Issue 267

9^th September 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Did you get a pre-order in? If you’re hoping for a new phone (or watch) I hope you had fast clicking, or tapping skills. From watching Twitter, it looks like there may only have been about 7 jet black devices that were available for shipping next week! 😏

I’ve been thinking a lot more about the App Store cleanup during this week, and I’ve decided to run a little experiment on how effective it’s going to be. It’d be easy to find some truly terrible apps and watch them disappear, but I’m interested in the grey area between good and bad. I’ve shortlisted some apps that are still ranked highly in searches for popular search terms, but that haven’t been updated in at least 18 months and have reviews that complain about things like crashing on startup. These apps are clearly still being downloaded and I want to see what their fate is. I’m not going to name the apps as I don’t want to embarrass the developers, or tip Apple off on which ones I’m watching! 😂

I have no doubt the clean up will be effective, I ‘m just curious where the line will be drawn.

Dave Verwer

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News

Go go go! The GM releases for all the platforms are out and the store is open for submissions. Good luck on getting featured with all the shiny new versions of your apps that make iOS 10 look great! 🎉

David Smith has also been thinking about the cleanup and has some fascinating stats how many apps could potentially be affected by it. As you may have guessed, there are a lot of apps in the firing line. He also notes that the 50 character app name restriction isn’t going to affect anywhere near as many developers.

Tools

This is very cool. Not only the shortcut, but also that it’s based on VVDocumenter which was an open source Xcode plugin that I talked about in Issue 104. Fantastic work both from Wei Wang on the original plugin and Apple on integrating it.

Samantha Marshall with a comprehensive guide to code signing, especially the new features introduced with Xcode 8. There’s a huge amount of information in here.

I linked to SwiftGen back in Issue 222 but this new release works with Xcode 8 and Swift 3 to help get rid of that stringly typed code.

Code

Curtis Herbert on implementing subscription pricing in Slopes. It’s a detailed post covering not only the implementation process but some of the issues he ran into. For example, there’s no way for your app to determine the subscription end date when auto-renew is turned off, which is something your users would almost certainly appreciate seeing. If you’re considering subscription pricing, you’ll want to read this.

Chris Dzombak on the difficulties of dependency injection with view controllers. I’m not sure I’d go as far as declaring them broken, but there’s certainly plenty of room for improvement. He talks a little about SwiftGen (mentioned above), and also the new Perform library by Adam Sharp. Ultimately though, he’s right that no one but Apple can fix this.

Paul Hudson on the new haptic APIs introduced alongside the iPhone 7 last night. There’s currently no way to test these until the new hardware arrives, but you can start getting ready for them! The HIG has also been updated to include some guidance on this new feedback mechanism.

Rob Napier on the subtleties of copying and pasting. He’s absolutely right, of course! 👍

macOS Development

Even though the MAS isn’t getting anywhere near the attention from Apple that the iOS store is, Denys Zhadanov argues that there’s still good reason to stay in there if your app is compatible with it. I do agree that there’s a level of consumer trust with installing from the App Store, but I also think that with every app that exits, that trust is eroded a little more.

Design

Ben Brooks talking about file management on iOS. He’s right that sharing files between apps is nowhere near as problematic as in previous iOS versions, but that the issue of duplicating files between apps is still very real. It’s a good read.

Business and Marketing

David Smith (again!) with some interesting stats on how his business has changed from generating revenue from paid apps and IAPs to advertising. Note that he’s not saying all apps are, or should transition to advertising, just that it’s worked for him.

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And finally...

Answering the big questions… 💯