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Longtime Indies on the iOS App Store
Last week, I asked on Twitter for examples of individual developers who have been making and maintaining iOS apps for the past five years.
What are examples of iOS apps made by a single developer that have been around for 5+ years? I can think of PCalc.
— Federico Viticci (@viticci) November 15, 2014
I was thinking about the App Store market for indie developers, and I was particularly interested in knowing for how long a single person can keep working on the same app. Is it because the same app makes for a good business even after several years? Is this commitment related to respecting an existing user base or scratching your own itch? Is it a combination of all of the above?
Note that I asked for individual developers and apps that are still maintained – not small teams of multiple people, and not apps that were released five years ago and never updated. I’m fully aware of the fact that no developer is an island and that, in the indie iOS development community, developers tend to help each other out and collaborate. And in no way I asked that to imply that teams of two or more developers “have it easier” or that it’s “better” to be a single person who makes apps. I think it’s pretty clear that I have the utmost respect for larger companies and smaller indie shops that create apps for the iOS App Store. I was simply curious: how many individual developers make an app and stick to it? Who are they?
I received a lot of responses, which were extremely interesting and contained a lot of great examples. So after coming up with a way to collect all those tweets, I created a workflow that uses the Twitter oEmbed API in Editorial to compile those links in a list of embedded tweets you can find below. If you’re reading this through an RSS reader, you may want to switch to the website for the correct visualization.
This is obviously a small sample based on an informal poll of the people who follow me on Twitter, and it’s not indicative of the financial viability of the App Store market for indies. I don’t know how these apps are doing or if it’s worth updating them from a financial perspective. But still, if you ever wanted to know what are some examples of individual developers who created apps 5/4 years ago and still maintain them today, you can find some tweets below.
Twitter Adds Ability to Share Tweets via Direct Message
As Twitter promised two weeks ago, improvements are coming to direct messages. After reinstating the ability to share URLs in direct messages, the company has now added a shortcut to its web, iPhone, TweetDeck, and Android apps (no iPad, it seems) that lets you easily send a tweet privately to someone else.
CloudMagic Adds Share Extension, Share Sheets in Email Messages
CloudMagic, an email client I mentioned in my article on Mail and extensions on iOS 8, has been updated today with a share extension and support for saving messages elsewhere with share sheets.
I use CloudMagic on the iPad because I need an email client capable of saving messages to Todoist. With the update, CloudMagic gains support for any app that provides an action/share extension, and, for the most part, everything works well. From the app, I can now save message text to Clips, the native Todoist extension, Drafts, and NoteBox. There are some inconsistencies (some apps insert data received by CloudMagic in the wrong field of their extension; subject lines aren’t always used to fill title fields), but it’s a solid start.
The share extension is also a nice addition. You can bring it up in Safari to send a webpage over email, use it in the Photos app to attach an image to a new message, and, in general, you can rely on it as a replacement for Mail system sharing (too bad it can’t save drafts).
CloudMagic is free on the App Store.
You Can Now Search for Every Tweet Ever Sent in the Twitter App
In a blog post published today, Twitter announced that every tweet sent since 2006 is indexed and can be searched in the Twitter apps for the web and mobile devices.
Since that first simple Tweet over eight years ago, hundreds of billions of Tweets have captured everyday human experiences and major historical events. Our search engine excelled at surfacing breaking news and events in real time, and our search index infrastructure reflected this strong emphasis on recency. But our long-standing goal has been to let people search through every Tweet ever published.
The blog post shares the technical details behind the technology (an impressive scale and undoubtedly a huge challenge), but I was more curious to try the user-facing aspect of indexed tweets and search in the official app for iOS.
For me, there’s tremendous value in being able to easily retrieve old tweets: I’ve written about the Twitter archive before, but today’s rollout brings retrieval of indexed tweets to the search section of the Twitter app – no need to download an archive. Twitter search used to be limited to tweets from the past couple of weeks; now, you can look for every public tweet sent since 2006.
Merging Text Captured from iOS 8 Extensions
A few days ago, I asked a question on Twitter and received lots of interesting replies that I wanted to save for reference. I thought that I could simply use iOS 8 extensions to append direct links to each tweet to a single note, but that turned out to be harder than expected.
iOS 8.1.1 Brings Fixes for Share Sheet Extension Reordering, iCloud Crashes
Earlier today, Apple released iOS 8.1.1 with bug fixes and performance improvements for the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S.
What Apple doesn’t specifically address in their release notes are two welcome fixes that people who use iOS devices extensively will likely notice: the order of action and share extensions in the system share sheet now sticks across apps and app relaunches; and, the iCloud hanging/crashing bug appears to be gone.
Google Updates YouTube for iOS with New Music Section
Following the announcement of YouTube Music Key earlier today, Google updated its official YouTube app for iOS with a new Music tab in preparation for the service’s beta rollout next week.
The new tab, available at the top of the main interface, doesn’t bring Music Key functionalities, but instead showcases a selection of music based on popularity and your watching history on YouTube. In this section, YouTube is offering mixes (non-stop playlists based on songs or artists, like radio stations), recommended videos, a history section for music videos you’ve played before, plus trending and popular videos.
The selections in the new Music area of YouTube are solid when it comes to personal history and recommendations, but they feel a little impersonal as they lack any sort of editorial pick or curated content. The Music tab is very much user-centric at this point: music videos are either recommended based on your history and likes on YouTube or they’re already part of your subscriptions and playlists. The execution is nice thanks to large previews, a clean interface, and the ability to quickly start playing a mix or a playlist, but, right now, YouTube’s Music tab is obviously not meant to replace the home page of services like Beats Music or Spotify.
You can get the updated YouTube app with the new Music section on the App Store.
Overcast 1.1 Brings iPad App, New Landscape Mode
Overcast, Marco Arment’s excellent podcast player that I reviewed back in July and that became my favorite way to listen to podcasts on the iPhone, has been updated today to version 1.1. The new version, which I’ve been testing on my iPad Air 2 and iPhone 6 for the past couple of weeks, brings a welcome iPad interface, further optimizations for iOS 8 with bug fixes, and a new landscape mode on the iPhone.