Issue 361

20^th July 2018

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I almost never talk about sponsorship but I want to start this week’s issue with a quick note about it.

Over the years many companies have been generous enough to sponsor this newsletter and I’d like to extend my thanks again to all of them for supporting what I do here!

In recent years you may have noticed a trend towards repeat sponsorships from large companies. I’d love to bring back a little more diversity for you as a reader by bringing in some new sponsors, and especially some smaller companies that may have felt like the pricing was previously out of reach.

So if you’re an indie developer, small company or a bootstrapped startup then I’d like to offer you a limited time 50% discount to make sponsorship a little more affordable. There are a few slots available in August and September so please get in touch if you think what you do might be of interest to this wonderful community.

This week also feels like a great time to make this offer as this issue’s sponsor is a fantastic example of an independent developer producing something perfect for you all.

Alright, apologies for the interruption… On with the links!

Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

“It’s like having a personal senior developer” - This recent customer comment perfectly describes the value you get from NSScreencast. With regularly released screencasts on iOS and related topics, you can learn a lot without taking up much of your time. Invest in your career today, you won’t regret it! Get your 20% discount now.

News

Many people took this article in the way that it was probably intended to be taken and concluded that it was an “It’s only worth developing for iOS” story. I looked at it slightly differently, as an opportunity to potentially increase revenue by 50%. Yes, the cost of building/maintaining two apps is huge, but if you’re at the stage with your business where you’re looking for new revenue opportunities and had previously dismissed Android as “won’t make any money”, that’s definitely not the case.

Also, a ~26% year on year increase in revenue after ten years? 😳 Wow.

Bear in mind that this tweet thread from Max Seelemann starts with the words “Rumor has it” and I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of this happening yet? (Correct me if I’m wrong!) However, if this is true I also think it would be a shame. I think the imperfect, but reasonably effective system that’s in place right now is about right.

Tools

Wouldn’t it be great if rdar:// links worked for all of us like they do for people who work inside Apple? Can Ethan Huang make that happen with this open source app? Well, no. Of course not! However, what he can do is make them open the corresponding Open Radar page. With Brisk supporting cross posting to Open Radar, we’re in a better place than we ever have been for filing bugs with Apple.

That 4TB disk option in the new MacBook Pro is a bit 💸💸💸 isn’t it! There is another way if you’re short on disk space though. This app will find old and (potentially) unused device symbols from previous point releases of iOS that you may no longer be testing with. I saved 10GB in a few seconds with this but if you have an older installation you’ll probably save much more than that.

Great tip from Liam Nichols! This should be an option. 🕵️‍♂️

Code

Want to debug your network calls with something built into your app (rather than something external) then this tool from Paolo Musolino might be just the thing you’re looking for. No code to integrate, just include the library and shake your phone.

Is this a networking library where every request only returns the first 280 characters of data? 🤣 No, of course it isn’t. Instead it’s a battle tested networking library built on top of NSURLSession (naturally). Why should you use it? Nolan O’Brien gives you the low down.

Oh and, also in networking news this week.

No, not a new version of SQL 😀 but a new version of the SQL building library extracted from Vapor 3.0. The readme is… minimal 😂 so you’ll want to head over to the docs instead! Also, from the Twitter thread there you might also be interested in FluentQuery.

Design

In what feels like a follow up to last week’s link about iOS UI moving south, Theo Strauss writes about the search field in the Lyft app. He points out that the HIG doesn’t say that search bars should be at the top of the screen, even though they often are but even the guidelines did say that, design rules are often made to be broken. Make what is important prominent, and reachable.

Business and Marketing

Carolina Milanesi with some interesting results from a survey of iOS and Android users. We’ve known for a long time that App Store customers are incredibly price sensitive, but this sentence particularly stood out for me:

In other words, great reviews, feature list, screenshots, and app description do not matter if the price is already beyond what the user perceives to be the right price for the app.

If you’ve not played with adjusting your pricing for a while, read this and give it another thought! Note that the survey only had 800 participants which makes the data much less useful but I still thought it was interesting.

And finally...

18,000 pull requests is amazing! 🤯