Issue 299

5^th May 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Friday everyone! Just a quick note before we get started this week that iOS Dev Weekly now has three regular authors. As well as continuing to write issues myself, you’ll be seeing regular contributions from both Evan Dekhayser and Vicc Alexander. 🎉 Thanks to everyone who applied!

Dave Verwer

The Apple Watch has received some attention over the last week, in two very different ways. According to Apple’s quarterly results, Apple Watch sales have doubled year-over-year, and now earns enough more than some Fortune 500 companies on its own.

However, the apparent success of the Apple Watch does not seem to transfer to developers. As it turns out, Google Maps, eBay and Amazon removed their Apple Watch apps without anyone really noticing. Google has confirmed it plans to bring the app back, but it says a lot about Apple Watch usage that these high-profile apps disappeared so quietly.

watchOS 3 did a lot to improve watch app capabilities, but it seems to not be enough to drive more usage. I’m hoping for significant changes in June to improve the overall app experience in watchOS 4 to drive more users toward the app ecosystem.

<p>Evan Dekhayser</p>

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News

This update to the App Store Analytics now allows developers see where app downloads are coming from, between searching the App Store, browsing the charts, or clicking external links. This kind of data helps developers better understand their users and plan future advertisement campaigns. For instance, I’m taking another look at Search Ads now that I know that nearly 80% of my downloads come from App Store search. 🤔

Tools

This handy website lets you generate all the app icons you need for an asset catalog. If you’re not especially skilled with Photoshop or Sketch, like me, you can use this tool to automatically scale your icon to various sizes without wasting time or energy.

Code

Swift has a number of ways to handle failures, such as optionals, do-try-catch, and fatalError. But how do you know which one to use in any given situation? John Sundell gives a great overview of which solution to use based on what you are trying to achieve in your code. 💯

Matthew Liam Healy answers the age-old question, “how do I download resources from a server?” I love this article because it addresses the widespread belief that you need to use third-party dependencies like AFNetworking or Alamofire even though iOS comes with a simple solution built-in.

I don’t know about you, but nothing bothers me more than stringly-typed APIs in Swift. Creating a custom UIFont still requires passing in the font name as a string – but this is not acceptable any longer! 😤 Nicholas Maccharoli’s library provides an abstraction over this API to make sure that you will get the font you want every time without the risk of a typo.

Design

Tristan Harris, a Design Ethicist at Google, discusses how software design can influence a user’s thoughts and actions. This article goes into extreme depth about techniques that popular apps use to “hijack” their users’ minds and how these can lead to abuse. The overarching theme is that technology should be used to improve, not to take over, its users’ lives.

Richard Banfield shows how similar the tech industry is to biology. Just like organisms, products need to fill specific niches, evolve and adapt to change, and thrive on constant factors that are ingrained in the environment. This article then gives specific guidance to how these similarities can be applied to your own ventures.

Business and Marketing

Considering there is an entire website dedicated to bad clients, it’s important to properly vet potential clients before agreeing to work with them. Zach McArtor discusses several important questions to ask when considering a client, including budget, scope, the company culture, and the state of the existing codebase. Responses to these questions can help you identify a nightmare client before they become your nightmare. 😓

Now that developers can reply to reviews, all that’s left is getting some reviews to respond to! 😂 Reviews are not the easiest things to come by, and sometimes you need to give your users a small push in the right direction. Kieran Doyle points out two small, simple changes that can increase the likelihood that users will leave positive reviews on your app.

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And finally...

“What do you do?”