WWDC 2024: What Subscription Apps Need to Know — David Barnard, Jacob Eiting, & Charlie Chapman, RevenueCat

David Barnard:

Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world, to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show.

Hello, hello, welcome to our annual WWDC Recap with RevenueCat. We are going to be sharing this as a Sub Club Podcast as well. So for those of you listening on the podcast, this is actually live. Let's do a quick round of intros. Most people on this podcast probably know me and Jacob. Most people on the webinar should know a little bit about RevenueCat and us, but we'll do a quick round of intros. Charlie, tell us a little bit about you and what you do at RevenueCat?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, so I'm Charlie Chapman. I'm a developer advocate here at RevenueCat. And my job is to come out to events like these or online, and just talk to developers, understand the pain points they're having, and bring that back to the team. As well as, when we come out with new features, explain what it is that we can do, how we can help out your subscription app business, specifically on the engineering side of things.

David Barnard:

And Jacob is CEO of RevenueCat. It's boring for you to tell people what you do because you have the most boring job.

Jacob Eiting:

I don't have a real job job. It's a fake job. It's never boring, but it's definitely fake.

David Barnard:

Why don't you give us your best RevenueCat elevator pitch?

Jacob Eiting:

Well, I think Charlie surrounded it there. But, yeah, we help developers make more money with the power of computers. We started as an SK1 wrapper, StoreKit 1 wrapper, which we'll get to later today. But we make software that helps you do in-app subscriptions, more or less, and do it better, and monetize better, and be a more successful app. That's our dream. And then, yeah, like David said, my job's made up. I do podcasts. That's what I've been doing the last two days.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And then I'm David Barnard, used to be developer advocate. That got confusing because I'm not actually a developer, so we made up a name. I'm Growth Advocate at RevenueCat. I host the Sub Club Podcast, run the Sub Club community, host webinars, speak at events. I'll be in New York City in two weeks for App Promotion Summit. I'll be interviewing-

Jacob Eiting:

I will too, actually, so I'll be there as well.

David Barnard:

Oh, nice. I'll be on stage interviewing the Senior VP of Growth at Babel. So we'll be in New York City. Get in touch if you're in New York, or in New York for APS. We will be hanging out for a few days before, meeting up with folks. So without further ado, let's get into it. WWDC 2024. I personally think the absolute biggest news of WWDC '24 was the deprecation of everybody's favorite Original API for In-App Purchase.

Jacob Eiting:

That's so bad. It's StoreKit 1. Before it was StoreKit 1, it was just StoreKit.

David Barnard:

Just StoreKit.

Jacob Eiting:

SnoreKit, who really wants to know that stuff? But I think it is-

David Barnard:

SnoreKit, I've never heard that one before.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, Google my Twitter for SnoreKit, I did a couple... That's like the joke I would make every four months. StoreKit? More like SnoreKit. But I do think it's a good time to take a moment to remember our good friend, StoreKit, later known as StoreKit 1, later later known as Original API for In-App Purchase classic TM.

But a history lesson, StoreKit didn't come out in iOS 1, it came out... Actually, it come out in iOS 3, I believe, because it wasn't in the very first iteration of App Store. So it was in 2009 that we first got StoreKit. And it piggybacked... This is so beautiful, the elegance of technical debt. It piggybacked on the basically technical foundations of iTunes, the old iTunes, buying stuff. And the whole app store infrastructure originally was built on the iTunes infrastructure. Apple, always be shipping, which was built on everybody's favorite, very popular web framework, known as WebObjects, if anybody's ever heard of that. They used to sell it in a box. I used to know that because IL1, they used to have it in one of the displays of old Apple stuff. You could buy a boxed version of WebObjects. So anyway, that was the origin of StoreKit.

David Barnard:

It all run on Oracle from what I understand.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, really? Was it running on Oracle backends?

David Barnard:

Yeah, yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, that's awesome. Classic cutting edge web technology. And, yeah, you know what, it held up. That was, what, 2009 to 2024? That's, what, 15 years? 15 years of in-app purchases with StoreKit. They extended it in 2013 to add recurring purchases, which it was never designed to do, which I'm not too sad about because it created an opportunity for me to start a business. But they just kept extending it and extending it and extending it. And it really is a load-bearing part of the app economy is this little WebObjects SDK and framework and API that's lasted this long. When did StoreKit 2 come out? It was two years ago, three years ago. They announced, "Hey, a newer, fresher, more modern take on how to do commerce within apps." And then we knew this day would come.

Now, they've deprecated it. It doesn't mean it's going away. I actually think it will probably be around forever. I don't think they'll be able to fully deprecate it because there are probably apps out there don't use RevenueCat, that have IAP code that's a billion years old. And maybe someday they will, but it's going to be a while until they can really rug that one.

David Barnard:

I don't know that Apple would ever say this, but my guess would be that something like 80% of all revenue on the App Store still goes through StoreKit 1 because so many big apps haven't transitioned. There's so much legacy code.

Jacob Eiting:

There's a big bias, there's going to be a big bias for the biggest apps being the oldest, right?

David Barnard:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

And so they're just going to tend to be on StoreKit 1.

David Barnard:

And it's a big lift to migrate from StoreKit 1 to StoreKit 2.

Jacob Eiting:

If you're starting that new, StoreKit 2 is a much better user experience. But if you're trying to mesh an old system in a new system, ask me how I know, it's not super trivial. So anyway, just to say goodbye to an old friend, it was good to know you. RevenueCat's about to deprecate our last dependencies on old StoreKit receipts. It took us even a few years to fully get migrated over. We'll still support the technology and the receipts. And RevenueCat will always still work with probably some degree of both systems. But a pivotal moment for about 12 people, and us being in that group.

David Barnard:

Yeah, actually, there's probably thousands of engineers around the world who still-

Jacob Eiting:

Who have deprecated skill sets.

David Barnard:

Day in, day out, have to deal with StoreKit and all the oddities and the bugs, but this-

Jacob Eiting:

I'm just really worried what's going to happen with support. Because I can see them breaking stuff in StoreKit original classic, and there's just not going to be any incentive. And it's going to be like, "Oh, upgrade to StoreKit 2, which is not something you can do quickly.

David Barnard:

Yeah, no, they specifically said, and this is them deprecating it, is saying, "Stop using it. We're not going to stop supporting it." But I believe in the, if I remember correctly, the-

Jacob Eiting:

Still supporting can mean we're not going to fix weird edge case bugs though.

David Barnard:

No, no, no. But if I remember the slide correctly, they specifically said, "Will not receive updates." They probably will fix some bugs.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, for something critical. But if it's second order, they're just going to be like, "Use StoreKit 2," as the workaround, right?

David Barnard:

Yeah. They're not going to add stuff to the receipts. They're not going to... Yeah, yeah. So goodbye StoreKit 1. So long, farewell.

Jacob Eiting:

Well, now, when we say StoreKit though, it's just going to mean StoreKit 2. Because that was the other thing they did. They rebranded it as Original API for In-App Purchase, which so beautifully Apple to name it that. But, yeah, we'll see you later.

David Barnard:

So, personally, I think the second-biggest news out of WWDC was AI, AI, AI. And apparently now that stands for Apple Intelligence.

Jacob Eiting:

You mean Apple Intelligence, yeah.

David Barnard:

So I don't want to go too deep today because I'm actually hoping to schedule a podcast soon, talking about the future of apps in a post-AI world. Because I think there are some interesting discussions to be had. But because it was such big news this week, I did want to touch on it. And, Jacob, I thought your framing... So we recorded a podcast with Mojo. And I thought your framing was really good, that the AI revolution is really just a new, and the next, app revolution. What did you mean by that?

Jacob Eiting:

I was waking up earlier this year, or maybe late last year, in cold sweats because I thought apps were over. I had the feeling that, "Oh crap, this ChatGPT thing's really powerful." You could see a few more iterations on this, and maybe you just talk to a thing and it does 90% of your computing needs. That might still happen to some degree. But I think one thing that I realized, that I had come to before this, but became really clear from Apple's integration of AI across the entire OS, is that the mobile device and the app paradigm are going to be super important for this next revolution in computing, this AI-ization of everything we do. Because it's on always, it's connected, and it has context. And that's one of the biggest things that the mobile device has that a lot of other computing platforms don't have is they have context.

I find this with some AI desktop apps I want to use and stuff. To get them to understand context, you have to connect to a million devices and a million services. For one, I don't love giving random new AI app my calendar and email and stuff. That's not secure. And so the mobile device has a ton of advantages here. And then, Apple, obviously, as the arbiter, they've got this great privacy brand. They do understand this stuff. Apple's been building CPUs and GPUs now for... When did the first A chip series come out? It's probably almost 10 years now.

David Barnard:

Yeah, I think more than 10 years, yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, so Apple knows how to build vector processing chips. I assume the new iPhone will have either dedicated or rebranded hardware, specifically for running forward passes on LLMs and things like this. So I really think... And I guess to the point that the AI revolution really we shouldn't be afraid of it, is that Apple's teeing us up. They're going to give us APIs to access their LLMs. The LLMs, or I say LLMs, or whatever, AI, Apple Intelligence features will be able to access your app. We'll talk about app intents a little bit later. But then, also, I think you'll be able to dip into all of these features at the OS level to supercharge whatever little niche problem or big niche problem you're solving.

And, yeah, I'm a lot less worried about apps getting left behind by this because I just think it's so easy to implement, it's accessible. The platforms are going to be pushing it and providing it to developers. I really think AI will eliminate a certain number of use cases that used to maybe could have been apps, like Solver. There's a bunch of apps that got semi-sherlocked this week. But I don't think they're in danger because even if AI eats the bottom couple layers of the stack, it's also expanding the surface area of what can be done with apps. And it's just creating new opportunities. And OpenAI, Apple, Google, all of these foundation model companies are not going to be able to go after each one of these apps. And that's where developers come in to connect this core technology to a need. So, Dave, you told me not to talk about it much, but it's going to be a good podcast.

David Barnard:

It's going to be a great podcast. I'm hoping to get Ben Thompson on, actually, because I feel like-

Jacob Eiting:

Oh boy, me and Ben, we have history. I don't know.

David Barnard:

You and I, Jacob, I feel like maybe are... Well, we're definitely biased, and we're very app people. And I think Ben, he even talked about it recently I think on a Dithering or whatever, I think he's bought into, apps aren't going anywhere just like the desktop didn't go anywhere with mobile. It just becomes different use cases, like you were saying. But he's a little more AI bull. And so I think it'd be fun to have him or someone like him as a balancing factor to have a deeper discussion on the future of AI and apps. But I wanted to pass it to Charlie because I think there are immediate opportunities with Apple Intelligence in iOS 18, especially for indie developers who love jumping on that release bandwagon to get attention in the fall. What are your thoughts on how developers can take advantage of this to get attention in the fall?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it's been really weird because watching the keynote, everybody was very, very excited, thinking, "There's all this stuff that we can hook into." But then throughout the week as we've all been actually digging into the APIs, as often is the case with these things, the actual hooks we get in are a little less full-featured from our perspective, as third party developers, as I was expecting that they might be. For example, there's that image generation tool. It's basically just a glorified photo picker from a developer perspective. We can't do prompt engineering, I don't think. But then the big one is being able to hook into the Siri, Apple Intelligence stuff. This is one of Apple at its best, where they're basically just taking advantage of the app intense system that they already had.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, I was going to say, is there new with this, other than Siri just-

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it's weird. This is a thing that already existed. My indie app I have is a media app, so I already implemented all of the media app intent stuff. So my understanding is I don't need to do anything. What it does mean is I get to, in September or, well, later this year, whenever these features actually come out, I'll be able to market it as if it's a new feature. But I don't think I even have to write any code for me to plug into it. There are a few new types, such as photo apps that can do editing on photos or something like that.

Jacob Eiting:

This is going to work really well, I feel like, because just seeing how some of the limited, in the ChatGPT ecosystem, some of those limited hooks that they have with other third parties, work pretty well. And the way that LLMs can semantically understand app intents better than Siri ever could. You can write a human text. I don't know if they're going to include-

Charlie Chapman:

That's the key. Because I've supported Siri in my apps for forever, but how often do people say, "Play this music from Spotify," and they say that query the exact right way-

Jacob Eiting:

Never, ever, ever works, right?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

I just think of the Larry David sketch of him yelling at Siri, right?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

It never, ever works. But if it starts to work, we'll be in a different world.

Charlie Chapman:

I think it'll create an interesting new funnel from a business perspective. The paradigm for forever has been open app, and then you track somebody through the user experience. And, now, potentially, this shrinks that funnel but then grows this other one of your entry point is a tech space, very clear intent entry point into your app. And as Apple Intelligence gets better over time, it might not even open your app. You can just provide the action. But then how do you, as a developer, bring people along and help them learn about the features your app has if they're not looking at your UI? I think there's going to be a lot of new challenges in the future as this gets more and more fleshed out.

David Barnard:

And that's, I think, what developers should be thinking about over the summer is, which... So you, you've already built out some app intents. But maybe spending a couple of hours brainstorming like, "Okay, how would somebody think about, for you, wanting some form of white noise, dark noise, brown noise, whatever? And then are there new contexts that you put in those intents?" I think developers should be exploring this over the summer so that they're the most ready they can be for however it rolls out.

Jacob Eiting:

I think you're right though, Charlie, going back to my fever dream of the end of apps, this is a slightly... And this is why this stuff's so hard to predict. This can really actually be a big boon rather than.. It is Siri and the OS maybe taking more of the computational load. Not the computational load so much as the user interface. Now, the interface of your app becomes less important, which could be negative. But the functionality you provide... I think of challenges like, "Well, how do you get somebody to pay for dark noise now, if they're just asking for it? Do you put a paywall in the app intent? How do you do?" Here you go, if somebody asks for a noise that's premium, you just pre-roll an audio that's like, "Hey, you access this if you want all of these sounds," whatever. But silly example, but there's going to have to be rethinking. If it becomes a significant new channel for entry into the app, it's going to have to be rethinking of how we even monetize.

Charlie Chapman:

Or the only channel. Does it become like ASO or SEO, where the way I need to think about my app being used is... Maybe the way it gets into a white noise app is you just say, "Hey Siri, calm me down." And then it's being smart. You know what I mean?

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

It's like you have to learn all these new ways of telling the system that you can solve this problem.

Jacob Eiting:

One of the things that LMs is really good at is just this textual human communication. And I think that's probably the thing that's got me most excited, and where app intents never saw them. There's app intents, and then there was also you could access the search. You could put stuff up for search inside of Siri or inside of Spotlight. Neither of those ever felt like they were meaningful entry points into apps. I think this might have a chance to actually fix that. So it's exciting.

David Barnard:

Yeah, it's so early. Apple announces these things and then it's later this year, so we don't know how much is coming in iOS 18. And then we probably will see some early implementations, and then it's going to evolve over time and stuff. So very early days, but it's exciting. So definitely something developers should be checking out. But speaking of early, I wanted to pass it back to Charlie one more time for Vision Pro. Again, still very early days. What are your thoughts on how developers should be thinking about Vision Pro at this stage, even with 2.0 having been announced a couple of days ago?

Charlie Chapman:

I think, selfishly, I was hoping there would be a little bit more but, realistically, I shouldn't have expected there to be that more this year. I think my general feeling is the same as it's been since the beginning, which is, it's a fun platform to experiment, but understand, if you're trying to make a business, this is a really, really small audience still. If anything, the biggest announcement was just the fact that they're opening it up to new markets. It's definitely still a experimental... I still think of it's a publicly available dev kit and I think that's the appropriate way to think about it.

Jacob Eiting:

Apple can fund it for a very long time to understand if there's a market here or not. And they should, they shouldn't... I don't know how long until they killed the Newton, you know what I mean? It's not unusual for companies to roll a new platform, and then, if it doesn't pan out in a couple of years, have to kill it. Apple, being as well funded as they are, can expend a certain amount of energy to see if they can find a niche and get it to take off.

David Barnard:

Oh, I'm a Vision Pro bull. I think we're just in the early days. I'm with Charlie. This was a developer kit, and it's going somewhere, but it's just going to take a while to get there. It's a phenomenal experience.

Jacob Eiting:

I'm telling you, James Cameron movie, if you make a... I don't even like James Cameron movies that much. But if you made an exclusive James Cameron movie for AVP, I'm buying that right away.

David Barnard:

I tweeted about this a while back. I think what it really is going to take, and I'm shocked Apple hasn't... And maybe this is their patience as well. Is that they know it's a developer kit now. Maybe there's going to be a Vision that's not a Vision Pro that's going to be more consumer friendly. So maybe they're holding their cards a little bit. They want to see if the developers-

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, you wouldn't want to make Avatar 3 exclusive for AVP now because it only a few thousand people would see it.

David Barnard:

Yeah, until there's like a $1,000 device that's more consumer friendly, the platform's more mature, all those kinds of things.

Jacob Eiting:

It has to be the price of a nice TV, which is $500 to $800.

David Barnard:

I think it's going somewhere, but it's still early days. And so the way I continue to think about it is, if you have the bandwidth and the financial backing to be able to explore things that don't require an immediate return on investment, it's a fun place to play. There's cool games, there's awesome experiences. People are doing really cool stuff on it. And the immersion and Apple immersive videos, it's really cool, but it's just early. So if you can afford to play, play, but it's not a build a business on it yet, is my perspective.

Charlie Chapman:

Exactly. I did a presentation at a conference earlier this year talking about it. And the big banner slide was, "This is not a gold rush." Trying to articulate that, yeah, this isn't the original iPhone or the original iPad. Don't play that same playbook there and expect to come out getting the pot of gold at the end like you did in those eras.

David Barnard:

Do you remember, off the top of your head, at least directionally, what the numbers were, iPhone launch, then iPad launch, then Watch launch? Because your slides and that, for anybody who hasn't watched Charlie's presentation, if you're curious about Vision Pro, he did a phenomenal presentation. I watched it on the flights I did this last month. It's really good. So, yeah, you shared the at launch of these different platforms, the scale was just so different.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, the iPhone was bigger than I was expecting whenever I started running the numbers. And then the iPad was just at a completely different scale. And the Apple Watch is still bigger than the iPhone. It was just seen as a failure because the expectation was so high. And then you see the Vision Pro number, and none of this is super surprising, but seeing it graphically laid out like that was a good reminder of what to actually expect if you're trying to run a business on this App Store.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And then, orders of magnitude, it's hundreds of thousands of... For people on the podcast, I'm holding up my fingers with a little, teeny, tiny sliver of Vision Pro is hundreds of thousands of units. And then the iPhone even was tens of millions of units by the time the App Store really started taking off. And even at launch, I believe it was maybe even over 10 million. And at least within the first year, it was in the tens of millions. And then iPad was tens of millions very quickly. And so you just see this tiny, little sliver in Charlie's charts from his presentation, compared to these massive platform launches that were the more gold rush-y. So anyways, early days, and a lot of opportunity, but not something especially business relevant today.

So I'm going to move on. This is going to be me monologuing a bit, but Charlie and Jacob, I'll pause here and there for y'all to jump in. But Apple announced a ton of stuff. And since this is a recap webinar, and I spent the most time deep diving into all this stuff, I'm going to go through and just talk about it. Because they did a lot of cool stuff. So a lot of this is in the... There's a What's New in App Store Connect, WWDC video, if you want to go more in depth. There's five or six videos we'll be referencing in talking through this stuff that you can go watch for more detail. But I know tons of folks aren't going to sit down and watch the whole video. So I'm going to give the highlight reel of what Apple announced.

In App Store Connect, you can nominate your app for featuring now. And it's cool because it's like a whole new UI. Because you get to actually say when these new features are launching, when your 3.0 is launching, when your new app is launching. And then you get to pitch it to Apple in a more directed way. So that's a cool new feature of App Store Connect and an opportunity to get your app in front of Apple and, hopefully, get it featured.

Similarly, there's marketing asset creation in App Store Connect now. I first read about this on the web before I saw the video demo. And so I was like, "Ah, any designer is going to be able to throw something together." And I was like, "Ah, it'll just be for indies." But then I saw in the video it's like, in App Store Connect, you can generate these promotional images that are animated and have these glossy, little things. Apple actually did a really good job with this. And not just indies, I think, are going to use this. It's like you can go into App Store Connect and build these little promotional images that play really well.

Jacob Eiting:

Do you have some ability to customize them and stuff?

David Barnard:

Minimally, I think it's just text customization, and then it auto generates a lot of this, like animations and stuff. But it looks really nice. It looks like you hired somebody.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. But if they all look like that, it's not going to be differentiated, right?

David Barnard:

But how many people are going to see multiple of these? It's like you're targeting your audience with a specific thing. And maybe it's good that they're similar. It's like, "Oh, cool."

Jacob Eiting:

Are these not the assets that get used in promo banners and stuff like that?

David Barnard:

No, it's like a different-

Charlie Chapman:

For external.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, it's for you to be like, "Hey, I got promoted. Here's-"

David Barnard:

Yeah, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

You can tweet about it or put it in your distribution, yeah.

David Barnard:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

That's cool. That's a nice thing.

David Barnard:

It's really nice.

Jacob Eiting:

That's just a gift from Apple. Thank you. Thank you. Doing something with that 30%. I'm glad.

David Barnard:

And then one of the cool things too is that Apple will now notify you when you get featured. And then they create special artwork to highlight that you got featured.

Jacob Eiting:

That's so nice. There's certain platforms you would subscribe to almost just for that, just to know where and when you were featured, right?

David Barnard:

Yep.

Charlie Chapman:

Do you know, David, my understanding from the conversations I've had here is that that's only for App of the Day. Does that also include the different lists that you get in throughout the store and different countries?

David Barnard:

I did not see details on that, so TBD. But I would imagine if it is currently just for App of the Day, they'll expand it over time to have more.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I hope so. Because that's the challenge is, especially as an indie, when you see the sudden spike and you're trying to figure out what happened. It's like, "Oh, in Turkey, there's a list on the today tab, but it's not necessarily App of the Day." And finding those is a real pain. So that would be sweet if we can get more clear notifications on that.

David Barnard:

Yeah. But to Jacob's point, these third party tools that tell you... App Figures has a great view you can go into to see where all the different countries you're featured in and what lists you're featured in and stuff. I don't think those are going away yet. But it's cool that Apple's moving in this direction. And then has this custom artwork that you can share to promote that you got featured by Apple. So cool, little detail.

Deep links for custom product pages. This is another really cool one. I don't know that a lot of smaller apps have been experimenting with this because it's been more of a bigger apps create an ad highlighting like Strava. They do both running and they do cycling. And so if you create an ad more focused on running, you want them to land on the App Store and see stuff more about running than cycling. And so big apps have been doing this, but I think Apple's just making it easier and easier to do this stuff, where if your app has multiple primary use cases, different features, you can create these custom product pages. And this has been around for a while, the creating custom product pages, but, now, when somebody buys through that custom product page, it can deep link into your app to give a customized onboarding. So Strava might say, "Okay, now, you saw an ad about running. You saw the App Store screenshots about running. And, now, when you open the app, you're going to get the runner onboarding, not the cycling onboarding."

Again, just another really cool expansion of the capabilities of the App Store that provides a better way for you to customize that whole end-to-end experience. And this is a long time complaint of the App Store. It's a big, black box, you have very little control. This is Apple just ticking away at giving us more control of how we want our prospects and customers to experience our app on the App Store. And then, once they have, then deep linking into the app with more customized experiences. So super cool. And then it is coming to App Store Search Ads. And this, I think, was announced before that, so, now, you'll be able to create different custom product pages for different search ad terms. So, again, Strava, it's like if they're buying a bunch of running search terms, they don't want to show their normal product page. They want to show the custom product page. And then, again, they want to link from that custom product page to a custom onboarding. So really powerful stuff.

Charlie Chapman:

Does that make attribution easier?

Jacob Eiting:

That's what I was just thinking.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I know there's ways that some people are doing this, but this almost feels like an official API for that.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it depends on how many of these you can create, right?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that's true, that's true.

Jacob Eiting:

But even so, if you're just trying to run some localized, or you could create some broad buckets, that would be helpful.

David Barnard:

Yeah, and this is something I had been looking at, and I haven't dug deep into it, and this may be something we should investigate and write a blog post or something. But I do think it gives opportunity to at least, more broadly, get some understanding of how and why your customers are coming in. But they're trying to prevent tracking. And so if only 10 people click on a specific link to a specific custom product page, there's probably still going to be some level of anonymity. But if they're deep linking into your app, I don't know exactly how Apple could enforce that because you could probably just be able to pull that out. But I think it's to Jacob's point is that, even if only four people click on a link to this specific custom product page, you can't create 50,000 product pages to where you can individually identify your user.

Jacob Eiting:

But even if you can create 50-

David Barnard:

But you can bucket.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, I'm looking at it now. Yeah, it uses deep links or universal links. So you can basically assign a universal link to any of your... Which is interesting because I don't know... I guess they cache that when you install, and then on first open, you'll get a handler to handle that universal link. That's actually really powerful.

David Barnard:

Very cool stuff. We should definitely dig deeper and write some content around this.

There are some cool updates to TestFlight, the long abandoned, barely moved product. You can now send your public invite links and then they land on more of an App Store page. It has screenshots and explanation of your app and things like that. So when you're trying to recruit testers, the experience of recruiting testers has been pretty poor, so they made some pretty big improvements to that. You can set criteria for that as well. So if you really need people on iOS 15 because you're making sure you have your backward compatibility, you can say, "Only allow people to join if they're still on iOS 15," or something like that. And then, you actually get stats on the enrollment. So how many people landed on your page? How many actually enrolled? How many met the criteria? How many didn't meet your criteria? So cool.

I would love to see them invest more in TestFlight, personally. The features I want to see is more around group management, and being able to email the users on beta with testing nodes. And there's a lot of stuff they could do to continue improving TestFlight. But, hey, again, a nice step forward and a nice little enhancement they added there.

Jacob Eiting:

Sorry to go back a topic. 35, you can have 35 custom landing pages. It's not infinite, and that achieves what Apple's vision is on... And we'll talk about ad attribution later, which is some amount of attribution. But what they really just don't want is you to be able to narrow it down to a person. And so it's a pretty good way to achieve that. So you can imagine setting up 10 campaigns or 20 campaigns that each link to a different... Maybe even the page is the same, but then you handle that deep link through to your app. And, now, you have a way to attribute what campaign they came from, which is interesting.

David Barnard:

Yeah, very cool. Next step was reduced screenshot requirements. That was the title of the section and-

Jacob Eiting:

This could have been the only thing they announced and I think it would've been a win.

David Barnard:

Was this the third most important thing announced at WWDC 2024?

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, this is-

Charlie Chapman:

This is where you wish you had the old sessions because there would be cheering in the room.

David Barnard:

So the gist of this is that, for those who have not had the pleasure of working in App Store Connect, still to this day, you have to upload different iPhone sized screenshots for different sized iPhones. I think the latest requirement is only two or three different sizes.

Jacob Eiting:

Luckily, you don't have to do that across languages, do you?

David Barnard:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, you do? Oh my God.

David Barnard:

So it's like every language you want to support, I think it's two or three different iPhone sizes and two or three iPad sizes. What they did now, and I think this is a coming this fall thing as well, or coming later this year thing, is that, when you go into App Store Connect, you can have one set of iPhone screenshots per language, and then one set of iPad screenshots per language. So just massively reduced complexity. And there's all these tools that do this for you.

Jacob Eiting:

They also had stuff built in to do this. There's all kinds of automations, but it's still-

David Barnard:

But I've always done-

Jacob Eiting:

Even generating them was a pain in the butt. How do make that many images?

David Barnard:

And so for people who automate this, and just do really simple screenshots, and there's tools that help you automate this, but all my screenshots are in Sketch. And so I always have to do multiple sizes and the Sketch file is insane and then-

Jacob Eiting:

Luckily, App Store Connect is really responsive and fast, so it makes it really easy.

David Barnard:

I can't tell you how many times I've tried to submit. And it's like, "You didn't do this." And I'm like, "Did what?" And then three layers deep is like, "Oh, I didn't update one screenshot size in one language."

Jacob Eiting:

David, they use WebObjects and Oracle, so it must be fast. Actually, I don't even know if they still do. I just like-

David Barnard:

I hope they don't.

Jacob Eiting:

I love to give the Apple backend teams a hard time.

David Barnard:

This is another podcast I'd love to do, an ex-Apple employee if they're ready to just blow.

Jacob Eiting:

Do it like those anonymous true crime, where it's shadowed out. "Yeah, that's when we actually used the Java framework that was 30 years old to do that." That'd be good. I'd love that.

David Barnard:

A history of App Store backend would be a fascinating-

Jacob Eiting:

Oh my God, that-

David Barnard:

To a small audience.

Jacob Eiting:

David, some stories just shouldn't be told. That's one that we're going to probably lose to history, but it's okay.

David Barnard:

Yeah. All right. App Store search enhancements. This one's another cool one. Again, lots of little things stacking up to just make things better for the App Store and developers. So, currently, if you go to the App Store and go to the search tab, you get this customized view, where it's suggested searches and suggested apps and things like that, which is really cool. That's been around a few years. So, now, though, when you tap into the search field... Because, currently, if you tap into the search field, nothing changes. So, now, coming this fall, in iOS 18, when you tap into the search field, it actually gives you recent searches that you can clear. And then it gives you personalized suggested searches. So it's just another cool thing where, when somebody's going to search and they probably have something in mind, but if they don't or if they get distracted, it's going to, hopefully, help more apps get discovered by people spending more time in search and having more personalized recommendations, and all that kind of stuff.

So another cool thing, there's now enterprise program APIs. Not super applicable to us, but, again, another cool thing Apple's doing is allowing more direct access to enterprise features. So if you're doing any kind of enterprise distribution, less painful through the API. App Store Analytics API, this is cool, you can now get a lot more details about your App Store performance through the Analytics API. So tools like App Figures, maybe, eventually, RevenueCat, I don't know. We'll have to look at exactly how useful this would be for our customers to mix some level of data. The challenge though, as always with App Store Analytics, is that they're always anonymized and they're also always opt-in. And so it's something I always keep in mind, if you're looking at App Store Analytics.

Jacob Eiting:

Well, it depends, like the financial reports and stuff like that are not opt-in, but a lot of the stuff is. Yeah, it's very private data.

David Barnard:

Right, but this is more of their usage analytics and stuff like this. So if you're trying to find out how many active users do I have? Well, you have to go in and some of that's anonymized, some of it isn't. And there's little, I don't know, and I'm sure Ariel at App Figures is digging into this and has already been using aspects of it. But you have to know which ones are opt-in and which ones are global. So some of the stats in App Store Analytics are global, some are opt-in, and so you have to look. And then you look at the percentage and it tells you, "My weather app had 25% opt-in rate. Launch Inner Pro had 20% opt-in rate." So you have to take the number and multiply it by the opt-in rate to get a sense for what's going on.

Jacob Eiting:

Because Apple can't do division for you, whatever.

David Barnard:

It's important though, if somebody's going to be looking at the numbers, and Apple just multiplied it. I always thought that the audiences who opted in-

Charlie Chapman:

Those cohorts aren't the same.

David Barnard:

Aren't the same, yeah, yeah. They don't behave the same. And then, similarly, Apple added a ton of analytics in App Store Connect. And I think this was part of the DMA, I think the DMA required them to share more statistics with developers. So they added hundreds of new metrics to App Store Connect. So there's a lot more going on there.

Jacob Eiting:

Nobody should ever need more than 100 metrics. I haven't looked at them, but what do you need to know? There's seven that matter. Anyway, I'm glad regulation has opened up the other 393 to us. Anyway, another thing.

David Barnard:

Another thing announced earlier this year that seems to be in closed beta is contingent offers. Again, another cool opportunity. This is one where... And we've seen some apps doing this. So, actually, speaking of Strava, again, Strava is doing this thing now where they promote other apps. I don't know what kind of deals they have with those apps, or if it's a sponsorship, a partnership, an affiliate, or whatever. But with contingent pricing, Strava could say, "Hey, as part of your Strava membership, you get 20% off Weather Up. And you can bundle the pricing. And this is going to be at the App Store level."

And then the cool thing there with contingent pricing is that if somebody unsubscribes from Strava, they no longer had that contingent pricing. And so then their pricing would go up on that next renewal. So Apple baking this in at the App Store level, again, it's in beta right now, so we haven't seen it massively in use, but I think there's a lot of opportunity here for affiliate deals. I'm thinking about this for Weather Up. When they open it broadly, what apps can I work with where, when somebody signs up through a contingent offer, they get 20% off? And then I give that app a kickback and I think it's going to open up some cool cross promotion.

Jacob Eiting:

Do y'all remember Free App of the Day?

David Barnard:

Yeah, that's still going on.

Jacob Eiting:

Back in the day. Is it a still thing?

David Barnard:

It's still a thing.

Jacob Eiting:

I thought Apple banned it when they said no pseudo app stores on the App Store.

David Barnard:

I don't know if it's the exact same site, but people will do this for ASO. Because you get a massive surge in downloads, so people will give lifetime access for free and things like that for a day.

Jacob Eiting:

But, yeah, it used to... Cross promo has always been good. I think this feature, as I understand it, is going to be more targeted at people that can do big biz dev deals. So it's going to be like larger apps probably take advantage of this but, still, another arrow in the quiver for us.

David Barnard:

Yep. And then we've got some bigger things to dive into. Offers, streamlined purchasing, StoreKit views, in-app purchase testing enhancements. But last small thing is, they actually mentioned this in one of those WWDC videos, and I think a lot of people don't even realize this exists. Apple offers support via phone or email in nine languages, 24/7. This always reminds me of the technical support incidents that people forget exists. You can get code level support from Apple with these two free technical incidents every year that nobody uses. And then people talk about, "Oh, I can never get ahold of Apple," whatever. They offer phone support. I've called them before about changing an address or something like that. And I thought it was interesting that Apple mentioned this in that WWDC video. I think because so few people actually use it, and they really do want to help more developers via this channel. So it's cool that they do that, and then that they specifically called it out in a WWDC video.

Charlie Chapman:

And this isn't technical code support. This is like, "I have a problem with App Store Connect. I need to change my business address," or something like that, right?

David Barnard:

Yeah, yeah. It's App Store Connect support. But the technical incident still exists. And, again, I feel like more people need to know about that.

Jacob Eiting:

This is a separate resource, right?

David Barnard:

This is a separate resource. But if you need code level support from Apple, you have two technical incidents a year that you can use. Look it up and take advantage of that.

Jacob Eiting:

I would just always feel like... I feel like whenever that would come to mind... Well, a lot of times, it would be like, you're dealing with App Review and I don't think they help in that department, typically. App Review has their own escalation methods. But I'm always like, I'm not going to call. These App Store Connect people did this to me. I'm not going to call them. They're just going to do more of it to me." But I'm sure they're helpful in some cases, so good.

David Barnard:

Let's talk about win-back offers. I know, Jacob, you've been doing a deep dive on that. Do you want me to give the overview or you want to-

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, I can talk, I can give you a break, David.

David Barnard:

All right.

Jacob Eiting:

So, yeah, win-back offers. So yet another kind of offer.

David Barnard:

It's the fourth, the fourth offer.

Jacob Eiting:

Is it fourth? But how do we count fourth? So there's intro offers, which would be free trials and introductory offers. There's promotional offers, which are basically any time you're in your app. And then, now, we have win-back offers.

David Barnard:

No, but offer codes.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, and offer codes. You have an offer code. Wait, then, what is the thing where you can put an app in, promoted? When you can put an IAP into the App Store?

David Barnard:

Oh, that's totally separate because that's... Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it's separate, but I think it also has the word promote in it.

David Barnard:

It says promoted.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, yeah. So technically not related, but they've got some branding organization issues, but anyway.

David Barnard:

We've got four types of offers now.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, so intros are like, free trials is the big one. But then you can also have the first time somebody starts a subscription in a group, you can give them a cheaper deal. So that's one option. Those, you can only have one or none on any subscription product within a group, I believe. And you only get it once within the group, but each product can have a different... So one could have a free trial, one could be 30% off, something like this. Promotional offers can be applied at any time in a person's active cycle. So if they have an active subscription, you can apply it to that and reduce the price of that offer. I think you can actually do it to a new subscription as well. But there's some stuff there where you have to have it signed by a server. It's this really somewhat overly complicated process, but it is possible, those promotional offers.

And, now, we have win-back offers. And so win-back offers are basically very similar to the first two categories, but they apply to folks who had a subscription and it has now lapsed, which is something that wasn't really obviously easy with the existing promotional offers. And so, now, not only is this a new category of offer, it actually has some new functionality to it that's unique to the other. So, one, you can actually set who this applies to in App Store Connect. I haven't seen the demo, but it's, basically, you have some selectors on this can apply to these lapsed subscribers. So you set it there. And then one of a couple of things happen. So, one, you now see this in the auto-renewal status field on their StoreKit 2 response. You'll see eligible win-back offers as an array that comes back from some of the StoreKit 2 responses.

But then there's some other things. So another place you'll be able to optionally see this is when they open the app. They can actually get a pop-up, which this is huge. So you can turn on this win-back offer, somebody opens the app. And App Store will automatically pop a modal that's like, "Hey, you're eligible for this," which is actually pretty powerful.

The other place you can see it is on the App Store, and this is cool. What did they call this, seamless purchasing, David? What was the name of it?

David Barnard:

Streamlined purchasing.

Jacob Eiting:

Streamlined purchasing. So on the App Store page, they'll have it there as a win-back offer and they can purchase it. Which I guess you could see somebody wandering over the page, maybe they uninstall the app, they go back to re-install it, and it's there. I'm not so sold on that being... Well, we'll get to the efficacy predictions. And then, I guess, similarly, inside the app, they have in their own StoreKit views. And you'll have programmatic access to any eligible win-back offers. You can decide how those are displayed, but the accessibility is controlled from the Apple side.

Now, that's cool. I think some things that make this a little less effective and powerful than it could be, or what we traditionally think about win-back offers, are a very powerful thing for reactivating and raising your LTV. Because there's a lot of customers, they'll subscribe for a while. They stop using the app, their life moves on. But they already know who you are. They've already spent money. You know they have the need. So marketing to that group can be really just an easy lift for your revenue. But one of the problems I see with win-back offers is there's still no way to communicate with these folks. Oh wait, Charlie, am I wrong?

Charlie Chapman:

So there is. They didn't go super into detail. But in their session, they did say there is a way to generate an offer link that you can distribute your own way. Now, my understanding is you have to perfectly match their eligibility criteria, or you could send somebody a link that they're not eligible for.

David Barnard:

Yeah. They talked about this in the session. It was like, "You can create this link and then share it on social." And it's like, "Well, if you share it on social, you would need to say, 'If...'" And this gets into the eligibility I talked about.

Jacob Eiting:

Because what you want to do is be like, "Here's a win-back," offer list of people, make them eligible for a thing. Also, communicate directly to that group of people, like, "Here's a thing you're eligible for." And, again, I think, Apple, they're a little tied around their own feet here. Because by privacy stuff and all that crap, they can't really do this, but it really hamstrings how powerful... And it's frustrating because they have the information. They know the people. They could even possibly be like, "Hey, if somebody's opted in to push in the past or whatever, let me send them an Apple branded marketing reactivation thing if they've opt-in." Obviously, that's a bigger ask, but anyway, it's still something. But I still think that makes it less than as powerful as it could be for most developers.

Charlie Chapman:

There's another one too, which they briefly mentioned. They said that the editorial team may feature your win-back offer across the app store in the Today tab.

David Barnard:

Well, but in a personalized way. So you would-

Charlie Chapman:

I'm guessing it's... I didn't write that quote, I missed that if they said that, but I was wondering the same thing. Will it only show to eligible people?

David Barnard:

From what I understand, the App Store is now actually very much a TikTok style feed, in a way, that Apple is actually doing user level personalization on lots of the pages now. So, yeah, it's like, if the person is eligible, it may pop up in their Today feed as part of it. If they're eligible, and they go to the app tab, it can show up in line along with the rest of the categories and stuff in the app tab. So I think this is really cool. This is Apple, again, helping developers make more money, helping themselves make more money along the way, but giving developers... And the cool thing about this one is that it's like, you just configure a few things in App Store Connect and it's done. So is it in and of itself, the way it's currently built, going to be this massive lift? No. But it's like you spend 10 minutes filling this out, and Apple promotes it, and it shows up in the App Store when somebody's searching, and you pick up a percent or two.

Jacob Eiting:

Just remember, you're paying complexity. So, now, you have this thing, if it's not that effective, it's not a program you want to be thinking about and running... Here, let me give the bear case here. That you have to be opening the app to see it.

David Barnard:

No, because you see it on the App Store because Apple... If they open the App Store.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay, or I'm on the App Store. But still contrived, and we don't actually know how much that's going to be visible and stuff like that. Because every other app that has a win-back is going to be competing for that same space, right?

David Barnard:

Right.

Jacob Eiting:

Maybe that happens, whatever. But you have to open the app. So who is this now? It's somebody who has churned but is still actively using the app, which, at that point, I can just make you see my paywall. I've already got you. I don't necessarily need this. And, again, the thing that makes win-back offers so powerful in the wild is that you've got marketing channel access to these people. You send them an email or a push notification or something like that. That's what makes win-back so powerful. Again, it's like Apple gets close, but then they just miss the fundamental thing that makes something powerful, right?

David Barnard:

Well, I'm going to be begging Apple for a server to server notification when somebody becomes eligible because that would be really powerful. Because then, we at RevenueCat, or individual developers, could then send that push notification, when you get the server to server that somebody becomes eligible. But, still, you were talking about complexity, and there's actually not that much complexity to support this. Because it uses the same thing as promotional offers and other offers.

Jacob Eiting:

No, I'm talking about the technical complexity. I'm just like, now, you have to remember, "Oh yeah, I've got this win-back offer running. And who gets hit and who doesn't get hit." Maybe it's minor, maybe it's fine. And having it all be basically for free with App Store Connect if your app has subscriptions, that's pretty cool.

David Barnard:

And you don't have to do the JWS authentication. And the promotional offers is a great feature, but it's not been adopted. We, at RevenueCat, we really should do more work on promotional offers to make it way easier because it is really powerful. But this is the baby step for anybody can just set it up and it's way easier. And then, in an email support or whatever, you can use these custom links. And it's a nice step in the right direction and making it way easier for developers to-

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, I suppose if you had a really broad targeting. Charlie, what were you going to say?

Charlie Chapman:

I was just going to say, functionally, it's just like introductory offers. It feels like when you set up a trial. It's almost like... It's not an afterthought because, strategically, that's way more important. But they're really simple to set up. It's just a dropdown editor that looks very similar to that, and then you just have it. And especially if the editorial stuff is real, that's a new entry point in your funnel, right?

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, well, yeah. I'll concede it's better than nothing, but we'll see. And to David's point about-

Charlie Chapman:

It's interesting, at least.

Jacob Eiting:

I think it's got us, RevenueCat, inspired to lean into promo offers a little bit more. We've been talking about it today in Slack and stuff. And I think there's a lot of stuff that we could do. We've already been working on some stuff related to this, but it's given us some good ideas about how. Because, again, with us, because of the privacy domain that we operate within, we have a bit more individually identified. We can connect who's got what subscription to a person, or to a push notification token, or whatever, so we can connect them. That lets us do... You can see a world where, in RevenueCat, you create an offer, just like you would do here. We do it with a promo offer instead of with a win-back offer. But then we also have the list so we can help you actually communicate to that set of customers. And I think that's actually where most of the leverage comes from in these win-back campaigns. So, anyway, nice job, Apple, we'll do better.

David Barnard:

Free money, if it's 1% or 2% lift in a year. It's free and cheap and not super complex to implement. So I think it's great. And if Apple does create a server to server notification for this, then it becomes even more powerful, in that, for way less effort than promotional offers, you'd be able to set up targeting and send out notifications and stuff. So super cool.

And then, we touched on it briefly, but the streamlined purchasing is interesting, that people can actually do the full transaction on the App Store. So the app pay sheet will come up on the App Store and they're paying on the app store. Watching the session, it was interesting. You can turn this off. And, actually, I don't know if it's opt-in or opt-out. I think it's opt-in.

Charlie Chapman:

I think it's opt-out.

David Barnard:

It's opt-out? Okay.

Charlie Chapman:

I believe so.

David Barnard:

So when you set it up, it will automatically allow people to purchase in the App Store. If you don't want that, you can show them the offer in the App Store, or Apple will show them the offer in the App Store, and then when they tap the button, it actually goes to your app, where then you can provide a customized experience. So if you are creating those, something to keep in mind. Decide whether you want to opt in or opt out to this streamlined purchasing. All right, we are at the hour. This has been going a while.

Jacob Eiting:

I think that's all the major stuff. There's a couple of little things on there we didn't talk about. But there's a bunch of improvements to StoreKit views, which is cool. And some stuff that in-app purchase testing enhances. But you all use RevenueCat, you don't need this crap.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, but use StoreKit configuration files. I got to make Josh Holt happy because that's his thing. But anybody who's using RevenueCat or not for any StoreKit stuff, you should be using StoreKit configuration files to test everything. And they made it better this year. That's the short answer.

Jacob Eiting:

The TL;DR.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, exactly.

David Barnard:

And then two last things I did want to touch on briefly. Apple announced this thing called Advanced Commerce APIs. And there's not a lot of information on this yet. But in the announcement, it says that... And for those on the podcast, I'm doing air quotes. "Complex monetization use cases." And so the examples they gave was content creator apps with creator subscriptions. That's currently a huge pain. And we get tons of customers coming to RevenueCat, "Can you solve this in a way that the App Store doesn't?" And the answer is no, because Apple doesn't support it. So Apple are specifically saying they're working on this to allow more flexible-

Jacob Eiting:

I think they're looking for partners. There's a form that we can link maybe in the show notes.

David Barnard:

Yeah, you can sign up to get notified. And it sounds like it's going to be a little bit more of a white glove kind of thing. But the way I read it... And there's other examples, complex SKU bundling, digital content across multiple apps in the same developer account. The announcement read like Apple recognizes, and probably has recognized for years, that there's all these complex use cases that the App Store does not currently support with the standard subscriptions and in-app purchases. And this is them saying, "Okay, we're going to start allowing broader monetization options on the App Store."

Jacob Eiting:

Maybe they've finally realized that their monopoly on purchasing has led to some negative consequences. And it's time for them to do what any other purchasing API would allow you to do, which is good. If this is downstream DMA stuff, I'm very happy. I'm now pro-DMA because this has been just a problem we've needed for a long time.

David Barnard:

Yeah, we get so many requests at RevenueCat.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. And they're never like... There are some huge examples of apps doing this, and I think they've gotten a little bit of wink and nod help from Apple to make it happen. But there's a ton of small apps that would benefit from trying to do some cool stuff here. There's just a lot of apps. I think there's a blog post about this somewhere, the apps that don't exist. There's a lot of apps that don't exist because this stuff is too hard. And, hopefully, they'll start with some development partners, and then they'll bring it down and open it up to more people. But I think that would be very good.

David Barnard:

I am all for more business opportunity in the App Store. And, with Apple, I continually get my hopes up and then get let down. But this is one of those things.

Jacob Eiting:

This looks concrete.

David Barnard:

It's like they're moving forward with allowing new models and new monetization.

Jacob Eiting:

It's interesting that they're sharing-

David Barnard:

And sign up on this link to be notified. I'm going to put all my emails in that box because I want to know what's going on.

And then the last thing I did want to touch on is AdAttributionKit. We're going to do a blog post on this. Eric Seufert already wrote a great blog post on this. But it's kind of SKAdNetwork 2.0. It's new and it has some nice things.

Jacob Eiting:

It seems a little more, from the developer experience perspective, it's a little more... Like [inaudible 00:53:47], I watched the session on it. It made more sense to me than SKAdNetwork ever did.

David Barnard:

Yeah. But it was like a small evolution. There's some new features, but it's not like-

Jacob Eiting:

It's fundamentally the same thing. It's fundamentally the same thing. It's just maybe the DX is a little bit better and they fixed a few things.

David Barnard:

Right, yep. But I was hoping, with the rebrand, it would be all new, and new capabilities, and the attribution framework everybody's been hoping Apple would build. This is not quite that, but it's newer features and better and whatever.

Jacob Eiting:

But, hey, I think one of SKAdNetwork, we're never going to get back to the attribution world we were in. And Apple's clear, if you want to do attribution, you have to run it through us, which is a little crazy, but that's the rule they've thrown down. I do think the DX matters. I think SKAdNetwork, abstractions were weird. It didn't make sense in a lot of cases. Those are still in the new AdAttributionKit, but I do feel like it's a little bit more friendly.

David Barnard:

The frustrating part though, and this is with pretty much all Apple announcements, is that, from my reading of it, is that most of the features require at least 17.4 iOS, iOS 17.4, iPadOS 17.4. But then some of the new features, one of the big new features is re-engagement so you can actually, specifically... Because what's happened in the past is, you just run a bunch of ads. And SKAdNetwork doesn't know whether or not they had previously installed the app, previously engaged. So they just show up as if they're a net new user. Well, that's not good. You want to understand who's been re-marketed to and re-engaged versus who's a net new user. So this re-engagement stuff is actually really cool. And that's the biggest, I think, announcement for AdAttributionKit. But that requires iOS 18. So it's like, okay, maybe in 2028.

Thankfully, people have been upgrading quickly. I saw a stat recently, 77% of people are now on iOS 17 or later. So it's good. I think iOS, as a platform, people do move quickly to update. But when 20% to 30% of folks, a year in, are still not on the latest version, it sucks that all these fun new things aren't backward compatible. I wish Apple would find a way to do what Google does and be able to backport some of these new things. Because, now, AdAttributionKit may be 2025 and 2026, like Facebook starts really ramping up with it. They still haven't even fully ramped with SKAdNetwork. So, anyways, we'll do a deeper dive, maybe even do a podcast with Eric Seufert to unpack all of this in more detail. But something to be on the lookout for and to know it exists, even if we're not going to go into all the details here on this webinar/podcast. But I think that's about it.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, that's everything. It was light, honestly, for WWDC. There's enhancements. We were going into this with this assumption, at least on the StoreKit side, because of, I think, all of the resources that were probably put into DMA compliance the last six months, probably took a lot of oxygen out of the room for working on App Store stuff. I don't have any inside information on that, but you have to think it's not like Apple, they're human. They only have so many resources and so many threads they can run on at a given time. So I wasn't surprised to see incremental good stuff, but not like a big revolution this year on the commerce side. So it's nice sometimes when it's quiet, at least for me and my business. It's nice when they don't totally turn everything upside down, so good.

David Barnard:

Yeah. We can focus more on promotionals and other fun things this year, instead of all new StoreKit 3 or something.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, all right. Thanks, everybody, for coming.

David Barnard:

Thanks, everybody.

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