quite a bit of progress has been made over the past few weeks.

Family tree maker 2017 update