299: Mid-Summer Update
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Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development. I'm Marco Arment. And I'm David Smith. Under the Radar is usually not longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started. So it is, as we are recording, August 1st. It is officially like mid-summer. We are probably like halfway between WWDC and when iOS 18 launches, if not even past that point at this point, and

Yeah, so it seemed a good time. The last couple of episodes, we've been talking about the exciting Overcast launch and sort of the run-up to that, how it went, and there's a lot of those kinds of things. So I think it's interesting to get back into the more traditional fare of the summer in terms of talking about things that we're doing, how we're approaching things for getting ready for September. Now we are, by any measure, probably sort of within about a month of when we really need to be wrapped up with anything that we want to be ready for day one.

when iOS 18 launches. And so it's kind of an interesting checkpoint in with that. And also just to talk about why, I mean, for example, like, you know, is this, whether we, whether we're talking about what we're, what we're working on and why, how we approach that. And it's just, you know, it seems like a good time because I think it's interesting this year to think about,

when iOS 18 we expect to launch, which is probably just one of those idle speculations that there's no real way to know. Every year is different, and all we have is kind of the weird guessing game we can play based on past years, but every year is slightly different. But I think it's an important exercise because if you don't have a target, if you don't have a date in mind that you're trying to be ready for, it's very difficult to be ready. It's not like the kind of thing where...

You know, if you just are going along, it's like, oh, it'll be ready when it's ready. It's like, well, then you're unlikely going to be have everything wrapped up and tidy in a way that you're going to really feel confident and good about your release when it when it happens. And it's sometimes I think it's you can over you can over index on being ready for day one in terms of some some updates, some years, it's going to matter a lot. And some years, it's not going to matter too much at all.

But it's something that I think I try at least to think about. And this year, I've just sort of like looked at the calendar. And as someone who's been doing this for a while, my current guess is that the most likely Apple event day, sort of the iPhone event, would be somewhere around Tuesday, September 10th, with iOS 18 launching publicly probably September 18th, the Wednesday of the following week.

That's my guess. It's hard to know. Like every year is different. And so it's hard to know. But I think because of that, that seems to be like a reasonable thing. And so my current kind of hope and thing that I'm sort of aiming towards is to be ready roughly the end of August, beginning of September. That first week of September, I really need to have everything wrapped up. And if you're a longtime listener, you probably know that I have a sort of this milestone where I'll put up a little sign in my office that says no more new features.

I'm expecting to put that sign up probably in about two or three weeks because I need to be at the place that I'm polishing, testing, doing, especially with iOS 18 kind of work where I've been doing all this work on iOS 18. I need to go back and make sure it works on iOS 17 or iOS 16.

do the compatibility testing and all the stuff that isn't very interesting and exciting, but is also the nevertheless important. And so for me, that's probably going to start, you know, here in about three weeks, which is a little bit scary, I will say, just as someone who, you know, sort of, it's the kind of thing that when you, when you sort of get on your plane to leave Cupertino at the end of WDC, it always feels like, wow, I've got the summer ahead of me. I can work on all these things. And then you get to August 1st, you're like, oh, the summer's gone. Everything's

It is coming very quickly. And so that is how I feel. Obviously, your summer was a bit different. You were focused on something else. But I imagine now one of the big advantages of the Overcast rewrite is that you may actually be having an update ready for day one because you have all this sort of extra velocity that now that you're in Swift and SwiftUI and all these things that should make that a little bit more straightforward than it would have been in years gone by.

It's kind of a mixed bag in that area, honestly, because, I mean, first of all, like, you know, my relaunch, you know, it went overall fairly well, but I still have, like, fires to put out here and there. I still have, you know, little bugs that keep cropping up that I need to, you know, get quick fixes out for, and there's certain design tweaks I need to make because certain parts of the new design, like, it isn't working well for some people, and I think I can, like, you know, tweak things to make it a little better for them and things like that. And so...

The amount of work I have to do for the rewrite, basically just to get it back to a stable state where nothing is actively on fire, that is taking up more of the summer than I probably originally would have guessed. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. And because of my new code base, I am able to really tackle those things quickly and effectively. So ultimately...

like I'm getting a lot of work done. I'm making a lot of progress on the app and moving it forward pretty effectively, but it's not leaving a lot of time yet for iOS 18 stuff. Now, the good news is, you know, for you being in the widget making business, there's always a lot to do in these recent years of OS releases. There's not much for me to do. Like in terms of like what iOS 18 needs from my app, like,

There's not a lot there. There's a lot that will come later in the Apple intelligence era where once Apple intelligence can start indexing the app intents of my app and start offering interesting AI and Siri integrations using the app intent without setting up shortcuts, like that kind of thing, that's going to be really great. But by all accounts, not only is there no...

I wouldn't necessarily say there's no API for it because I think App Intents, that is the API for it. But there's no way for us to use that yet. There's no way for us to even test that yet. And that's, you know, everyone's talking about how, you know, iOS 18 is not going to have Apple Intelligence. It's been, quote, delayed to iOS 18.1.

But even the version that's in 18.1 betas, that's not the version that indexes app intents for developers. That is one of those things that Apple said, I believe, coming next year or coming later or whatever. So that part is not even there yet. So there's not – there's almost nothing that most developers can do for Apple intelligence. Yeah.

And so for the rest of the system, there's little my cities here and there. I think the most obvious user-facing things that people are going to want to see apps supporting immediately are the customizable icons for the home screen theming and the control center widget controls. Other than that, am I forgetting anything? What other significant things are users going to expect on day one for most apps?

Yeah, no, I mean, I think tinting for the home screen and then control center widgets are the two main features for most users. I think there was a, there's a lot of like deep on like in Swift, Swift six and those kinds of, you know, changes that happened, but those aren't user facing features and things that certainly would be like day one changes.

And there's some things in terms of if you have live activities to make sure that they work well on the new Apple Watch live activity system. But yeah, it is definitely been a quieter year if you aren't in the widgets world, because obviously, you know, doing widgets, there's a lot of things to do with tinting on the home screen and control center widgets are certainly been keeping me very busy. But it is definitely a quieter year in the ways otherwise because of Apple intelligence, I think. I think that is something that

It's a big, you know, sort of tentpole of the OS. But at this point, there's little for us to do as developers beyond in terms of certainly for the early, you know, 18.0 is not going to have any of it at all. And then exactly at what point it becomes relevant to have that stuff is going to come later. And even, you know, the split to introduce 18.1 as separate from 18.0 is also just sort of interesting in that regard because it pushes it even further into

It feels like down where, you know, there's some, you know, one of my to-dos at some point is to sort of, you know, do a big audit of app intents and make sure if there are things that I can do and should do to be exposing there. But it kind of pushed it. Originally, I was like, oh, do I need to get that done by 18.0 in case some of that stuff ends up, you know, shipping as part of that. But,

now that 18.1 has sort of been pushed off, at the very least, it's going to come out sometime later than 18.0. Sometimes we've had these very minor updates that come out like a couple of weeks later, but my instinct with this and based on what it's 18.1 is, how it's feeling at this point in August, it seems like it's more like that's going to be coming out more like October, November-ish rather than a couple of weeks later in September-ish.

Um, so it's nice to have that, that, that, that space. And I think it's nice to have a, you know, and not every summer is quiet ish. Whereas, you know, this one has a little bit of a quiet feel to it. And I think it's been enjoyable to, you know, as a result to be able to be a bit more creative and a bit more engaged. And I think, um,

In that sense, it's also nice that if you wanted to have Overcast be 100% 18.0 ready on day one, most of that is something that is much more straightforward for you to do. It's making sure that your app icon is tintable and your widgets are tintable. And maybe you have a couple of control center actions to play resume, which are very similar to the things that you already have set.

in your widgets already. So it may potentially is the kind of thing that you could tackle somewhat reasonably, even if you don't have a huge amount of time, but just in a little bit of time. Yeah. And I, and that's, that's kind of my plan. So like, I think to actually answer your question, um,

I think I will be able to hit day one if it doesn't come up and catch me too much by surprise as I'm putting out other fires. But I should be able to because the new code really is much easier to work in and much easier to expand. And again, that was a large part of the reason I did it. And I certainly paid a big price to do that, but now I'm able to reap the benefits. So yeah.

Ultimately, I think I'm going to be there on day one, but I'm really also very, very glad that this is a very light summer in terms of developer features that we can actually use. That's great for me.

I have no complaints about that. Like, it would be a much different scene for me if this was one of those summers where there was, like, some massive new iOS set of features that I really should take advantage of and that everyone would expect. You know, something like, I always go back to, like, the dark mode introduction. Like, that was such a big thing for so many apps. Had to do so much work. You know, like, or, you know, obviously, like, iOS 7 and shit like that. You know, major system redesigns.

This is not one of those years. And thank goodness, because we need stuff like that sometimes. We need time to breathe and explore and pay down technical debt and experiment with new things. And when you're constantly on the treadmill trying to keep up with Apple and all the new stuff they're doing, that all of a sudden everyone has to keep up with this stuff, it's very hard to have any room to experiment and breathe and pay down debts. So...

This, for me, is a perfect timing for this summer. I'm also... I mean, I hate to say it. I'm kind of... It is working out well for me. I wouldn't say I'm glad, but it is working out well for me that this has not turned out to be the year of the Vision Pro like I thought. Because that also would have been a huge different direction and a huge undertaking that I would have had to do much more work for, and that would have detracted from my ability to get everything else done. And so...

that product having a much slower burn than I expected at first, that also helps me a lot, honestly. But that's... It's not to say I want it to fail, but it certainly has helped me that it has not taken off like crazy. But... Because, you know, at the beginning of this year, I think we said on the show, and certainly we were saying, you know, a lot on other shows and stuff, that, like,

We expected this to be the year of the Vision Pro and spatial computing. We were expecting they'd be really difficult to get all year. They'd be backordered the whole year, and everyone had been going nuts over them. That's what we thought would happen. So it's nice that we still can't predict things very accurately, and we still get surprised here and there. And it's nice that that honestly has not happened yet, and that's going to be a slower thing because...

That allows us to really focus and do the best work we can on iOS. And that's, I think, much more important to our businesses. Yeah, and I think in that sense, there is just something very...

comforting about having a slightly slower pace of development that we're having to kind of undertake. It is nice in some ways. I mean, it's in similar to the way that like the, you know, Apple intelligence moving into 18.1 and many of the features coming in, you know, it probably an 18.2 or 18.3. There have been some, you know, it is, I appreciate the sense that Apple's been taking the developer year that we used to kind of have this very intense June, July, August, you know,

And then things got real quiet. And, you know, the point releases were much more minor, much more not developer focused, tend to be more like bug fixes and minor features or service updates or things like that.

It's nice in some ways that they've stretched that year out a lot, which I'm sure is helpful internally within Apple. I imagine their developers appreciate it too, that they don't have to get everything ready in this very narrow window. If it doesn't make it out the door by September 1st, then it's on hold for another whole year. This new cycle where they're updating and doing things on a much more regular basis, I think, is probably better for them. And it's definitely better for me. I like that I can reasonably push off

worrying too much about Apple intelligence right now because Apple has made it very clear that it's not coming right away. And so I can, I'm not being lazy or kind of missing an opportunity by pushing that off until maybe that's what I tackle in October or that's what I tackle in November. I mean, it's a little tricky insofar as it's, there's no specificity in a way that like I feel, you know, when I, a little bit ago when I was giving an estimate for when I think the next iPhone event is,

We have a lot of evidence to use to guess when that is. And I can kind of put a reasonable balance on no sooner than the Wednesday after Labor Day, no later probably than two weeks thereafter. That's usually when the event is. It's very consistent. There's a lot of things I imagine that are – it's a hardware product, so it's very consistent.

tied into some schedules that aren't as flexible. But when I think about when other things are going to come, that could come at any point. And when Apple gives general guidelines like early next year or those kinds of very vague things that could... Like we ran into with Vision Pro, right? That could have meant... It could mean January. That could mean March. In that case, it meant...

Was it February 2nd, I think, or February 1st when it actually launched? The lack of specificity there is frustrating because I can't play with it, but it's also nice that it's not all happening at once. And so I will take that over having tremendous specificity of everything all happening the first week of September and the next three weeks being just absolutely chaotic and overwhelming. We are brought to you this episode...

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So something that is a bit of a perennial topic if you've been listening to Under the Radar for several years around this time of year is also kind of discussing how much we share our plans for the fall publicly. Yeah.

And this is something that is complicated and nuanced. I think there are advantages to being very public about your plans and as you're developing things and talking about it and getting help. And, you know, someone one of the most fabulous aspects, I feel like, of our community or certainly the part of the part of the iOS community that I feel like I'm privileged to be a member of is.

is a sense of camaraderie and a sense of, you know, get helping each other out if we have problems or issues or, you know, we, I discover something that was a weird edge case bug and I have a workaround sharing that workaround so that someone else who's encountered that bug doesn't have to do the, you know, the battle that I just fought.

But the summer, I always find, is a really tricky time for me because especially once you get to a point where your apps have some amount of success and have some amount of traction, they also naturally will attract competitors and people doing the similar things to what you're doing.

in a way that is awkward if you, you know, who potentially then you tell you, you give your plans to your competitors, it's much easier for them for your competitors to build their app to adapt against that, to make, you know, if you have an idea for some novel new cool feature and then they just, you know, sort of copy it. Well, it's one thing if they copy it that, you know, the week after you've launched it and you've had the benefit of being the only one who had that cool new idea.

But if you've pre-announced it, they can copy it from the start or even potentially pre-empt you and launch it before you because either if you're waiting for iOS 18 itself and so maybe they launch it in iOS 17 or you never know. You're going to get stuck in AppReview and you're going to miss day one by a couple of days and they didn't get stuck in AppReview.

So it's a tricky thing. And I would say it's funny. Like, I actually I had someone recently reach out and be like, hey, are you you know, you're right. You think things OK? You seem real quiet on online recently. And I was very gracious, very kind. And everything's fine. But it was just like, I don't talk about my work right now because where I've generally settled is that I don't talk about my sort of plans publicly between WDC and.

and the actual launch because I want to have that impact. I want to have the ability to be creative, to come up with novel things, and to not worry that they're going to be sort of copied or in some ways even just that the impact of them gets diminished. That if I've been talking about it publicly for a while, it's not as exciting as when it just sort of like appears one day and here's all this cool, amazing things. I'd be able to go from zero to 100 in

in one day rather than sort of gradually, incrementally building it over time. You know, there are some features that I will talk about this. Like, I mean, my big updates I've been doing to Pedometer recently over the last couple of months, like, they tend to be the things that I talked about publicly because they were kind of these incremental things that I was doing over time and without a particular deadline or schedule for. And so it felt reasonable to do. And, you know, they're features that weren't, like, novel and new. They were more just novel and new to Pedometer++. And so, you know,

It's a tricky place, but that's sort of where I've settled. And I think broadly, it's a reasonable idea to do that. I think, you know, I expect to do a lot of talking about what I've done over the summer, you know, after the summer. I've, you know, I tend to record a lot of, you know, capture notes and screenshots of things in progress so that maybe I'll write, you know, sort of some things looking back and kind of retrospectives about how the process worked or development choices that I had to make or design choices that I had to make.

But I think that's best done afterwards than sort of doing it ahead of time. But...

But that's really not how I always was back in the days when I didn't have the degree of success. It didn't feel important. It didn't feel like something that was super relevant. Maybe it's one of those things that's like one of the sort of drawbacks of having some amount of audience is that you have people who are listening to you. And so what you say actually can have an impact on you. And what I really don't want to do is end up in a place that just because

I was excited about something and I started online as a result that had a negative impact on, you know, sort of the prospects of the app because I am very excited about what I'm working on. Like, I mean, it's certainly,

talking privately to people who've seen what I'm working on. I think I'm doing some cool stuff this summer. I think there's been some really interesting things that are coming as a result. I think control center widgets are really cool, and you can do some really awesome stuff with them. But exactly how I'm doing that and the way I'm approaching it is something that I expect to be waiting on sharing rather than sharing right away. Yeah, I've gone back and forth over time on the value of keeping things quiet until launch.

I think it is a tool that is not always the best answer, but it can be a good answer. And it kind of helps to develop the skill to know when to use it. Like, you know, for most Overcast updates that I've done, I have not had secrecy. I have not enforced that or had only secret betas or anything. I just... I developed mostly in the open because...

In part because it's just more pragmatic in a lot of ways. It's easier to not try to keep secrets than to try to keep them. And in part because I don't feel threatened by copying nearly as much as many app categories would because I feel like I have a pretty good moat around my own business. And so I don't really need to try very hard to get the jump on someone and make sure someone can't steal something from under me. But at the same time...

I do... When I have something that I really think is great, that is a very new innovation, I do kind of feel the need to keep that quiet. I will occasionally do that. And to the largest extent, I did that with the redesign. The entire rewrite and redesign of Overcast, I only had a small private beta group. I did not have a big public beta group. And honestly...

I have found decreasing value in a large beta group over time. And part of that's just like, I think I just need to like reset my group and clear it out. And, you know, cause like what happens is, you know, I have this group, I have like, you know, a Slack group and I have, you know, people on, on Mastodon and stuff who, who like join it through my link or whatever. Eventually the link fills up. The link is like, you know, I have the cap set as 5,000 testers and test flight for that link. And so, yeah, I have 5,000 people ostensibly on the test flight.

In reality, I don't get anywhere near 5,000 installs of every build. It's not even close. I think I get a few hundred at most. And in terms of actual feedback that I get from beta testers, it's very, very little. And so I have found that the value of having a small private beta is not that different from having a big public beta.

The big public betas tend not to report any additional issues that the small beta participants didn't report. It just takes a little longer for the small beta participants to report them sometimes because it's a smaller group. They're not using the app immediately upon each build being launched and stuff like that. So I have found in general the value of keeping my work secret. The value is not massive most of the time, but also...

The downsides aren't that massive most of the time. Like, not having a big public beta for my rewrite really didn't affect it at all. Again, like, there was no feedback that I got from a bigger group that I didn't get from my beta testers, from even having a small beta of, I think it ended up being something like 40 people. Like, I got all the same feedback that I got later from the bigger release and the bigger groups.

So, and, and I, it is nice to have that kind of big bomb drop, you know, to coordinate it with press, to have like a big splash to come out, to be able to tease it a little bit on the, like, you know, like before my launch, I, I posted a couple of screenshots, you know, ahead of time, like teasing the new interface and honestly testing the reactions to the new interface. That's why it did that actually. Like the biggest risk I thought I was taking with the new interface was moving the playlists to circles, uh,

and you'll notice I posted that like months ago on my Mastodon account. That was not an accident. That's because I wanted to see like, does everybody hate this or is this okay? And no one hated it. And so I'm like, okay, I think this is a safe change to make. Sure enough, that it has panned out that way. That was a safe change to make. So,

controlling the message i think does have a lot of value um it isn't and it isn't always necessary to do that for a lot of stuff um but certainly like when you have like big big new features big new ideas it is kind of fun to do to actually have that be secret and then launch it um

As we talk about, you know, Apple rumors and stuff. I get the irony here. But no, it is nice to have that sometimes. Yeah. And I think it speaks to, I mean, obviously, it's like Apple is famous for being very secretive. And I think there is certainly a value to that that is...

is tangible. Like there is something that is more exciting about the run-up to an unknown launch than there is to something that, you know, you know all the details of or that. And even just, I think honestly, there's an aspect of it is so hard to get any amount of attention for anything that you, you do that. It is so difficult. If you take that amount of that attention and spread it out over the entire summer, in this case, it's,

It's just you're not going to get the impact. You're not going to get any – whatever impact you could get from having something be – being big and public in that way or happening all at once. It's just – it's exciting in that way. And honestly, I do think there is something that I found helpful that – I think you're right that it's easy to think that –

Lots of feedback. More feedback is better than less feedback. That, oh, well, if you shared it with lots of people, you had a big public beta, right? Because at this point, the public, you know, iOS 18 public beta is out there. We could have public test flight betas of our apps that we're launching right now that, you know, we could have thousands of people potentially who are running the iOS 18 version right now.

And in some ways that would be helpful maybe, but I think it also makes it really confusing to sort of have a voice for your app and have a clear vision for what you're excited about and what you're working on. Because sometimes users will give you feedback that will be like, oh yes, that's amazing. But sometimes you get feedback and you're like, hmm, I don't know. Maybe that's right, maybe that isn't. And it ends up you spend a lot of time spinning your wheels or going in directions that are

aren't going to get you to a shippable state as quickly as you want. And honestly, I think sometimes I realize that I've had the mindset that I needed to have it perfect on day one or I'll miss out. And the reality is that that's not the case. The most tangible example of this I always have is I launched WidgetSmith without the concept of theming in the app at all.

and the app was wildly successful as a tool for theming your home screen in spite of that. People were fine waiting whatever it was, about a month, until I added proper theming support into the app. That didn't miss the opportunity. And obviously that's a unique case, that's not a universal thing, but I think it is easy to want it to be perfect. But the reality is, until you know what the competitive landscape is,

It's a hard thing to commit to any particular direction. In some ways, saving your feedback and having more flexibility for what you adjust to later can be helpful. So anyway, that's where I've been. If you were wondering, I often talk about, I've posted these design walkthroughs, I talk through development problems and things, and that's not what I've been doing. It's not because I haven't been working. It's because I've been

you know, keeping my work to myself, having a small group. And I think there is very much what you were saying is like the law of what's it, the law of large numbers. I think there's a, some kind of theorem where once you get to a certain amount of feedback or of signal, additional signal won't help you. You know, it's like, it's why you don't need to have, you don't need to survey a million people to understand and have a reasonable confidence about what people are thinking. You only need a small, much, much smaller number than that.

And I think having, if you're showing your, your, your, your, your thing to 20, 30, 40, 50 people, that's probably going to be enough. It's probably going to capture the majority of the issues such that,

You know, you don't need to capture all of them. You just need to capture enough of the main things and the rest will come later. And then you can use that time just, you know, to be more focused, to be more productive, to really get to that place that you can be ready in a couple of weeks to put up the sign that says no more new features, because whether we like it or not, August is not going to last nearly as long as I wish it were. Thank you for listening, everybody. And we'll talk to you in two weeks. Bye.