WWDC 2025: What Subscription Apps Need to Know

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.

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Live from W... I'm not Charlie, I can't do that. Welcome, everybody, to this special edition of both the Sub Club Podcast and RevenueCat Live stream. We're pulling double duty here. I just did a bunch of pushups. I'm out of breath trying to get my energy up. Charlie and I have been in Cupertino all week. I just flew home late last night and been talking to folks on the ground. Charlie was at WWDC, he got a ticket. I did not. But for those on the podcast, you might not know Charlie. Charlie, why don't you do a quick intro of yourself and maybe tell us about your week real quick?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, so I'm Charlie Chapman. I'm a developer advocate here at RevenueCat and I also have a bunch of indie apps that I make myself, iOS and macOS and stuff like that. And yeah, this was my second WWDC that I've gotten a ticket to go into the spaceship. It was really cool. I mean, it's funny. I think we're going to have an interesting conversation here because I've been very deep in the thick of it in the in-person developer community here on the ground, which I'm going to guess and you'll confirm or tell me I'm wrong, but the experience in-person and the vibe in-person is very different than the internet discourse, which I've actually been a little disengaged with. I think we're going to be able to represent two different takes here. I'm still here right now riding high on that positivity I think, and so we'll see how our two experiences compare.

David Barnard:

Yeah, I think you're right, and I intended to do even more of the community stuff. I was staying in the same hotel as Community Kit. I actually got really sick the first day.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, no.

David Barnard:

Yeah, well I think it was just travel and caffeine timing and stuff. I got a wicked migraine, watch the keynote from my room instead of a Community Kit, so I definitely did get less of the in-person than you, even though I was there in-person for Community Kit and other events and went to dinners. And I did meet with a lot of folks and had a lot of very interesting conversations during the week, but I was back in my hotel room and following vibe on Twitter and online and I actually did take a minute to watch some YouTube videos. I went to the talk show with John Gruber and he had Joanna Stern and Eli Patel on, which was really fascinating. I definitely did get more of the outside perspective probably than you did. Although I'm super jealous that you got to watch the F1 movie live in-person at the Steve Jobs Theater. I think there's enough fanboys like us listening to the podcast and on this webinar. Give us the 90 seconds of how that experience was.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I mean, it was really cool. If you're a person who's obsessed with Apple and architecture the way that many of us probably are. Just getting to see the Steve Jobs Theater and go down those spiral stairs that I've seen in lots of pictures was really cool. And then there was a little interview at the beginning with Jerry Bruckheimer and then you watched the movie and it was a nice movie theater to watch the movie. It was a fun crowd that was super into it. I will say the sound system there was remarkably good.

David Barnard:

I bet.

Charlie Chapman:

There's a lot of things that are sometimes overhyped, I think. But that was one that definitely lived up to the expectations, especially with that movie, I think.

David Barnard:

And how is the movie? Should I go watch it on opening day?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I think I'm not allowed to give a official thumbs up, thumbs down review, but I definitely really liked it. I'm a big fan of that director already. I really liked the Top Gun movie and some of his previous films, so I was predisposed to like it, but I thought it was really fun.

David Barnard:

Awesome. Everybody's here to hear about WWDC, and I wanted to kick things off with the meta.

In my impression, and I think this is what you were alluding to as well, Charlie, about the difference between on the ground and the Twitter backlash, is that this year more than ever, I do feel like you should interpret the action speaking louder than words. In that, Apple very clearly did not say much about the injunction. They didn't even really go out of their way in the keynote and platform State of the Union. It definitely wasn't an apology tour, which part of me was hoping for. Maybe four or five years ago, there was a WWDC where the whole theme was like, "We love developers." And the fact that Apple has done that in the past gave me a little hope that this would be a, "We love developers."

There were definitely notes in there, the song at the very end of the keynote singing the app reviews, that was a really nice touch. But generally in the keynote and even in the platform State of the Union, there wasn't a strong nod of like, "Hey, we really care, and we know that things feel tense right now," but the actions in what they released and what they actually did for us does speak volumes even if they didn't come out with a very un-Apple apology tour that some of us might've hoped. Is that the sense you got on the ground as well?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I think also I was hoping for maybe more of the Mac Pro round table, kind of "Hey, we hear you." Not necessarily a full-throated apology because not really Apple-y, but a kind of, "We get it, we hear you," maybe something bigger. And so, it was a little disappointing in that regard.

But then there were a little touches throughout. Like you said, there was that song at the end that actually I felt played very well. I think it was in the video, but one of the things in-person that they did was there was walls of app icons that were sort of floating up in between sessions and stuff. And those were, I believe just the app icons from everybody who got a ticket. They just pulled their developer ID. There's people taking pictures with it. There was a couple nods to this is a developer event and not just a press event. The visitor center used to be completely closed off and only accessible to the press. Opened it for a few days to developers on the roof, and there were little touches here and there where they were like, "Yeah, we hear you, we care about you." But it definitely wasn't this big turnaround moment. It was more just incremental. And I personally, at least, I do still feel like there's a lot of room for improvement in that RRelationship.

David Barnard:

I've been hammering Apple honestly for years now that I personally don't think for things to really change. Apple does need to shift the PR narrative. I think they're very used to just, "we know we're right about certain things." I shitpost on Twitter all the time, and even when I know I'm like 50% or more wrong about certain things, but it's just that you want to feel heard. And when Apple stonewalls and doesn't speak authentically, it doesn't acknowledge the tensions, doesn't speak to those things the way other humans do and even other companies do, I think that's where it falls a little flat. And that's where all the touches in-person and some of those smaller touches throughout the week do go a long way.

Like you, I think that it feels like Apple needs to start taking a more open approach to how they work with developers, how they communicate to developers. And I don't know if this will ever happen, but fingers crossed, I'm forever hopeful that Apple will start to shift this kind of thing and not... I commented to somebody yesterday, it feels like they're still running the reality distortion field PR playbook, but without Steve Jobs, it just falls flat. It's like we love Steve for the brazen and brash and we knew he was lying, but we loved him for it.

Whereas when it's a recorded video that's going out to the public, even the press I feel like is a little fed up with that style. I just don't think.... One, it doesn't fit without Jobs, and then two, it's 2025. I just don't quite think the way they try to control the narrative works for them as well as maybe they think it does or hope it will or whatever. And I think we saw Apple not doing an interview with Gruber, which I think was a little bit of a slap in the face to the developer community. And then they did do one with Joanna Stern and she was freaking awesome, asking the questions that all of us want to have answers to, but still didn't get clear answers, got talking points, got spin. And I think that's just unfortunate. I hope we see a shift in tone and I think a shift in tone would actually go a long way.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I agree. And I think the sentiment on the ground was similar. That was something I was curious about. Sometimes you get there in-person and there's all these people that don't know every podcaster and every blogger, and they don't read [inaudible 00:09:54], and you realize that there's a huge swath of developers that aren't terminally online like we are. But them not going on the talk show was the talk of the town, especially before the event happened. And so, there's consequences to that, and I'm sure they're aware of that, but it definitely impacts how people feel about the company, for sure.

David Barnard:

Yeah. All right, well, let's dive into what people are really here for. Again, I feel like we're [inaudible 00:10:22] so much, hopefully people find our hot takes interesting.

I wanted to kick off the meat of the conversation with Liquid Glass, which is where Apple kicked things off with a keynote. Well, first I'll say I freaking love it. Twitter was very dismissive. You had all sorts of people pretending to be designers and hammering Apple on the legibility and all that stuff. And I get it, and honestly the first day I was super disappointed like, oh geez, we're stepping back to iOS 7 and how could they make such a huge mistake? Probably more in-person than on Twitter, I was really dismissive of Liquid Glass, but once I put it on my device, I really like it and I think I quickly filtered my view of it through the known iteration process.

Almost always, Apple overdoes something and then pulls it back during the betas. And I was even thinking there's a bit of just the Apple marketing hype where in the keynote, they want it to just look so striking and gorgeous and pretty, and I wonder if that was even intentional. It was like, "Yeah, we could dial it back a little, but for the keynote, let's just go big. Let's just make it look good."

And again, I mean, maybe in 2025 that does fall a little flat, because I did see a lot of influencers... I watched Marques Brownlee, I watched other YouTube folks talk about their initial reactions, and again, most of them didn't have time to put on their device and spend a long time playing with it, so that the day one reactions were a bit muted.

But my personal take is that as people use it over the summer, as Marques and these other big YouTubers and journalists and others really use it over the summer, and then especially as they dial it back a little over the summer, I think this is going to be a huge release. And then what I think is especially interesting is that it being a huge release is a huge opportunity. I think it's a huge opportunity for existing apps to steal market share from competitors. If your competitor is not jumping on this opportunity... And I mean, yeah, I'm working on an update to my weather app. There's so many weather apps, I don't think I'll be the only one, but if I can be one of the three to five weather apps that's like the talk of the town when iOS 26 comes out, I think that's a huge opportunity for me, and I'm jumping on it. I'm super excited about this opportunity.

And then secondarily, I think it's a huge opportunity for new apps. So if there's a new idea or a new spin on a to-do list or a new spin on Habit Tracker or whatever, I'm throwing out ideas that probably some people in the audience already have apps in the space and don't want me to say, but if you've ever had an idea for a new spin on something, anytime there's a major shift like this, it's actually a great opportunity to release a new app and start from scratch of what is a to-do list app in the era of Liquid Glass.

I just think it's a massive opportunity. I assume you agree.

Charlie Chapman:

I had a similar reaction in the immediate aftermath of the announcement, because I think I was hoping for a bigger UX redesign and it wasn't really that. It was a lot more, it's a new material to play with.

David Barnard:

Maybe you haven't had as much time on the betas. There are some really cool changes to a lot of the apps, like Messages is dramatically different. Calendar is dramatically different. Honestly, I've had multiple wow moments throughout the week as I launch new apps and go through my normal day-to-day usage of iOS where I'm like, "Ooh, look at what they did here." And I do think there really are some genuine UI paradigm shifts and user experience paradigm shifts that maybe are easier to miss if it's not on your carry device, and if you're not using it as much as I had since putting it on my phone, I think I did it like Tuesday morning.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, I did it to Apple Park, and I eventually caved and put it on my Mac and it's on my iPad and it's on my Watch, it's on everything. And that's what I was going to say is once I got it on device, I was a lot more excited about it. I still don't think it's a big user experience shift in terms of how we think about design, but I do think it's a big shift in terms of minimalism versus surprise and delight. There's so much and what you were saying, there's all these moments of, "Ooh," and especially when you're in-person with a bunch of nerdy developers, the amount of times somebody goes, "Oh my gosh, have you seen this?" And we're constantly doing that.

There's quite a bit of stuff going on and one of the biggest ones I think is obviously Liquid Glass, the material, but I think bigger than that, and you mentioned messages, is this like Apple being okay with going wild and letting the experience be a little crazy, maybe a little too crazy in times, and I'm sure they probably release this pushing really far and then I'm sure over the betas they'll dial it in a little bit, but it's just fun and delightful in a way that I think we all can take as app developers can take as an example and bring that into our apps.

And to your points about the opportunity, to me that is what I was desperately hoping for selfishly as an indie app developer is something where Apple can release a thing that immediately makes every app that doesn't do it look old. Whenever I first released my app, that was one of the big differentiators is most of the big apps in that space still either looked like iOS 6 era or it looks like they were clearly designed in that area and they just took away textures or something. And this represents another one of those opportunities. You can be the app that very obviously in screenshots is modern looking and that is a nice thing if you're looking for a way to differentiate.

David Barnard:

And not to mention getting featured.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, are you talking about me?

David Barnard:

Yeah, well, and I mean just generally. I was trying to set you up for that of that anytime there is this opportunity, Apple does love featuring apps that take advantage of the new thing, and that was the whole section I have in my notes. It's like play the game is that by adopting Liquid Glass, not only are you setting yourself up for Apple to feature you, which is less important these days in some ways, but man, little App of the Day badge, those things do go a long way in user trust. Apple featuring you but then also press, you and I both. Part of our marketing playbook is to do unique things that get attention and so this fall will be a great opportunity. I feel like maybe more so than in years, maybe the widgets and Widgetsmith was the last big where the press was excited to highlight new apps. And I think this is going to be a year where there will be a lot of discussion.

And I mean, hey, this may be another opportunity too, that TikTok influencers are going to be going through the App Store like, "Hey, what's new? What's pretty, what's unique, what's out there?" And another opportunity to not just get picked up by Apple and not just get picked up by the press, but now we have this third dynamic of maybe you get into Marques Brownlee video, maybe you get in a TikTok that blows up to 10 million views. I think it's just a huge opportunity.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I totally agree, and I think we'll get to this a little later, but it's not just Liquid Glass but it's also the foundation models like the AI features that Apple's added. There's a couple other smaller APIs that I think there's going to be people at Apple and potentially social media movements that can happen where people are just trying to highlight apps that are taking advantage of this. And I think our job if we're going to do that is not just to build it, but to be able to tell the story of how Apple's technology enabled us to build this innovative thing. That's where I think that's where you get the best bang for your buck in terms of both press and Apple. If you can tell a story that ties into this broader narrative of the iOS 26 update, whenever that comes out in the fall.

David Barnard:

Couple notes on that. One, if Charlie and I have gotten you excited at all, don't jump right into designing. The first thing you need to do is watch all the WWDC sessions on Liquid Glass. I already watched two of them. And then the Human Interface Guidelines, I actually did not even open it, but I saw a few people tweeting about it and from what it looks like there is a massive update to the Human Interface Guidelines. So download that PDF, go to a coffee shop, sit down with your drink of choice and pull it up on your iPad and just read cover to cover through the new Human Interface Guidelines because that's going to be the best way to prepare yourself even if you're a marketer, if you're a product person, if you're at a bigger company, this is not just for indies. Although Charlie and I, in some of this conversation, maybe you're screwing a little indie, but if you're in a bigger app company, you can be the person inside the company saying, "Hey, this is a really cool opportunity, let's do it."

And then read through the document, watch the session so it can be done well because if you do it well, to your point, Charlie, being able to tell the story, being able to get it right, one of the things I talked about is don't put glass on glass. I think that's going to be a mistake a lot of people make that actually makes it look worse or feel worse. Even if it looks cool, is that if you stack glass on glass on glass sounds good, like oh, glass everything. But once you start playing with it, you see there is a hierarchy, there is a visual language to it that you need to match.

And then one other note on that, this came up on Twitter a lot, is that Apple in the platform State of the Union very specifically through third party frameworks under the bus. I don't think they said React Native or Flutter by name. The fascinating part here though is that React Native, because it does render to native system components is a great framework to work in to adopt Liquid Glass because the community is already jumping on it, and the day of release people were updating React Native components to make sure that it worked with the Liquid Glass Paradigm. Flutter, on the other hand, so much of the UI is actually, and you may be able to speak to this better, but is rendered natively and then I saw a lot of dismissive tweets about it doesn't seem like Flutter is going to move quickly, so maybe Apple's comments very directly apply to Flutter but not to React Native, which is encouraging.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it's interesting because the design is that React Native is using those native controls under the hood, it'll be able to jump on these easily and use Apple's actual same metal renderer for all this stuff. Flutter isn't going to be able to get that out of the gate. It'll be interesting to see. I'm sure there's a bunch of Flutter engineers desperately trying to mimic those visual effects to see or at least get close to it. But the interesting thing about Flutter is I believe, because it is rendering it the same on all devices, if they can replicate it or at least get close to it, that will also apply to Android and I think the web as well. There's trade-offs with all of these different systems and it'll be interesting to watch them all try to figure out how to bring this into their frameworks.

David Barnard:

Yeah. All right, so there's two more big changes I wanted to talk about, but let's speed run these since we have so much more to cover. The first one is iPadOS 26. It's like Apple's finally building iPadOS the way it maybe should have been a decade ago of windowing and more a background API where it can operate more like a desktop, where you can push a task into the background to complete while a user switches to another window. I didn't watch the full interview, but in one of the interviews the execs did, they talked about how it took the M series processor to be powerful enough to be able to have multiple windows going on at the same time. Now, I saw some people saying that's BS and they could have done this sooner, and that's just an excuse, and it's [inaudible 00:22:46].

There really is probably something there, that when you have six different windows floating in the same view and being able to push things to the background while other apps are running their processes and switching seamlessly between them, there probably is at least some truth to that. iPad has always been this weird thing where iOS is such a dominant platform because it's what everybody has in their pockets. And iPad is a smaller platform, but these days a smaller platform compared to iPhone is still like a massive platform. I don't think the opportunity is quite as big on iPad as it is on iPhone, but I think it is an opportunity and for the right app, for productivity ,for those sorts of things, I think iPad is an opportunity this year and one not to just gloss over.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I agree. I think from a developer standpoint, there's not a whole lot of new APIs to play with to enable new types of apps, as far as I can tell. The background tasks are I think something that are going to be a really big deal for creativity apps. I think my conspiracy theory here is there's all these rumors that next year we're going to enter the foldable iPhone world. I think there might be something to the idea that all of a sudden they really focused on getting windowing working a lot better in a iOS-like environment.

And so, it might be a good test bed to run your app on the iPad, shrink it and see how it plays with window resizing now as a way to maybe theoretically prepare for this foldable iPhone feature that's coming. Yeah, I wouldn't spend a whole lot of time on it, but that's kind my conspiracy theory right now and that's how I'm looking at it more or less.

David Barnard:

I like that. I like that. And similar to iPad, even if Apple does release a folding phone next year, they're probably not going to sell 100 million units that's going to, it's almost going to be like this, whatever, it would be like a tent platform. You have watched-

Charlie Chapman:

The cohort of users buying that are going to be the type of users who probably are willing to pay a lot more.

David Barnard:

Yeah. No, absolutely. The other thing I did want to talk through is the on-device language models, and you and I, Charlie have already been debating and we probably could debate for another hour, but let's keep it to a few minutes here. I'm skeptical of on-device models for a few reasons. One is that for people who are paying for something, for most folks here... If you're an indie [inaudible 00:25:18], you just want to build something fun and cool and do something interesting. I think there's fun and interesting things to do with the local models.

But if you're expecting people to pay for something, I think the expectations, the bar for the quality of an LLM output is being raised literally on a weekly basis these days. My concern is that even using their examples, like Apple said, if you're all trails, you can use our local models to plan your trip. Well, I don't want my hiking trip planned by a tiny little local ChatGPT 3.5 level model. I want it planned by 0.3 Pro with deep research that's going to take into account all the different factors that a small local model can't take into account.

The thing that I think is more interesting with local models is models that are context specific, that are fine-tuned, like a translation model. You can fine tune a larger model or build a translation specific model that's trained only for translation, and on device that can perform at a speed and at a level more comparable to online, even if it's still, maybe you can get 90% there instead of 60% there. But my concern is that for a generalized large language model, the output is just going to be so subpar compared to what you can get with a cloud-based model.

And then especially again, like Apple's on-device model versus an Open AI model and the cost and the speed, even the latency, Open AI and Anthropic and Meta and the language model from X. Grok, there's a chip that's like an analog chip that runs LLMs ridiculously fast. There's so much going on in the industry around speed, latency, quality and everything else, that my concern is that the local models won't be as big a deal as they seem because once you get to playing with them it's like yeah, it works, but the output's just not that great.

I'm open to changing my mind here. I'm excited to see what people build with it, but personally, and I've been super plugged into AI. My 16-year-old son is so into it, we have nightly debates on most about what models and how they're performing and local versus cloud. This is something I am pretty into these days in part just because my son talks to me about it constantly. So my concern is that some of the hype around it was maybe a little mis-founded in not understanding those sorts of limitations.

And then just one more thing to add since I'm monologuing, but I want to let you have a chance to defend and put your 2 cents in, but I just saw on Twitter before we joined that the context window of these local models is only 496 tokens. So it's not like you're going to be able to throw this big corpus of text into that large language model. You're going to be able to send little tiny bits of context in there in order for it to give this output.

And again, the expectation now is that the large language models will have way more context and have larger context windows where you can just shove a ton of stuff into them, and you're just not going to get that with these local models. So I'm excited for the potential worried it's overhyped. But then the other thing is I do think this sets us up for the future in that it's only going to get better from here. And so, maybe this is a baseline and then three years from now, Apple's models are better, the devices are faster, the distills are better, and so Apple needed to do this in a way because it's building toward a future where they get better and better. I'm concerned that as we start playing with them, that the output's just not going to be good enough to build tentpole features around. Tell me I'm wrong.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes. Well, the very last thing you said I think I strongly agree with, which is building tentpole features around. I think don't build a chatbot around this. I've already seen plenty of people do it and it's as you would expect, it's not good compared to a big, large internet-based model. Where I've seen it be really interesting is as a way to extend what your app already does and make it better or nicer in random little ways, because the big thing that it seems to provide is like we said, it's free, it's on-device, and actually the thing that really surprises me is it's really fast, surprisingly fast. And I think that probably has to do with how small the context window is and how small the whole thing is. I've seen a lot of people doing basic sentiment analysis type stuff on-device.

One of the really interesting use cases that I've seen or large enterprise-type apps that have advanced search, that's a major part of how you use your app. You can have a prompt, basically, where somebody can type in what they want if they're looking for... I don't want to pick a specific industry, but doing some kind of search where you're like, I want something that's this color and this size and blah blah blah. And those are already all checkboxes and sliders and stuff in your advanced search. Because the way Apple designed the API, which I will try not to gush over, but that is actually the thing that's the most impressive about this as a developer, the API is actually incredibly well done.

David Barnard:

I know you weren't going to dive into, or maybe you're going to get to this. Maybe we should dive just a little deeper into the details in that one thing I am super excited about is can the API, can you bring in other models that are fine-tuned, and fine-tune your own models and drop them into the API in a way that you can get more specialized models? Because specialized models on-device seem most exciting to me in that you get the performance, you get the local, you get everything else, but then if it's a specialized model, then the output can be more comparable, versus this generalized model that just can't be anywhere near as good as the bigger models. So can you drop your own models in and does the API seem designed with that in mind?

Charlie Chapman:

I don't know about pre-trained other models. Obviously, you can provide it context, but I think that's all going into the context window. The way you do it is in a very structured way. I think that's the thing that's different than the internet-based tools I've at least played with. And what that means is you can also guarantee that the way you get it back is in that same structure that you asked for.

What that means is in that search example, it's like you can have somebody prompt with words what they want to do, and then you can send that to the model and you tell the model exactly how your search works and what the exact shape of the data you need back looks like. And it will 100% give it to you back in that exact structured data. And at least in the playing around with it that I've seen people doing, it's really good at that stuff. I mean, it's pretty simple. That kind of stuff is really simple, and you're not asking for high-quality writing or image generation or any of the things that these bigger models are really pushing far on. You're asking for something that's really basic. And so, I think natural language processing is now a thing that Apple has wrapped in a way that is as simple to use as the Maps API lets you map the entire world, or the WeatherKit API lets you do weather stuff, and it does it on-device really quick and there's lots of little features that you can add inside of there.

I think on two vectors, it's interesting. The first is obviously we talked about indies, it's cheap, it's a super Apple person and you want to use all the Apple stuff, that's cool. But I think on the enterprise side, having been somebody who's worked at big companies, getting your big company to give you a enterprise account to use some of these big new models is a process. Whereas this is just, it's on iOS. You can build a proof of concept really quickly with these things, because it's all just sitting right there in code, and then you can show your manager and move it up the chain. And then maybe it's not powerful enough to do what you need to do and you shift it over to something like a web-based API or maybe you use it as the entry point and let it tell you whether or not it needs to do something more complicated.

I think it has the potential to be the obvious first step for text-based input from users, and then from there you might need to go into a different direction. I don't know exactly how it'll shake up, but I actually think I'm more optimistic about it now than I was before I saw how it all works.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And you're actually playing with the API. I'm not. I'm just shitposting. Shit-taking, hot-taking.

Charlie Chapman:

One more interesting note that people might be interested in is I've heard from people who do apps related to food, the safety measures are intense on this one. And so, they found that having the word Thai or Chinese would cause it to send back results that are like, "Hey, we can't touch this." And so, there might be some prompt engineering that needs to happen to be like, this is all food-related, this isn't bad, but there could be some roadblocks that people run into around the safety stuff that maybe you don't run into on some of these more cavalier models from these startups. So that's another thing to keep your eye on.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And the 4,096 token, a context window doesn't allow for a massive prompt either, so you're going to have to balance both how much prompting you do and then how much context you want to give it. It should be the starting point. And then as a starting point, the determining factor is in the road testing, does the output seem to be 50% of the way there, 60% of the way there, 90% of the way there, and then is that output acceptable? And if it's not, then it needs to go to the cloud. So then my thought is that as you experiment, you're probably going to find it less useful and end up wanting to go to the cloud, but I would love to be wrong because it'd be super cool if it is like 90% there and that's a tolerable amount of loss in Fidelity that it will be useful for those sorts of things.

And I do like your example and from Dark Noise is that Image Playgrounds was almost a joke this past year, but you had one use case that I thought was really good and this is probably an example of the kind of use cases where even image Playgrounds in the state it has been for the last year was useful. So why don't tell people how you integrated Image Playgrounds in Dark Noise and why it did actually work?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I mean it was really straightforward, but Dark Noise is a ambient noise app, so there's a bunch of different, obviously white noise, brown noise, but then there's rain and frogs and trees and stuff like that. And I have a feature in there where you can build a mix so you can add them together and change the volume and build a soundscape that you want. And since the whole app is designed around these icons that work everywhere, I have an icon builder and most people don't mess with that. They just use the default one. I just added a button to say generate one as well, and it actually would generate one using Image Playgrounds, based on the name that you gave the icon. You can't really prompt engineer Image Playgrounds, but you could inject terms to it. I could say black background to, sorry, to force it to sort of fit with the app.

And a lot of people actually use that, because they just want a basic icon to go with the sound that they create. To push that forward, with the new foundation models, that's the same kind of thing I'm looking for there, is the ability to just auto-create a title based on what's in your mix. That's the kind of stuff that, it's not a tent pole feature to your point, but it's something I feel like it's going to be pretty good at doing is generate two words that represent the four sounds that you have in here and their volumes. And then also maybe a way to generate a mix based on that structured data, based on a prompt or something like that. Those are all not super tent pole features, but they're just quality of life things that you can add into your app. And based on what I've looked at so far, I should be able to add them to the app very, very painlessly, which is I think one of the big selling points.

David Barnard:

It's a great way to look at it too. It's like what are the less mission-critical where users will tolerate it not being perfect because they can replace the icon, they can do something else with the icon, the icon's not fundamental to the app? And so it's a nice to have and a cool feature and some people will use it, but then it's not all trails sending you down the wrong path. The consequences of it getting it wrong or so low that those are the kind of places to look at it. All right, so onto some of the bigger announcements. Apple made some big updates to App Store and I'm actually super excited and I think I did see a few people tweet, why do you even need RevenueCat if the App Store analytics are so good? And I think that's one fundamental misunderstanding of RevenueCat if you think our business prop is that we give you analytics.

But two, I think misunderstanding of the kind of analytics that RevenueCat provides. So while some of you may be thinking, oh, David's going to crap on this because it competes with RevenueCat, I actually think it's super cool because there are things because of privacy and for other reasons that only Apple can do and Apple's doing those things and I think it's a fantastic compliment to... I have not been looking at App Store analytics for years because I use Appfigures and RevenueCat to look at my data, but given all of these updates, I'll probably be spending more time there, and I'll go to App Store for the things where the App Store really excels at and I'll go to RevenueCat for the user level analytics and cohorting that we do and I'll go to Appfigures for the financial and accounting and the things that they're good at.

And so, I don't think this in any way replaces anybody. I think it's just a great addition to the landscape of when you're trying to figure out what to do next when you're trying to understand your users, this is a whole nother set of data and some of it is data you just can't get any other the way, so I'm super excited about it. Did you look into this at all and have you talked to folks on the ground about how this looked?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I mean from the people I talked to here, it was definitely not the talk of the town the same way the Liquid Glass or any of that stuff was you can answer this movie, is it actually live? Can we see this ourselves? I watched the video-

David Barnard:

I don't know.

Charlie Chapman:

... But I haven't actually seen it. Okay.

David Barnard:

I was so busy and I was flying back yesterday so I watched the videos, but I have not cracked open App Store analytics myself yet to see how much is live, how much is coming soon.

Charlie Chapman:

I'm seeing in the chat people saying it looks like it's the same as it is now, at least currently as we record. I was excited watching the session and I think you probably dove in a lot more than I did into what it's offering, but I'm always curious what we're really getting versus what we're not. But honestly, just seeing the investment in it at all gets me really excited, because hopefully we'll keep seeing that investment going forward.

David Barnard:

Yeah, totally. But let me just speed run some of the highlights, just so you're aware of the things to look for. And there are a few things I think are especially interesting to me. So one of the highlights is that you can have up to seven filters at once instead of three. I, again, hadn't spent enough time in App Store Connect over the past few years to know what a big difference that's going to be, but anytime we're able to filter by more things, people who are on iOS 18.5 and they did this and they did that, and being able to stack those things lets you dive deeper and deeper and deeper and then compare against the cohorts that aren't on iOS, 18.5 is the latest. So being able to do compare and contrast on those deeper levels with those deeper filters I think is really interesting.

They're doing a lot more cohortage use this year, very different approach than how we do it, but a lot of the cohorting is time since download, so what's your download to paid conversion day one, day 15, day 30? You can watch how those cohorts progress over time, so that's really interesting. Proceeds per download is similarly able to be cohorted like that. So you can see, and again this is one of those where it's a look back kind of thing and how interesting is it really, and we showed in the state of subscription apps reports that day one is where so much is going to happen. 80% of conversions for most apps are happening that day one of starting a free trial. But it is interesting and interesting to see watch those cohorts and how they perform over time and then you'll be able to filter those and look at how the different cohorts perform over time. And so, all very interesting stuff.

One of the bigger things though is that they're adding even more benchmarks, which is fascinating. Similarly to what I just said about RevenueCat analytics is that we do put out those data subscription apps report every year. And so, you might be thinking, "Oh, I don't even need to read that anymore." And I think the answer here is that Apple's going to show you some things that we can't show you and we're going to show you some things Apple can't show you. And so, I think they're really complementary, but it is super exciting that Apple is putting more benchmarks in there, so that you can see how do you perform against other similar apps. And Apple has a lot of data that RevenueCat doesn't have and we don't break it down as specifically to apps like yours.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, my understanding when they first started doing this benchmarking stuff a couple of years ago was that it seemed like it was pretty much broken down by category in the App Store, and maybe I was wrong about that, but in these sessions I noticed they kept saying by other apps like yours or by apps that are peers or something like that. Do you understand or do you have a sense of how those breakdowns are done or is it just if your app's a health and fitness app you're comparing against all health and fitness apps?

David Barnard:

Well, that's exactly what I was going to get you and I keep asking each other the questions that we were about to say.

Charlie Chapman:

We're professionals, we're seeing each other up.

David Barnard:

Yeah, I did not dig deep into that. But yes, my impression based on the way they're framing it is that they're not just doing category, but they are trying to do more peer-based. And I was going to bring that up as a caveat, in that what Apple thinks is something like your app may not actually be something like your app. So as with RevenueCat's, state of subscription apps report and any kind of benchmarking, you need to take everything with a reasonable grain of salt, and I don't have an answer today, but if you're going to make based on the benchmarking and App Store Connect, read up on and hopefully we'll be able to dig into this and publish a blog post or something like that discussing it, but read into how are they building those similar audiences? Is it just based on category? And then factor those sorts of things into your decision-making around it.

When we release a report every year, I have apps all the time asking me, "Hey, we're technically in the fitness category, but we think our app performs more like an education app because it's a fitness app, but we're like, we educate people about fitness or we educate people about health and wellness. We are not like Headspace." And so, in an ideal world, Apple is able to pick up on that and actually compare you to more similar apps, but we don't know exactly the algorithm, whatever they're doing is going to be fallible, so you need to take it with a grain of salt, but it's more data and so it'll be interesting to dig around it and see how you compare, but definitely something to take with a grain of salt.

Charlie Chapman:

The other thing that I think in most of our reports we have is the breaking them down by the quartile that you're in. And that's one where I'd be really curious if Apple's doing that here too, where it's like, is my medium-sized startup, does it really make sense for it to be compared in the same cohort as Netflix? You know what I mean? I would expect those numbers would look extremely different, but like you said, it's more data. It's just with these types of things, it's always a little dangerous to just see a percentage and be like, "you're in the bottom 20%, that's really bad." And it's like, well who are you really comparing against in this? But yeah, it's useful information. I'm glad they're doing it.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And then are you in the 20% in this metric but you're 80% in another metric that makes up for it? Are you 20% in trial starts but you're 90% in trial conversions? And a lot of context needs to be taken, but yes, more data. Interesting. A few other highlights that I'll just speed run, they added MRR, monthly recurring revenue, and active subscriber movement, which looks a lot like our active subscriber movement chart. Retention averages that are cohorted. They have a nice subscriber retention view. I believe that subscriber retention view has been there a long time, but then now you can do a lot more filters, and then they also introduce an API. I didn't get to dive super deep into what exactly is available via the API, but that may be an interesting opportunity for an Appfigures and maybe even like a startup to build stuff around this to dive deeper than Apple does.

But the one thing I'm super excited about is being able to filter by product page, and then I'll spoil something I was going to talk about later and we'll just talk about it now, is that the custom product page is Apple's doing some really cool stuff here, and I've heard people complain about their product page A/B testing and it's never going to be exactly what we as a developer community want from Apple, but the custom product pages can now be associated with keywords. So you can go in and assign specific keywords to specific custom product pages, and then that data then gets passed through into the App Store analytics so that you can filter by, let me look at people who landed, and the example they gave in the session, so I'll just use it, is if you're a Strava, which I think is the example they're keying off of, and you appeal to both cyclists and runners, is that you may have a custom product page focused on runners, and you have a different custom product page focused on cyclists.

And then what's cool is that then you can start breaking down all of these analytics by people who saw the cycling custom product page versus people who saw the running custom product page. Similarly, you're to be tricky because sometimes runners may end up on your cycling page and maybe that's dragging down the results of the cycling custom product page, and there's going to be caveats to figure out and all that kind of stuff. But the custom product page stuff is super cool and being able to associate keywords with those I think is going to be super powerful. And then being able to filter it all by those custom product pages in App Store analytics, it's going to be really great. So definitely looking forward to that.

The next thing I'll speed through is that, and Charlie and I both, we were talking before we went live that neither of us had time to dive super deep into this, but there seemed to be a lot of updates to the App Store Connect API in combination with the analytics API. I do wonder if there's an opportunity here for somebody to build a great tool. So with a test lite API, it seems obvious for the continuous development systems where you're able to push builds and what's the developer term for that? Help me out here.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, build systems.

David Barnard:

Build systems, continuous integration-

Charlie Chapman:

Development or continuous deployment is-

David Barnard:

Yeah, Fastlane, Bitrise, those things-

Charlie Chapman:

Like CI CD.

David Barnard:

Yeah, those systems seem most poised to take advantage of some of this, some of the stuff they did with the Test Lite API, but they, you will be able to, and this is what I'm specifically excited about, is in the Test Lite API, you'll be able to get access to the beta tester feedback. So you'll be able to, through the API, get screenshots and descriptions. So this is maybe a fun app for an enterprising developer to build. And now that it's everything so harmonious across Mac, iOS, iPad, you could build a cross-platform app that works across all three platforms to better manage your Test Lite feedback that when things come in you get a push, and there's webhooks for this, you can key into the webhooks so that anytime a beta tester gives feedback, you can get a webhook and send a push. And they built all of this into the App Store Connect app as well.

So the App Store Connect app itself, but App Store Connect app is always going to be very Apple-y in the way they think about it and design it, the base experience. So I think there's still opportunity to build a more sophisticated experience on top of it. This was really cool. It's like, "Hey, we're going to add this into the App Store Connect app. What if we just opened the API for everybody to do so they could build their own systems on top of it?" So being able to better manage test flight and customer feedback I think is really interesting.

Okay, so App Store Connect, again, I'll go through this pretty quick, but Apple is now going to use AI to generate tags for apps. This one's really interesting because it's very Apple in that there's this whole new tagging system and the developers cannot initiate their own tag.

So I can't go into App Store Connect and say, "I want to be tagged as this kind of weather app and that interaction or whatever." They're going to be automatically generated. And then the only option in App Store Connect is to actually remove the tags that the AI automatically assigned. You're not going to be able to self-assign tags. But another really cool step forward in that is just going to be more surface area. And what they talked about in the session was how in App Store Connect, they're going to surface these tags better. I imagine there will be filters, so you could search weather app and then filter by the tags. There's going to be places in the App Store where the tags are surfaced, and so you could see a whole group of apps related to that tag. I think tagging is going to be super cool.

And again, being able to unassign yourself from tags is really interesting, even if you can't add your own tags. We already talked about custom product pages being associated with keywords. The AI generated review summaries is actually live already. They talked about it a little bit, but that has been live already. Go check your app. I was talking with some developers in-person at the event where we were all searching our app to see whose was live. And my impression was apps that get a lot of downloads and therefore a lot of review velocity are the ones that are getting those AI summaries. If you're not actively getting a lot of reviews currently, even if your app has a lot of reviews historically, it seems like it's keying more on that velocity for when it does generate the overview. So if you're a smaller app and not getting a lot of reviews now, you might not see it, but it is live on the App Store today.

Offer codes is super interesting. So previously, offer codes were only available to subscriptions, and they're now available to consumables and one-time purchases, so everything has offer codes now. This is one I think you shouldn't sleep on. I've been experimenting with offer codes, and like everything, there's caveats. But I was doing this promotion with 50% off the first year where you can just follow a link and get that promotion. The downside here is that it takes you to a redemption page that doesn't have screenshots, doesn't have any other context about your app. And then when I tested it, and I don't know if they fixed this, my app had a seven-day free trial plus 50% off for the first year, but the page you landed on just said 50% off for the first year, so it wasn't even clear that if you accepted, you would get the free trial.

So there's going to be hiccups along the way, but this is another exciting point that they're moving forward with this kind of stuff, they're giving more opportunity. And this one in particular I think is really interesting for affiliate deals, because you can track the offer codes. Again, privacy limitation there really strict in that you can only create 10 different offer codes, so you can't spin up 100 different affiliates, each with their own offer code and track them seamlessly and get 100%, but you can have 10 different offer codes, 10 different trackable offer codes, and then you can create millions of codes under each of those, or 1 million across the 10 different offer codes. It's really interesting, something to look into to be able to just generate a link on the fly. Like your holiday sale, if you don't want to create a whole custom paywall, you just want to do a promotion on the web, it can be 20% off all of this link and then you can track it via that offer code.

So it being available now for consumables and one-time purchases I think is really cool. And those of you who haven't looked at it for subscriptions, I do think it's super interesting.

The other thing that I thought was interesting about all of this and the meta of App Store and App Store Connect, is it feels like Apple is starting to break away from the WWDC cycle where we are going to get more interesting things coming throughout the year. As much as they did already announce, I think we probably will be seeing more things that are not even necessarily big announcements at a keynote, but are press releases, are a news item on the developer page of Apple. And of course, the press will pick that kind of stuff up or the community will pick that stuff up. But I think we're going to start seeing the App Store more and more decoupled from the WWDC release cycle, which I think is fantastic for the future of the App Store. Any thoughts on App Store Connect and the App Store as things are changing?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I think that last point you made is something I really noticed too. There was a significant amount of time in the video spent on features that were released during the 18 cycle, especially 18.4. so there was quite a few things there that maybe didn't get the full attention of WWDC, but they're willing to push things out as they go. And so, yeah, I'm excited to see them push on a lot of things. I think like you mentioned, the taggable product pages and letting you send or show different product pages based on keywords. I think that might be the biggest opportunity in all of this for apps to maybe increase their... I was going to say increase their top of funnel. It's not that, it's actually your split the top of funnel into two different funnels, and then you can actually optimize totally separately now for different groups depending on what problem they're trying to solve as they search in the App Store. So I think there's a lot to dig into there and a lot of opportunity there.

David Barnard:

So Storekit, this is something I think historically we've spent a lot more time talking through. We'll gloss over it this time for two reasons. One, there wasn't a ton of new stuff for Storekit. If you're a Storekit nerd, definitely watch the videos. I think a lot of you who are here watching this or listening to the podcast either already used RevenueCat, so you don't need to know the nitty-gritty RevenueCat's going to deal with it or you're more product and growth focused anyway. So diving deep into the API related stuff of Storekit, it's just I think less and less relevant to this audience.

But there is new stuff, there's new transaction IDs and new download IDs and things like that that will make it easier for us at RevenueCat and then easier for anybody who's built their own IAP management system to uniquely identify users across downloads and across devices and things like that. So very good stuff, but just not stuff that maybe warrants a longer discussion here. And we don't have Jacob on the call to talk about story, his favorite topic Storekit. So yeah, I actually meant to mention that earlier Jacob was supposed to be on and then some stuff came up. Big shot CEO. Now left it to Charlie and I to have this conversation. Anything you wanted to add on Storekit Charlie?

Charlie Chapman:

No, other than I think that was where I felt like most of those announcements were things that came out over the last six months. So there wasn't a lot necessarily new right now. I think it was an incredibly small amount, but over the last year they have released things new there. But yeah, it's pretty nitty-gritty and not necessarily... It doesn't really enable a bunch of new things. It just makes, honestly, it makes our lives a little bit easier in terms of making the SDK robust for everybody.

David Barnard:

All right, AdAttributionKit. There were announcements here, but before I tell you exactly what happened, and I'll just go through it quickly, but I'm going to read a tweet because I think this maybe is the best top line summary. And so, I'll just read the whole tweet and you can make your own conclusions. But Eric Sufer who does dig way deeper into all of this than I do and understands it all a lot better than I do, had this to say about the 2025 updates to AdAttributionKit.

"The AdAttributionKit updates announced at WWDC this week feel immaterial. They're mostly nice to have features that don't overcome the fundamental deficiencies of App Store Attribution Kit and therefore won't move the needle on its adoption. It seems clear to me that Apple's principle mistake with SKAdNetwork, which is what it was formerly called, the reason it failed was instigating AT&T before the functionality of SKAdNetwork was in place. In the absence of robust platform-based measurement framework, the largest ad platforms pieced together their own patchwork measurement solutions and now none of them has any incentive to integrate deeply with SKAdNetwork/App Store Attribution Kit. Anecdotally, I only see App Store Attribution Kit Postbacks being used by advertisers in media mix models where real-time feedback isn't necessary."

So yeah, in summary, and this is something we've been talking about a lot on the podcast and I've been talking a lot about in private conversations, is that to be quite frank, Facebook, Google and others are fingerprinting. It's technically against Apple's rules, technically against the letter of the law, but for many reasons, Apple is turning a blind eye to that fingerprinting. And so, what has happened is that because SKAdNetwork, giving a little more nuance to what Eric said, what happened is that because SKAdNetwork wasn't good, Meta, Google and others had to fingerprint to get any kind of effective measurement and then they got so good at that, there's just not a lot of incentive for them right now to use SKAdNetwork/AdAttributionKit.

So there were updates, but as Eric said, it's hard to see this creating any fundamental shift. I think Apple would need to offer both more carrots and more sticks in order for AdAttributionKit to really take off and become a primary source of attribution.

And to that end, Apple did announce that they're going to further crack down on fingerprinting. That freaked me out, that freaked Eric out. I saw growth app growth Twitter freaking out a little bit when it was announced. I think in the platform State of the Union, that fingerprinting was going to be something that they cracked down on. But Eric did follow up on this and dug deeper into it and his summary that he posted on Twitter and wrote an article about is that from what anyone can tell at this point, it does seem as though the crackdown on fingerprinting is almost exclusively targeted at data brokers, not ad networks. The sense is they're going to continue to turn a blind eye to all the fingerprinting that's going on and only break it for data brokers and folks like that, not for Facebook and Google.

And the interesting tidbit there, I don't think Eric talked about, but I thought of as I was reading through all this and thinking through it for this live stream is that even though Apple today is not cracking down on Meta and Google and other big Apple oven and other big networks and MMPs and stuff, they could at any moment weaponize this, because technically what all these folks are doing is against the rules of the iOS platform. And so, this is a stick that they could use to try and get more people to use AdAttributionKit, but it's a stick that if they use, will be the meme of putting the stick in the bicycle tire.

They'll be like, "Oh yeah, privacy is so good," and then they stick it in the tire and apps stop growing. I feel like AT&T was a little bit of that where apps really struggled post-AT&T to grow, because the SKAd network was not good enough to actually replace what came before it. And it means something I've been saying for years, I'm so in favor of the spirit of AT&T. I care about privacy. I don't want to be tracked across the web and all that kind of stuff. But what happened with AT&T is they put the cart before the horse a little bit and didn't provide a good alternative. And so, I think we'd be in a very similar situation is that even as much as they put into AdAttributionKit as of 2025, I don't think it's good enough to replace the fingerprinting. Therefore, I think they recognize that if they weaponized this new fingerprinting crackdown against Meta and Google and others, it would be self-defeating and it would be very problematic for the broader ecosystem and then therefore problematic to Apple earnings and the success of the App Store and everything else like that.

So long-winded way to say, I don't know that it's super important this year, but Apple did add multiple re-engagement and in conversion events to SKAdNetwork, they added customizable conversion and conversion windows and cooldowns. And this is all the nitty-gritty stuff that actually probably some of you listening to the podcast know way more about than I do. It comes into somebody sees your ad one place and it gets attributed to that ad, but then they see another ad. How much time in between seeing those two ads should reset, so that the second ad gets credit versus the first ad get credit?

And that especially comes into account for re-engagement ads, is that if the download happens and then they see a re-engagement ad, does the download ad get credits because it happened within 24 hours, or does the retargeting ad get credit because that's what really led? So they're starting to build out more fine-grained tooling for that. But again, unfortunately nobody seems to really use it and it doesn't seem like that's going to change just based on the way things are. I'm sure you're super excited to jump in here, Charlie, and any thoughts there?

Charlie Chapman:

No, not really. I haven't dug into how all this stuff works super deeply, to be honest. The only extra color I'll add is in addition to sticking the stick in the tire and maybe potentially harming the business, if they were deciding to use that stick, is also the regulation environment is oddly both directions on this. Even for areas that are very privacy focused, it did seem like there was some fear of monopolistic behavior there, so they might want to back off of that as well in that regard. But to be honest, I don't understand that world well enough to say anything super intelligible there.

David Barnard:

So Charlie, give me a summary. What are the vibes coming out of WWDC 25?

Charlie Chapman:

In-person, the vibes are good. There wasn't some big new device like the Vision Pro or big new announcement like Apple Intelligence last year, but instead there was a significant number of quality of life improvements and APIs that at least talking to people, everybody had a different new API they were excited about. But definitely the one that everybody's the most excited about is the foundation models and how they can work those into their app. And so, I think there's a good chance we're going to see some fun, interesting, innovative features in apps, and maybe I'll be surprised and there will be some big tent pole type features that come out of this as well. I think there's a decently high potential, and certainly I'm excited to see how this progresses over time as Apple improves these models.

David Barnard:

Yeah, I think for me, the vibes coming out of WWDC are good. I'm personally very excited about Liquid Glass and what this means as an opportunity for developers in the fall. I'm excited about Liquid Glass, just using it. I actually, I showed my ten-year-old son the iMessage backgrounds and he was like, "Ooh, I want that." Those kind of things are like, yeah, we can all say, "Oh, that's ugly or that's weird or whatever," but people like this kind of stuff and there were a lot of really fun things for consumers. I think you've said this a few times that iOS-26 does just feel fun. It feels like Apple's doing new things, trying new things, doing fun things, and is it maybe not the biggest developer story, maybe not the most new APIs? It definitely needs refinement, but I left WWDC very excited about the future of Apple's platforms.

And then anybody who's been following me on Twitter or talks to me in private knows I've been pretty critical of Apple even more so in the last year and very concerned about their future and what it says about them as an organization that it feels like they missed AI. Although the spin this week was, "We didn't miss ai, we started with the wrong approach and we're quickly going to catch up," which means they missed AI and they're having to regroup, and the leaks are that they had to completely reorganize the AI team and move somebody new in charge. And so, all of those things have left me very concerned about Apple and very critical about Apple, to be honest. But I think there was a lot to read between the lines of that actually left me encouraged.

Ben Thompson had a really great post called Apple Retreats, and you would think from the headline Apple Retreats, like their tail between their legs, they've given up, they're retreating. But his point was, and I think if you read between all the lines this week, is that Apple's retreating back to what they do really well. There are so many little nice to haves, like the experience of iOS 26 with Liquid Glass, with the user experience changes, with iMessage backgrounds, with all of these things, it's what Apple does best. It's building great platforms, building great user experiences. And his point was like last year, they overextended themselves a little bit maybe, where they're not as good at these cloud-based models and AI and all those other things. But I think by retreating and not over promising like they did last year, by letting it be a letdown of WWDC, because I think in one hand they could have made WWDC more exciting by announcing things that maybe weren't quite ready. It's almost a good sign that they were humble enough to let WWDC be a little underwhelming.

Now they can over-deliver and under-promise instead of over-promising and under-delivering. And so, on all those fronts, and again, reading between a lot of lines and a lot of conversations I had while in Cupertino, I'm excited. The Apple fanboy and me is coming back a little. And so, I don't know, maybe I need to lay off the Twitter shitposting a little bit and give Apple a little room to breathe. I think we're going to see some good things from them in the coming years. And so, I think my vibes coming out of WWDC are strong. I feel like we're starting to see the inklings of a new Apple that is better poised to grow in the coming years.

And I think that's encouraging to us as developers, because whether or not you're an indie that's solely working on iOS or even a big company where maybe 80% of your revenue is on iOS, every little thing Apple does, every little decision they make, every API they give access to, every change to app review, maybe we didn't get the big things like dropping the feed at 15%. There's a lot of things we still want, but every little improvement they make to their platforms, every little improvement they make to developer experience does matter to us, and it matters to us more so than pretty much anything else, because it is the primary place where most of us monetize our apps. So yeah, I'm leaving encouraged. I think there's a lot of potential. Will Apple deliver? Big question mark. But I'm excited.

Charlie Chapman:

I'm happy to see a little bit of spark of joy in David's eyes again. That's always exciting. And so, I'm very excited, and I can't wait to go play with everything once I get home.

David Barnard:

All right, well, as we wrap up, for those of you on the podcast, if you have questions for me and Charlie, go to YouTube. Breaking news, I actually released the first short form YouTube video today on the Sub Club channel. I went over the test results. At RevenueCat we ran a four variant tests experimenting with web paywalls and linking out to the web. I release a YouTube video going over those results with charts and graphs and data in my analysis and everything else, and I will be releasing more of those kind of videos on the YouTube channel. And so, for those of you on the podcast who want to ask Charlie and I questions, go to YouTube, because that's somewhere we're going to be more active in releasing more videos.

All right, thank you everyone and we will end the stream here.

Charlie Chapman:

Bye.

David Barnard:

Bye. Thanks, Charlie.

Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by Chat.SubClub.com to join our private community.