Issue 134

21^st February 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

A quick look at the top free App Store chart today tells me that we are not yet done with the Flappy Bird madness. There are two Flappy Miley Cyrus clones in the top 10 free apps chart. I downloaded them both (naturally) and one of them shows an advert at the top constantly and then a full screen ad after when you fail. The other has a black bar on the bottom of the 4” iPhone screen. Shocking.

Is this really what the App Store is about? Someone save us…

Dave Verwer

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News

Compared to the third party solutions like App Annie and Distimo, the Sales and Trends section of iTunes Connect has been a weak point of the App Store for a long time but it received a much needed update this week.

Looks like iTunes Connect received another small update this week with a change in the submission process to track whether your apps include potentially infringing content. This isn’t something new but it’s obviously becoming enough of an overhead for Apple that they want to get a head start on these issues before the review process starts.

Tools

Until Interface Builder supports the use of constants instead of relying on naked strings this will certainly save you from a great number of trivial runtime errors. Install this small script into your project as a Run Script build phase and never be told that you must register a valid cell or storyboard identifier again.

Cute little experiment by John Moore, Earl Lee, Calvin Chan, and Shenil Dodhia. Live stream your app out to anyone with a browser and let them capture and annotate screenshots with feedback. This project was the result of a 48 hour hack day so I would be cautious of how much you expect from it but I think the idea is really promising.

Great tip from Ted Bradley on reducing IPA size by looking at asset sizes inside the zip file rather than extracted to disk. It is a well known fact that some files compress better than others but I hadn’t considered the possibilities of using this to your advantage in terms of sacrificing extracted space to save compressed space. Something to think about if you are really pushing that 100Mb limit.

Code

David Smith with a good point about planning for the additional server load when considering your implementation of Background Fetch in iOS 7 and he gives some great tips for implementing in a responsible way. Oisin Prendiville also has a good follow up post on the same subject.

Sam Page on building a Facebook Paper style scrolling image view which scrolls based on the tilt of your device. I haven’t managed to try Paper yet so I can’t say whether I like this technique yet but it’s certainly one solution to small screen image viewing which doesn’t require the slightly awkward pinch to zoom gesture on the phone.

There are many ways that Core Data can bite you in the ass but concurrency has to be the most common, and painful of them. Since iOS 5 things have been much better with multi threaded Core Data access but there are still several things you need to be careful with, Theodore Calmes has some great tips.

Design

I don’t say this lightly but Threes is the best game to hit the App Store since Letterpress, if you haven’t tried it yet then you really are missing out. John Teti has a great article here deconstructing the tutorial/onboarding process and along the way points out many of the things that make it such a wonderful game.

Business and Marketing

Mary Ellen Gordon looks at the rate of decay in download/install numbers for iOS and Android apps. Her conclusion? Half of all apps on the store lose 50% of their peak user base within three months but if you can keep your initial users for longer, it significantly slows the decay rates. It’s also good to look at how decay rates are affected by the App Store category you pick (Hint: Avoid Games and Social).

Justin Williams on taking over the support for Glassboard as a small company. Clearly for a free app, hiring a company to handle first line support is going to be untenable so I like his idea of support driven development as you are not only going to cut down on support email volumes but actually build a better product out of it as well.

And finally...

A pretty visualisation of your App Store reviews.