Interesting blog post from Apple today: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=06082016a. Covered on The Verge and Daring Fireball

Search Ads is an efficient and easy way for you to promote your app directly within the U.S. App Store search results, helping customers discover or reengage with your app, while respecting their privacy. Starting this summer, you’ll be able to participate in the Search Ads beta and see the ads in action.

Awwww hell no. App Store search is broken enough, the last thing developers need is paid ads. This is pure and simple, a way for Apple to make more money and that's ok, they are a business after all. The App Store search page must get a crazy amount of hits per day, why not make some money off that? It's a perfectly reasonable move on Apple's part, but Apple Press for the love of Zuul please let's stop pretending that they are some kind of Shining White Knight of a company that eschews this sort of thing. There's nothing good here for developers or customers, this is just Apple helping Apple.

We’re opening auto-renewable subscriptions to all app categories including games, increasing developer revenue for eligible subscriptions after one year, providing greater pricing flexibility, and more.

This on the other hand is a big improvement to subscriptions. The 70/30 split is dropping to 85/15 after one year of a subscriber being on your system and they are expanding the list of apps that can use subscriptions. The Internet is all abuzz with what this means for us lowly indie app developers, but honestly this seems more geared at things like Netflix & Sketch than it does to apps like Pocket Weather and Pocket Casts. My one fear is that desperate developers will jump on this and try to turn every app into a paid subscription. If that happens (and it's a big if) it could easily lead to customer fatigue and all sorts of blowback. This will be something to keep an eye on for sure.

Finally, Schiller says that the App Store has been speeding up app review times — to the point where 50 percent of submitted apps are now reviewed in 24 hours, and 90 percent are reviewed within 48 hours.

Let's end on a high note. This is a MASSIVE win for developers. I'm willing to ignore the fact that we took 8 years to get to this point just because it makes me so happy to see Apple publicly saying that these review times are here to stay. Just this week I submitted an update to Pocket Weather that was approved in about 16 hours. That's game changing vs the 7 days+ we used to have to wait. My eternal gratitude to whoever solved this one, hopefully once and for all.

Fellow Relay FM host Jason Snell wrote an interesting article comparing Google in the naughties to Microsoft in the 90s.

Open Google Docs for iOS and you’re whisked into a Material Design world. To create a new document, you must tap a large red circle at the bottom right corner of the screen. The options icon is three vertical dots, rather than the three horizontal dots favored by Apple. Menus display in Material Design style, white cards on a gray background.

Full Article

He argues that much like Microsoft was in the 90s, Google is now pushing a design language that is common across platforms and that in contrast Apple isn't (as evidenced by Apple Music on Android). While I agree with some of what Jason is saying, I feel as if he's so dangerously close to an epiphany. I'd argue that all the big companies now have their own design languages that they push across all their platforms, and that Google is the only one to actually give it a name.

Allow me to elaborate. Every time I head to iTunes Connect or iCloud.com I'm presented with web apps that look like iOS apps. We have iOS launcher style icons on blurred backgrounds, we have iOS style navigation, heck we even have pop-up boxes to notify you of events and errors. Everything about these 'web apps' screams iOS. So it would be easy for me to pen an article about how Apple doesn't respect the web, or Windows. But they respect Android, right? Their music app changed 2 icons on the player screen! It turns out Apple actually have a huge sample size of 2 apps, which we can look at to see if they respect the Android platform. Here is the second one:

Fits right in on Android. Totally.

Yes readers there's nothing the least bit iOS looking about that app. At all.

The truth is that Apple has a design language that they have chosen and they are applying it everywhere too. They haven't named it 'Apple Design' or 'TiLTOWB' (Tiny Light Text On White Backgrounds) but it's there, everywhere you look. Microsoft does the same, they have their 'authentically digital' design aesthetic that you see on Windows 10, Xbox, iOS and elsewhere.

So yes, Google is trying to apply Material Design to all platforms, but so is every other big tech company out there. Apple does it. Microsoft does it. Spotify does it. Facebook does it. As to whether they actually should, or each company should develop a unique aesthetic for each platform, well that's another debate entirely.

Android Developer

iOS Developer

“It’s no good to pump out gold bricks if you’re crushing the souls of tiny unicorns in the process” - Matías Duarte

If the above quote is not a great reason to listen to this week's episode of Material, in which we interview Google's Vice President of Design Matías Duarte, then I don't know what is.

I had a few more thoughts after writing this post about Apple's first Android app. The most interesting one was this: Apple Music on Android has the potential to be the best music app Apple has ever made. Bear with me here:

• They won't be burdened by any legacy implementation: they could literally build it from scratch, with all the lessons they've learnt to date.
• They don't have the burden of having to play your local music like the iOS app, it could be a dedicated app for Apple sourced music only.
• They can update the app as often as they want, iterating on things fast, since unlike iOS it's not tied to OS releases.
• The team building it probably has far less oversight from the Print Designers that seem to run Apple's User Interface division these days, so they can probably be a bit more experimental and try out some fun new interface paradigms.
• Assuming they don't clone their iOS app, they'd be free to rethink how things should be laid out to work best for their users.

I know this is just a dream. I know Apple probably has a tiny team working on this whose only goal is to clone the iOS feature set and get the job done. I doubt there's a tonne of resources allocated to fancy animations or new interface ideas. It's a shame really, at times like this I wish Apple were slightly more divisional. I wish that the division building the Apple Music service as a whole were focussed solely on making that an amazing experience on every device. I acknowledge though, that's not how Apple rolls. The Android app will be, I suspect, a re-skinned version of the Beats Music app that preceded it.

Overall I'm conflicted by the commercial realities of the situation. In the long run is it better for Apple to make amazing apps on Android that entice people to look into their hardware, or is the sounder strategy to build a wall around their content and apps that will only run on their own devices? The optimist in me wishes the former were true, but the realist knows it's the latter.