Issue 699

14^th February 2025

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Is running a business on the App Store getting too complicated?

No, not adopting Swift concurrency in Swift 6 language mode, but all the various rules and regulations you need to follow these days. Since January, Apple has already published news posts about changes in tax treatment in Japan, new rules about selling games in Vietnam¹, and a reminder about trader status in the EU.

Reading Developer News is all well and good, but it doesn’t cover everything. I recently saw Douglass Hill post about new subscription rules in South Korea, and I’m confident there are other things I’ve missed.

Top that off with all the optional things you can choose to do. You now have the choice whether you’d like to sell outside the App Store in the EU, which is not a trivial decision at all. There’s also the recent Advanced Commerce API announcement, which again isn’t something you should rush into, even if you qualify.

It’s all so unpredictable, too. Will you get hit by some new rule that means you need to rethink your whole business model, or will you instead end up restricting sales country by country?

It’s also worth noting that except for the new DMA rules, all this happened in the first six weeks of this year! It’s overwhelming. Some of it is the mobile app industry growing up. It’s big business, no matter how you look at it, and big business brings rules and laws. Most of it is not caused by Apple, and I’m glad for all the things they do to make selling to 175 countries around the world easy. But it also feels like a lot to cope with as a small/independent developer, and it takes away from the time we can spend developing and marketing our apps.

Part of me longs for the early days of the App Store, when it was all so much simpler. Do you?

Dave Verwer

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Tools

This is a great set of Terminal tips and tricks from Neil Macy. The one that stuck for me was Atuin, which has already saved me from many keypresses on the up arrow key. 🎉

Code

I love the journey that Josh Holtz takes us on in this blog post about writing code that will live in an SDK. He talks about writing a view component that needs to show toolbar items no matter whether it’s already contained within a navigation view by whomever uses it.

Majid Jabrayilov:

Cooperative cancellation means that Swift will never stop your task automatically, but it will provide you with information about the cancellation. It is totally up to you to decide how to handle this information.

It’s a great, real-world, look at concurrency, and a great follow up to the article he wrote last week covering task groups. 👍

It’s likely that you’ve never touched the CarPlay SDK, given that you need a special entitlement, so it was fun to read Moritz Philip Recke’s latest post. He covers how to apply for the entitlement, how to set up a project once you have it, and some common types of apps you might want to build.

Business and Marketing

If my comment above put you off from starting that new app you had been planning, you should read this inspiring post from Charlie Monroe. This sentence sums up the post well:

This advice comes from someone building a company from scratch with zero initial capital.

Given that I described the post as inspiring, it won’t be a surprise to hear that the conclusion is that starting a one-man business was worthwhile for him. It’s still an interesting story and is worth your time if you’re thinking of going indie.

Jobs

iOS Engineer @ Bevel – We’re building at the forefront of consumer health. We are a small team that deeply cares about our craft. You’ll get a chance to work on something that improves the health of tens of thousands of people! – On-site (United States in NY)

Senior iOS Engineer @ Distilled – We are seeking to recruit a Senior iOS Engineer to work on some of Ireland’s most popular mobile applications, Daft.ie. DoneDeal.ie & Adverts.ie – Remote (within European timezones) or on-site (Ireland)

And finally...

I don’t usually “do” leaks and rumours, but I’m pretty sure that next week’s announcement will be … retro. ❤️