Issue 451

10^th April 2020

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I received a few emails after my comments last week on the Amazon App Store deal. Mainly, I heard that people didn’t think that the experimentation I was hoping for was as critical as Apple simply reducing their 30% cut.

I don’t think Apple needs to, or will, reduce that cut any time soon. The App Store has been, and remains, a thriving part of their business, and there’s no shortage of people creating apps for it.

But to see Apple play with pricing models in any way is always going to be interesting to me. Yes, this specific deal is probably only ever going to apply to huge companies, where Apple need them as much as they need Apple. But as I touched on last week, could this deal trigger internal conversations that result in slightly more extensive experimentation? Could experiments even lead to potential new business models being able to thrive on the App Store? Maybe they even make entirely new types of app viable? That’s expansion, and it’s far more interesting to Apple than a simple change of percentage.

Anyway, I have no evidence at all that those conversations are even happening, let alone triggering experiments. But I hope they are, and I hope they do. If Apple ends up increasing the types of apps, or business models that are viable on the App Store, that benefits all of us too.

Dave Verwer

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News

It seems like, at least as of yesterday this is still happening. It’s hard to know what’s going on here, but testing purchasing logic is hard enough at the best of times, without instability in the sandbox. I hope this gets resolved very soon.

Oh, and this status page which shows status, as well as history, on the availability of these systems might be helpful if you’re experiencing problems. 👍

Tools

If you work on a large project, you might have a build time problem. The first part of this article from Maksym Shcheglov goes through how to measure your build time to see how bad things are, and the second part talks about what you can do to reduce it.

Code

There are many ways to move data around in your app, and there are even more now SwiftUI is here. I enjoyed Vadim Bulavin’s latest post where he gives a breakdown on where he would use each one of them.

Here’s Jeff Watkins with a three-part series on how to make the humble UIButton class more beautiful, functional, and accessible. 👍 Start with Nobody loves, move on to Dressing up, and finally Constraints. Looks like there’s more to come too.

Honestly, you’re unlikely to end up using this new library from Roman Kyrylenko, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth linking to. The effect it produces is beautiful and fascinating, and that’s always worth a look.

Also, right up until I was doing a final proof of this email I thought the name of this library was Meatballs 🍖 rather than Metaballs. Who else read it like that? Stand with me… 🙌

Design

I was excited about the new mouse/trackpad support in 13.4, and it’s been fantastic to see everyone jumping on implementing it so quickly. Even more than just adopting it though, I love it when a feature inspires people to riff on it, and figure out how it could be even better. Here’s Greg Pierce doing precisely that. I love this idea. 😍

This is interesting, and the logic behind it does make sense, but after thinking about it, I can’t recommend you go as far as implementing anything like this. If anything in your product means you need to mislead users on what your app is doing, it’s probably best not to do it. I bet you’ll end up more successful in the long run.

Business and Marketing

This is great. 👍 David Barnard has given a guide he originally published a couple of years ago an overhaul and an update. If there’s something you were wondering about regarding testing paid subscriptions, there’s probably something written about it here. Now, if only the testing sandbox was up… 😬

Jobs

Senior iOS Developer @ Bosch eBike / COBI.Bike – With us you can ride bikes and write code! Have the safety of a large organization and the dynamic of a start-up! With the partnership of Bosch eBike and COBI.Bike you get the best of both worlds. Plus a highly creative and driven team of a hundred people in multiple locations. – Frankfurt Germany

Mobile Full Stack Engineer @ Expensify – Join our passionate team of top-notch engineers to solve a real-world problem, and help people spend less time managing expenses and more time pursuing their real goals. As we revolutionize the way people manage their expenses, being part of the Expensify team means building the easiest, fastest, and most efficient platform to automate everything expense-related. – Remote, London UK, New York City NY, Portland OR, or San Francisco CA

Senior Developer Adocate @ Amazon AWS – If you’ve got a track record with native iOS development & enjoy travelling, meeting people, writing, & speaking, this is a really fun and flexible (remote) job opportunity! – Remote

Is your company hiring? Could you do me a favour and let your hiring managers know that they can post free iOS development job listings on iOS Dev Jobs. Thank you. ❤️

And finally...

let me summersDay == thee … Yes, I’m bad at that, but some people are great at it! ✍️