MediaPlayer Enhancements in iOS 10.3 →

Charles Joseph, developer of Picky, on the enhancements coming to the MediaPlayer framework in iOS 10.3:

I was genuinely surprised and elated to find that yesterday’s iOS 10.3 beta finally adds what looks like proper queuing functionality to MPMusicPlayerController and I excitedly tweeted about it. Scott Edwards asked if I could “explain why that’s important to a non programmer”, so I’m going to try to do that here.

Alternatives to Apple’s Music app (like Picky) need to be able to access and play the user’s iTunes library, unless they’re part of a streaming service (like Spotify) or providing their own syncing and library management and companion apps (quite the tall order). While developers can build incredibly advanced playback functionality with tools like AVFoundation, that’s only possible for an increasingly smaller subset of users’ libraries: only locally downloaded, non-DRMed content — nothing stored in the cloud and nothing downloaded from Apple Music. People are storing more and more of their music in the cloud and expect third-party apps to be able to keep up.

It sounds like Apple is listening to feedback from developers of third-party music players. The changes documented in the iOS 10.3 beta so far don’t address all the concerns Allen Pike covered last year, but it’s a good first step. I’m curious to see how apps will take advantage of the improved API.

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Mac App Subscription Service Setapp Goes Live

By John Voorhees

MacPaw, makers of CleanMyMac, Gemini, and other apps, launched a public beta subscription service of hand-picked Mac apps last December called Setapp. Today the service, which aims to become the ‘Netflix of apps,’ was officially launched with a stable of 61 Mac apps.

For a flat subscription fee of $9.99 per month, customers can download any of the 61 apps and use them as long as they continue to make monthly payments. After MacPaw receives a 30% cut of customers’ subscription fees, developers who participate in Setapp are paid based on a formula that accounts for the price their apps are sold for outside the service and whether customers use the apps each month, which MacPaw tracks.

iOS 10.3 to Standardize In-App Review Prompts, Developers to Gain Ability to Respond to Customer Reviews

By Federico Viticci

With today’s release of the first iOS 10.3 beta for developers, Apple announced two changes that have been highly requested by iOS users and the developer community. iOS 10.3 will offer a developer API to standardize how apps can ask users to rate an app or write a review on the App Store, and developers will get the ability to directly respond to customer reviews on both the iOS and Mac App Store.

Apple Increases tvOS App Size Limit to 4 GB →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Nice change for tvOS app developers announced today by Apple:

The size limit of a tvOS app bundle has increased from 200 MB to 4 GB, so you can include more media in your submission and provide a complete, rich user experience upon installation. Also, tvOS apps can use On-Demand Resources to host up to 20 GB of additional content on the App Store.

On one hand, this prepares the platform for 4K support and larger file sizes in the future, and it makes another step towards legitimizing the Apple TV as a micro-console (in addition to bigger app downloads, developers can also require controllers in their games for tvOS 10).

However, the 64 GB version of the 4th generation Apple TV has been around for over a year now with little explanation from Apple as to why customers would want to spend more for increased storage, and this feels like lifting a limitation because why not.

I’m curious to see what happens now, particularly in terms of game releases on tvOS. This is a welcome change for game developers, but we haven’t seen any major tvOS exclusives so far.

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Amazon’s New AI Tools for Developers →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Interesting announcements from Amazon at its AWS event this week: the company is rolling out a suite of artificial intelligence APIs for developers to plug their apps into. These tools are based on the AWS cloud (which a lot of your favorite apps and services already use) and they leverage the same AI and deep learning that has also powered Alexa, the software behind the Amazon Echo.

Here’s April Glaser, writing for Recode:

Drawing on the artificial intelligence that powers Amazon’s popular home assistant Alexa, the new tools will allow developers to build apps that have conversational interfaces, can turn text into speech and use computer vision that is capable of recognizing faces and objects.

Amazon’s latest push follows moves from Google and Microsoft, both of which have cloud computing platforms that already use artificial intelligence.

Google’s G Suite, for example, uses AI to power Smart Reply in Gmail, instant translation and smart scheduling functions in its calendar. Likewise, Microsoft recently announced it’s bringing artificial intelligence to its Office 365 service to add search within Word, provide productivity tracking and build maps from Excel with geographic data.

It’s increasingly starting to look like “AI as an SDK” will become a requirement for modern apps and services. Deep learning and AI aren’t limited to playing chess and recognizing cat videos anymore; developers are using this new kind of computing power for all kinds of features – see Plex, Spotify, and Todoist for two recent examples. I’ve also been hearing about iOS apps using Google’s Cloud Vision a lot more frequently over the past few months.

I think this trend will only accelerate as AI reshapes how software gets more and better work done for us. And I wonder if Apple is considering an expansion of their neural network APIs to match what others are doing – competition in this field is heating up quickly.

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App Review Downtime Announced →

Linked By John Voorhees

Each year around the Christmas holiday, Apple’s App Review team takes a break from reviewing the thousands of apps that pour into the App Store on a typical day. During the break, new apps and app updates are not accepted. This year is no different. According to Apple’s Developer news site:

The busiest season on the App Store is almost here. Make sure your apps are up-to-date and ready for the winter holidays. New apps and app updates will not be accepted December 23 to 27 (Pacific Time), so any releases should be submitted, approved, and scheduled in advance. Other iTunes Connect and developer account features will remain available.

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Improving Integration with Apple Music for iOS Apps →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Allen Pike has a good summary of how limited the media player framework is on iOS, especially for developers who want to create apps that integrate with Apple Music:

In the meantime, these limitations mean that any music app that attempts to play Apple Music tracks will be seriously limited, require odd workarounds, and behave problematically depending on user behaviour. In the spirit of giving users a quality experience, we’re stuck with the same limitation that other sophisticated audio apps have today: no Apple Music.

The explanation is a bit technical in places, but I think we can all relate to some limitations he details: apps can’t modify Music playlists on the user’s behalf, queue management is severely limited, and fading a song out is a private API.

There could be an entire ecosystem of music utilities and alternative players based on the streaming service – think how professional DJ apps, tagging services like Shazam and SoundHound, or music discovery apps could take advantage of a direct integration with Apple Music. I hope Apple will consider some of these suggestions for next year.

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Dissecting the Most Profitable iMessage Apps →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Ariel Michaeli, writing on the appFigures blog:

When it comes to making money, users seem to be fine with paid apps. Unlike the iOS App Store, on the iMessage App Store only 7% of top grossing apps are free(mium). That’s just 13 apps!!!

The remaining 93% of apps (187, to be precise) cost between $0.99 and $4.99, with the majority (61%) having a price of $0.99 and 36% having a price of $1.99. The remaining 4 apps split between the other price tiers.

Monetizing upfront is great for developers because it’s simple and easy to implement, but it’s also a sign of a store that isn’t mature. If the iMessage App Store matures similarly to the iOS App Store—which is likely considering it’s the same audience and device—we’ll see a strong shift towards freemium. For now, developers should make the most out of it.

Speaking from personal experience, the iMessage App Store’s top charts are a constant source of discovery for new paid sticker packs from indie artists. These first numbers from September seem to be holding up so far.

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