WWDC '23. Check. What's next?

It’s been about a month since I announced my full-time Indie-dom, and there’s been a lot going on. I had a few milestones that I wanted to hit prior to the start of WWDC ‘23, and I hit them all. I’m particularly happy with my progress on Bills to Budget’s upcoming Sharing capability — it’s not in Test Flight yet, but I’ve been testing it myself, and I will be submitting a version this week.

After completing my goals, and then being as focused as possible on WWDC last week, I spent the weekend not exactly sure what’s next - this post is intended to dump a few ideas out of my head, take a shot at prioritizing them, and getting some plans in place for the next few weeks.

But first, a few thoughts on how my WWDC went…

A solid B+ — that’s not a grade for Apple, that’s a grade for me. I got a lot out of it, to be sure, but I want to do better on a few things next year. Hopefully, I’ll remember to refer back to this post next year, and improve!

I had some really great lab experiences, but overall, I could have been more effective in my preparation. I had some questions/ideas prepared, but I could have spent more time preparing sample projects. I had also wanted to spend more time thinking/talking with folks about the AppStore — getting feedback on my Product Pages, getting tips on how to get featured, etc — but I kept putting those labs off for more interesting ‘technical’ slots. This was a mistake that I only realized on Friday, when it was too late, and something all Indie’s need to pay more attention to.

This year had a different on-line vibe than previous years, because there were so many people and events that were in-person in Cupertino. Online social events were harder to find this year, and the one I decided on was try! Swift Dub Dub, which was hosted on Friday — but by the time Friday came around, I was exhausted, and had a few projects I wanted to work on, so I ended up bailing. Next year — find something earlier in the week!

That said, I was active on a few Slacks and Discords, and got a lot of value out of them. Mastodon — no so much. The iOS community on Mastodon was so incredibly active, there is no way I could keep up without spending hours scrolling that I didn’t have. I’m curious how others felt about this — it’s a different experience than Twitter, where the ‘algorithm’ keeps you a bit more up to date (although you obviously don’t get to see everything), but on Mastodon, once I fall significantly behind, the only way I know to catch up is to declare bankruptcy and jump to the top of my stream.

There are a handful of short-term milestones I want to hit, along with a few general themes for the next 2 months. I’ll have a vacation thrown in the middle of that, so I’ll be hoping to get some closer before then (I know, I know — a vacation right after going Indie? It’s something we’ve been planning for almost a year, and most of it’s already paid for, so here we are :) ).

Prior to WWDC, I released a version of Signals with AppDivvy support — now it’s time to get partners engaged, and start building this up. AppDivvy is intended to be an important part of the marketing plan for my business, and establishing a small base of content patterns will be really important to set the direction over the next year, and hopefully push some growth.

Part of my goal at WWDC was to speak to the folks who could help guide my decisions around how the Sharing Experience will go for B2B. As I’ve mentioned, the basic flow is working, but it’s a fairly bare-bones implementation, and has a few rough edges I’d like to work out, especially around the SwiftUI ShareLink and the UICloudSharingController — both of which appear to have bugs. On the plus side, I was able to talk about these bugs with both the iCloud and the SwiftUI teams, and filed feedback — now I need to hope that they get fixed!

I’d really love to tie the CloudKit Sharing feature with the new Collaboration support that was rolled out last year — this is an area I wanted to learn more about at WWDC last year, but was a bit hamstrung by a need for more preparation.

I’m not yet sold on whether I want to move Bills to Budget to iOS 17, but I’m leaning that way — with it being a newer app, the current user-base is small enough for the impact to be relatively small. It will likely improve my chance of getting some press in the fall, however I’m concerned that it will mean my TestFlight group for the Sharing feature will be severely limited, since it would require more than one person in a family to be running the betas. More likely, I will end up splitting these builds, and potentially releasing the sharing sooner than September.

While I’d love to take advantage of SwiftData, it’s not directly compatible with CloudKit sharing yet, so at best, I’d need to have SwiftData and CoreData exist in parallel — this is definitely a supported path for SwiftData, but the need to keep your two models exactly in sync “or risk data loss” has me nervous. Some testing is needed!

Signals for HomeKit is going to get a bit of a facelift, but because it’s also on macOS, I’m currently targeting this to be updated with the macOS release, likely in October. While there are really no changes to the HomeKit API (again…), I’m overdue to re-write the effects engine, and so far I love the new Observable capability. In addition, I learned on Friday that AppIntents will now get 30 seconds of runtime in a Shortcuts/”Hey Siri” context, which tremendously opens up the kinds of effects that I can pull off — things should be interesting when I start digging in here, and I’m excited to finally break through the old 10 second limit!

There might just be something new — time will tell on this one 👀