Issue 399

12^th April 2019

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

If you follow David Barnard you’ll know that he’s long been advocating for changes to the App Store that cut down on the number, and type of scams that are unfortunately so prevalent these days. Did his emails have an effect? It’s certainly possible as he noticed a new prompt before starting a free trial for a subscription this week.

Like David, I’m hopeful that this June might see the announcement of a reworked payment sheet for the App Store, or maybe even a reworked purchase process for subscriptions altogether? I definitely hope for better (and native) subscription management in iOS and macOS.

But no matter what ends up in future releases, I believe this week’s change is good for the platform. Anything that makes users feel more comfortable that iOS is a platform that only charges them for things they are aware they are being charged for will reap rewards in the long term, and iOS is very much a long term platform.

Of course, in the short term this extra tap and extra decision where a customer could drop out of the purchase process is going to have a negative effect on subscription rates. In fact, Jacob Eiting of RevenueCat is seeing trial rates drop by 20% so be aware of that if you’re seeing your numbers drop!

Erk… Right before publishing I noticed this tweet saying that this extra step may have been turned off. If so, I still hope for improvements to subscriptions that build more trust in the platform in the future.

Dave Verwer

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News

Greg Scown with a follow up to Corbin Dunn’s post of a few weeks ago. He argues that throwing a bug over the wall to Apple and expecting it to be fixed isn’t enough. It should be, but in a company of this size it’s not going to work like that. If you really care about a bug, you should also be advocating for it to get attention.

Talking of bugs… There seems to have been one fixed in iOS 12.2 that might trip you up if you were relying on size classes in your iPad app. Thanks to Douglas Hill for pointing this one out!

Tools

Dave DeLong with a clever trick to use conditional compilation inside your app extensions. But even if you’re not needing to do that, I’d still read it anyway as you’ll almost certainly learn something.

Code

GraphQL is one of those technologies that sounds amazing for mobile apps when you first hear about it, but is it something you should be using? Let Chris Downie and Sam Landfried tell you about their experiences with it in this three part article (1, 2, 3).

Benoit Pasquier talks a lot of sense in this article on app architecture. Of course every app is different and what works well for a small app probably won’t scale up to a huge one. The same conclusion was made in this week’s episode of Swift by Sundell with Chris Eidhof and Matt Gallagher which is also worth a listen.

There were so many articles about this published this week (presumably as people started upgrading their apps to Swift 5 🚀) but I think the person who explained it best was Keith Harrison.

macOS Development

We knew this was coming but it’s going to be mandatory to notarise your Mac apps with the next point release of Mojave. If you’re a Mac developer and have not yet automated the process, I linked to this article from Berk Çebi a while back that should help you out!

Business and Marketing

Do your app’s notifications pass Dermot Daly’s test? 😂 No, I’m not going to mention the name of the test, this newsletter goes out by email and we all know where it’d end up if I did!

Up to Speed

If you’re getting up to speed with iOS development, you may not have tackled testing yet. There’s no time like right now though, so read this updated version of a comprehensive tutorial on testing from Audrey Tam and Michael Katz.

Videos

Last week saw the third edition of the CodeMobile conference, and already we have all of the videos published and ready to watch! 👍

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And finally...

I’d subscribe… 💸