This week is all about showing the Mac a little love. From a kick-ass utility for managing windows to an all-in-one customer management system Mac app, there’s plenty to put your Mac to work.
This week, I finally got around to adding Dark Mode support to Reps & Sets, the iPhone bodybuilding app I develop as a side hustle. That’s almost a year after Apple first announced the feature at its Worldwide Developers Conference.
What took me so long? Supporting Dark Mode is not as simple as it seems. It’s not just indie devs like me who have struggled with it, either. WhatsApp only recently added Dark Mode support, and Facebook is still beta-testing it.
So if you’re waiting for your favorite app to switch to the dark side, here’s why it might be taking so long.
Will Apple Arcade turn out to be the game changer that developers are hoping for? According to a new report… maybe.
Speaking to a slew of developers, a news report found that many are cautiously optimistic about what Apple Arcade could mean. In particular, it could help break the stronghold of freemium titles in the App Store. But there are still potential challenges.
This post is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of Mac app subscription service Setapp.
One of the amazing benefits of selling software on the internet is that you can reach customers from all over the world. So why would you cut out a huge potential market just by assuming everyone who wants to use your product speaks English?
In fact, ignoring other markets can be one of the biggest marketing oversights software companies make.
This post is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of Setapp.
As indie developers, we can get too caught up in how things work — what features our product has, what users can do with it. It often seems like if we can just explain how our product works, everyone will become a devoted user.
We spend lots of time pulling together onboarding videos and tutorials. But there’s a whole other front in the battle of promotion and conversion: making an emotional connection between a potential user and your product and brand.
Apple is adding another big tool for developers to its arsenal thanks to the acquisition of Vancouver-based startup Buddybuild.
The small 40-person company created a mobile iteration platform that allows devs to streamline their workflow and push app updates out through GitHub, GitLab and the like. Now Apple plans to take those tools and integrate them natively into Xcode.
What does it feel like pinning your hopes and livelihood to one of Apple’s most important creations? Fascinating new documentary App: The Human Story takes an unflinching look at the world of app developers in an attempt to answer that question.
It showcases devs’ big wins — and infuriating struggles — as they try to survive and thrive in the massive app economy Apple created. It’s basically the show Apple should have made instead of its ridiculous and annoying Planet of the Apps.
Apple has updated its WWDC app and online iOS Human Interface Guidelines to help developers create software for the new jumbo-screen iPhone X.
It has also added updates for the new Apple Watch and AppleTV.
App stores that take a 30 percent chunk of developers’ earnings are parasites, according to Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games.
“The system is pretty unfair at the moment,” Sweeney said during a keynote speech on the future of graphics and games development in the U.K. “These app stores take 30 percent of your revenue for distribution … That’s strange because MasterCard, Visa and other companies that handle transactions take 2 percent or 3 percent of the revenue…. So they’re pocketing a huge amount of profit from your order – and they aren’t really doing much to help us anymore.”
I recently switched back to freelancing full-time, and whilst I am lucky enough to have clients who don’t ask for precise hourly breakdowns, I have always been intrigued to know how much time I was spending on work tasks, especially those tasks that I didn’t directly bill for.
Many time trackers rely on you explicitly setting the task you are tracking and remembering to switch to another task when it’s time to track that. This is easy to forget, and for someone like me who switches tasks frequently, it’s hard to always know when one task finishes and another begins.
Timing 2 takes a different perspective. Instead of tracking by task, it tracks by application usage and uses a set of rules to assign activities in those applications to certain projects and tasks. The premise is that after a learning process, you can leave the application running behind the scenes and it’ll track everything for you automatically. You only need audit the results.
For users, the Mac App Store makes finding, purchasing, and downloading new software a breeze. But is the experience as enjoyable for the developers behind that software?
Setapp surveyed over 700 macOS developers to find out what they really think of Apple’s marketplace. The results give us an interesting insight into the challenges they face when choosing the Mac App Store, whether life is better without it, and how Apple has improved.
I’m not so thin-skinned that I can’t handle the occasional criticism. But there’s something about App Store reviews that really bugs me.
Like most indie developers, I put blood, sweat and tears into my app, Reps & Sets, which I develop with my partner. It’s our baby, and we love and cherish it. So when some random dude posts an inaccurate one-star review, I’ll be honest: It hurts. That’s why I’m so excited that Apple will be giving developers the chance to reply to reviews in iOS 10.3.
Our App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
Smile, the indie development team behind super-popular productivity apps TextExpander and PDFpen, cut its teeth writing software for technology that barely exists anymore. But thanks to a user-focused attitude and a wholehearted embrace of the third-party tools that power modern offices, the company has been able to keep ahead of the curve as technology changes.
Our App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
When you’re developing Mac apps, success can sometimes seem self-defeating. The better job you do, the less your customers need to buy subsequent versions of your app. Your job then shifts to marketing and an endless quest to acquire new customers in order to keep cash flowing in. Meanwhile, those who use a subscription business model for their software can easily enjoy that sweet, sweet recurring revenue.
Apple’s Mac App Store is broken. For developers and Mac users alike, the online store just isn’t working.
It’s too hard for buyers to find good software. And, thanks to Apple’s picky restrictions, the Mac App Store can make life difficult for developers.
Setapp, a Netflix-style subscription service for Mac apps, offers an innovative alternative. Instead of buying apps individually, you rent a bunch of them for $9.99 a month.
While it might sound unnerving to anyone accustomed to the idea of buying Mac apps outright, after using the service for two months, I found it liberating. Setup is dead-easy. And the selection is fantastic. Setapp serves up more than 60 Mac apps, all handpicked by MacPaw, the Mac development company that dreamed up the service.
Our App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
Getting a bad app review is a definite bummer. When some faceless user trashes your labor of love in the App Store or some other public venue, it can really sting. But if you’re smart about it, you can turn negative reviews into positive opportunities for improving your app and winning committed customers.
Here’s how to spin bad app reviews into developer gold.
This post is brought to you by Agent.ai.
Not all businesses can afford a full-time staff of phone operators. And let’s be honest: Frustration with automated systems can leave customers looking for another place to do business.
Agent.ai has created something that bridges the gap — a customer relationship management (CRM) system that’s powered by machine learning. It comes in two forms: Co-Pilot and Auto-Pilot.
Our new App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
For independent Mac developers, one of the big, daunting tasks that the Mac App Store efficiently handles is app licensing. You just submit your app, then the store manages the actual app license through its user accounts. But this unquestionable convenience comes with a few critical downsides.
Our new App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
Sometimes you’ve got to think small to hit it big. For DigiDNA, a Swiss development team that makes popular software for managing iOS devices, that means functioning more like a tight rock ‘n’ roll band than a sprawling orchestra.
I work on an iPhone app called Reps & Sets as a hobby project in my spare time. This week, my partner and I came to the conclusion that there is no future for our app as a paid download, so we have reluctantly decided to make it free.
This was an incredibly tough call, because we have invested literally thousands of hours in developing our app over the years. Giving all that hard work away for free is heartbreaking. But we didn’t feel we had much choice.
Our new App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
App developers put a lot of time and effort into preventing their apps from being cracked or pirated. But for every coder taking a step toward making an app more secure, there’s someone on the march to crack it. The integrity of any app is subject to an ongoing arms race.
The most popular and useful apps are the most likely to release the cracken (I’m so sorry), so finding out that a bunch of people have downloaded your app illegally can be worn as something of a badge of pride. But that’s cold comfort when you’re losing customers, so let’s take a look at a couple of the most likely app-cracking approaches developers should protect against.
Our new App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
If you’re developing a Mac app, you’re faced with a major either/or decision: whether to distribute inside or outside of the Mac App Store (MAS). Sticking to the MAS means you’ve got access to tools for licensing, hosting, crash reporting and other necessary tasks. However, Apple’s tools may not be what’s best for your app.
Our new App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
So you’re going to launch an app for Mac. Congrats! Now you’ve got to figure out an app marketing strategy that will get it to the widest audience possible.
There are many ways to approach the birth of a new product, but even in a field as fast-growing and dynamic as the world of apps, experience has yielded accepted wisdom about the best ways to start and maintain a successful campaign. Here are great rules of thumb for maximizing impact and customers for your app.
Our new App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
Like death and taxes, distributing your new app through the Mac App Store can seem inevitable. It’s widely considered the easiest way to get the widest exposure for an app, a centralized marketplace for software with a captive audience of buyers.
But ever more developers are looking beyond the Mac App Store (MAS) for distribution options that best serve their app. MacPaw, maker of DevMate, performed an interesting survey of developers to ask if they prefer MAS or another app store alternative, and why.
Android might have more apps and a lot more users than iOS these days, but it’s still trailing far behind when it comes to making money for developers. Last quarter, the App Store made twice as much money than Google Play for app makers.