WWDC 2026: What Subscription Apps Need To Know

David Barnard (00:00:01):

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. Subclub 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 everyone and welcome to this special edition of Subclub Live. Normally we do these pretty much every Thursday, 9:00 AM Pacific 1800 Central European Time. Today's special edition, we're doing it on Friday because WWDC. I was flying home yesterday when we would normally do these on Thursday, but I was inside Apple Park Monday, Tuesday, and I guess part of Wednesday I was at the developer center and Charlie was on the ground all week talking to folks.

(00:01:11):

We talked to Apple, we talked to other developers, we watched sessions, we took notes, we had AI summarized things. We've been busy this week, so we've got a lot of really fun stuff to dive into. And just as a reminder, we started doing these subclub lives because I heard so many people tell me over the years that they listen to the podcast and they're in their car and just shouting to the void, "What about this or what about that? " And so this is your chance to actually ask those questions. So we'll have an AMA at the end where you can just ask us anything about ... Well, I mean really anything ideally maybe today WWC focused, but usually it's kind of anything app growth related. So it's been super fun to have so many great experts on and the chat's been amazing. So thank you so much for asking questions today.

(00:02:00):

Please chat it up, ask questions. We love that, the interactivity. So a couple of housekeeping items. We have some really fun stuff coming up. I five coded an app and launched it last week and I have been working with Nick from the Noise UGC platform to do UGC promotion on my app. Next week we're going to reveal all the numbers, all the strategies behind using noise as a UGC platform. So that's going to be super fun. And then the week after that on the 25th, we're going to have Marcus Burke on to do a Meta ads masterclass. So both of those should be pretty incredible, especially if you're looking to grow your app. And today we have Charlie, my colleague and developer advocate at RevenueCat and Thomas Petit, world renowned growth expert on the call. And the topic today, of course, is the WWDC recap.

(00:03:02):

So we do have a bunch of notes because there was a lot to cover. While we're kind of going through the notes, any relevant questions we'll try and take, try and keep the questions relevant to what we're currently discussing because you're probably going to ask questions that we already have in our notes to answer later in the discussion. So keep those relevant. But let me give Charlie and Thomas a quick chance to introduce ourselves before we dive into the chat. Charlie.

Charlie Chapman (00:03:31):

Hey, I'm Charlie Chapman. I'm a developer advocate at RevenueCat and yeah, I've been on the ground, still am on the ground here at DubDub. And as if you know what my voice normally sounds like, you can hear. I have been talking quite a bit to a lot of people, developers, Apple engineers, and kind of getting the word on the street on everybody's reactions to everything and sneaking, of course, lots of session videos into any cracks in my time that I can to kind of keep up with what's actually been announced. So that's kind of the context I'm bringing to you here.

David Barnard (00:04:09):

Awesome. And Thomas?

Thomas Petit (00:04:11):

Yeah. Hi everyone. I've been following this kind of announcement for about 12 years, I think, 13, Bell. And it's always exciting to ... I mean, besides everything that's announced, to try to pick on what new features we're going to be able to tap into for September onwards that ... And sometimes some of those have, let's say, a bonus for those who adopt early. It doesn't always happen, but it does happen sometimes that when you jump in very early on some new features, there's some really good benefit to do it before everyone. So I hope today we're going to cover the potential of a few of those.

David Barnard (00:04:47):

Nice. So I wanted to kick things off with a bit of a spicy topic. As I do now always, I take down my own notes and reveal as much information as I can and then I toss it over to multiple AI agents and say, "What did I miss? What should I be thinking about? How should I frame it just to do better?" And so this time I tossed it over to Fable5 and Fable Five came up with a really interesting framing of today's discussion. And that is that with the Epic ruling, so confusing now which rule dropped. I guess last year when we finally got open season on external payment links, the way Fable framed this is like, "Hey, Apple is now competing for payments and look at everything they're doing to make the App Store payments better." Now, and Charlie's making a face personally, I think Apple was headed this direction anyway, but what's interesting to me though is that as they add more and more features that were like what we're going to discuss today, app store payments do become more and more competitive to linking out.

(00:06:04):

So if you're currently finding success linking out to web payments, it may be worth a new AB test as these features start to drop because as Apple adds more and more options and flexibility and payments and everything else, it does become more effective to remain on the platform. So any thoughts on Fable's framing there? I know Charlie, you're already kind of nodding your head.

Charlie Chapman (00:06:31):

Well, I guess maybe it depends on the specific ones you're talking about. To me, one of the big ones, which I know we'll get into is like seat-based licensing

(00:06:39):

And that's one where we've been following Apple for a very long time and it's a tale as old as time that there's a thing everybody's been begging for for years and years and years and then all of a sudden somebody internally at Apple, in this case, the Apple Creator Studio team needed a way to sell things in seat-based licensing and lo and behold, suddenly that's a feature on the App Store. So I think a lot of times it's more of a kind of the dog fooding thing that drives some of these. But of course there's all sorts of external pressures that drive this too. But yeah, we can dig in a little bit more on specifics, but I definitely give a little side eye to that quick hot take from Fable.

David Barnard (00:07:23):

Fable called it the carrot era that Apple is now offering more carrots. But I mean, that's the thing is like pretty much every year they've introduced new things throughout the history of the app store. The app store first launched, there were no in- app purchases that came I think a year and a half later. And then from in- app purchases, then consumables and subscriptions and like Store Kit two, they have been progressively improving the App Store payment system for the full 18 years of the App Store. So this is not some big new thing, but it does feel like they're moving faster and that's exciting.

Charlie Chapman (00:07:59):

Yes, agreed. This year there was a lot more for us to talk about than normal years, I feel like.

David Barnard (00:08:04):

Yeah. Any thoughts, Thomas?

Thomas Petit (00:08:06):

Well, it's the great part of competition. I'm actually happy that we have the possibility to try both IAPs and non-IAPs and the fact that it pushes Apple to be better to be able to compete. I do believe IAPs have big pros and big cons, but it's very clear that it puts some pressure on Apple to iterate on this, more faclesibilities on SKUs and a lot of things that you can't sometimes do outside of the store. I'm not sure how much it is due to Epic and the opening because we have seen this figure ad, but if it puts pressure to have more of them, I'll take it. Yeah.

David Barnard (00:08:45):

One quick hit on news, Apple did not announce hardware, which I was really frustrated about, but which one of you put that in the notes? Because I thought that was a good one. Thomas, yeah, you take that one.

Thomas Petit (00:08:59):

It was very clear this WDC was going to be about software and a lot of AI, especially since there's been a lot of backlash to Apple on the last two years for a number of reason. I think they really wanted to center the stage on this, so it makes sense. But I think there's another reason, which is the new CEO is taking office in September and he's coming from the hardware side. So it also makes sense to, if there is something very big coming on hardware to let him have the, I don't know, the possibility to bring that up when it's coming in. So honestly, I think if there's anything big on hardware, I think it's going to be after September because of this reason.

David Barnard (00:09:38):

I was disappointed because I thought WWC was a perfect place to drop M5 and Mac Mini and M5 Mac Studio because I'm actually, I've got the money now. GritMethod has made like 1,500 bucks. I'm going to buy a nice Mac Mini and it's going to sit here on my desk as my dev machine going to get a little KBM and be able to switch and have a dedicated vibe coding machine. So I was disappointing they didn't launch, but Charlie, you seem to have some thoughts.

Charlie Chapman (00:10:06):

Well, maybe I just follow the rumors too strongly, but it seemed like the ones you just said were like the M5 Max were kind of the only ones maybe sort of ready, but given the supply chain constraints right now, it doesn't surprise me at all that they punted on that at least for now. I

David Barnard (00:10:26):

Can't even buy a Mac Mini right now, which is so frustrating.

Charlie Chapman (00:10:29):

Exactly. They can't even sell the ones they already have. Yeah, exactly.

David Barnard (00:10:33):

It's frustrating. I was hoping that the inventory had run dry in part because they were about to launch the new ones, but I was just totally wrong there and I'm just going to have to wait. One more meta point that Thomas reminded me of is the vibes were really good at WWDC this year and I tweeted this out and I didn't get a chance because I finally slept last night for the first night all week. Look forward

Charlie Chapman (00:11:02):

To that.

David Barnard (00:11:02):

Yeah, it's very nice. But I tweeted earlier this week that I thought it was the best WDC in a long time and that it's not what Apple said in the keynote, it's what the keynote says about Apple. And what I meant by that is that it was almost a more humble, straightforward, authentic Apple than we've seen in a long time. There were less like fancy video transitions, demos were real time instead of magic. Progressively, the WWC keynote has turned into what people jokingly say like, "Why did I spend 90 minutes watching an Apple commercial?" They're so polished, they're so perfected, they're so heavily edited that it feels like a 90 minute commercial. And to this year it really felt like that step back to a more normal pre- COVID WWDC where if you're on stage doing a live demo, you actually have to wait for Siri to come up with the answer.

(00:12:02):

So I think that was part of it. And then Charlie, maybe you can dive into John Gruber's, Something's Wrote in the State of the Cupertino and why they maybe did do more live demos this year.

Charlie Chapman (00:12:14):

Yeah. I mean, I definitely think that getting called out two years ago about not showing everything working, which was a signal that it wasn't working and obviously never able to deliver it until two years later at this point. That definitely I think contributed to why they took the approach they took. It was interesting to hear you say that the vibes were good because I feel like in the developer community at least, it was a weird progression through the week. I think post keynote and post State of the Union, the vibes were the lowest I've seen in a long time. Interesting. It felt like it was very short. There wasn't much there introing with like we focused on bug fixes and improvements essentially. It feels like a signal of like, okay, that's just the thing you say when you don't have anything else. And then of course skepticism about the series stuff, which was the main headline.

(00:13:10):

And then talking to engineers throughout the Apple Teams, I got the impression that no, for real, this was actually everybody's like top priority throughout the company. And then as we got access to betas and they finished indexing, we could feel it. Immediately you can feel how much faster iOS 27 is

Thomas Petit (00:13:31):

Compared

Charlie Chapman (00:13:31):

To iOS 26, which is crazy for a beta one. And then as people got access to Siri, we've all just been standing around in circles testing it and trying this, try that, take a picture of this. And I have to say it's like really impressive, surprisingly impressive

David Barnard (00:13:49):

Yeah, maybe my vibes were different because I was so excited about all the App Store stuff and it felt like they were doing a lot on the App Store. And then I talked to a bunch of Apple folks across Sunday and Monday and they just had a different energy to them than I've seen in years. They feel like things are really moving forward with the App Store and App Review and like all the things that we've been complaining about for years. They have been slowly stepping away and chipping away at, but it's like this year was another big leap. And so yeah, maybe my vibes were a little, because I'm more on the growth product side and app

Thomas Petit (00:14:22):

Store

David Barnard (00:14:23):

Optimization side than I am the engineering side. But man, I was on cloud nine most of the week. Thomas, any thoughts from you and the growth circles you run in?

Thomas Petit (00:14:35):

So I wasn't at the stage so it's harder to feel the vibe. There was a lot of reaction and some skepticism, some excitement, like a lot of excitement in particular around like ASO and search ads practitioners because the new asset is something that has been frustrating. But I think in the grand scheme of things we don't necessarily realize that they do bring a lot of like these small bits and they compound over time to make the store experience better for developer, for users and so on. This one felt pretty normal to me from the distance, but then again, I wasn't physically there and it's the lens of the more store perception than anything. I think a lot of the vibe that Charlie has felt, I and we will feel it when it's going to become live in September, October, it's very hard to like ... It's not very material for us yet until it happens.

(00:15:37):

Even if you can have a little preview on the device and so on, like how it's going to translate for users is very hard to anticipate until it's really out. So I think for me, the verdict of the excitement and the vibe is going to come third week of September.

David Barnard (00:15:53):

And that reminded me too. I think my vibes are so good because this is exactly what I wanted this year. I really like iOS 26. I love Liquid Glass. I think it's fantastic. It's the future. Funny enough, I stopped using my Android phone last year once, because it felt like iOS 18 and Android were at least somewhat equivalent on Android, the scrolling would be a little annoying or whatever. But then once iOS 26 dropped, Android felt like from a decade ago all of a sudden ... And so I've just been loving iOS 26, but I definitely have felt the rough edges both visually performance wise and everything else. So I guess I went into WDWC hoping that Apple wouldn't have a billion features. They would actually just really focus on making iOS 26 what it should have been. Somebody joked I think on Twitter or somebody joked recently about like the iOS 26 was like the alpha and like now we're finally getting the beta of what it should have been last year at this time.

(00:16:57):

So yeah, my vibes are off the charts. I'm super happy with everything that went down. I don't have access to Siri yet. Do you have access to Siri Charlie?

Charlie Chapman (00:17:07):

I got it. Midway through yesterday and like I said, genuinely it is pretty impressive.

David Barnard (00:17:13):

Yeah. So let's dig into that. What are your thoughts? We have a standalone app now. I haven't gotten to play with it, but do you think that's going to compete with ChatGPT, with Claude, with other AI experiences?

Charlie Chapman (00:17:26):

1u00% which I would not have answered that even before I got access. The only break I took last night was to watch a World Cup game with a big group of people and we would be asking questions about like, "Oh, who does this person play for? " And we realized we all just started using Siri. Some people were talking to it because we were testing it, but then instead of opening Safari and typing a question, I would just pull down and actually just type in there and I got my answer and I just naturally was doing that, not even just like, "I'm testing this at this point." Very, very quickly we got to where we trusted it at the same kind of level as Gemini or ChatGPT where it's like, if it's a thing where I'm not measuring medicine or something where if it gets it wrong, it's a big deal.

(00:18:18):

I just went straight to that, which actually made me think as soon as I realized that, I was like, "I haven't used Google literally all night." And I was like, "It's a very good thing from Google's perspective that they made this deal because I think they might be transferring over all this Google search traffic money that they're getting from the iPhone straight into Gemini traffic money." I was very surprised at how quickly that behavior kind of embedded itself

David Barnard (00:18:46):

Interesting. And then one of the new features this year is that you can set Claude Gemini or ChatGPT as a fallback. Did you ever have to rely on a fallback?

Charlie Chapman (00:18:56):

So we've been playing with that a lot. It's kind of a weird thing. So you can set Anthropic or OpenAI as the fallback for Apple intelligence features, but I don't think you can set it as a fallback for Siri AI features. So that would be like image generation I think is one where you can change it, but like you're just like search that you're doing, maybe there is a way to change it. Like I said, I just got access to it, but I think those are kind of separate things.

David Barnard (00:19:28):

Explicitly vocally asked the way you have in the past of like, ask ChatGPT this. So if you think something's too complex for Siri or you want to get ChatGPT's perspective, maybe you can say ask Claude who plays for what team or whatever.

Charlie Chapman (00:19:44):

Yeah, that very well could be. And on the same level of the sort of model selecting, there's even parts of some of these features where that exists as well. If you're doing the cleanup on Apple Photos to remove something from the background, it tries to automatically determine if you can just use an on- device version or go out to the cloud, but you can actually in the UI manually select, does this one go out to the cloud? Is it high quality version? They use different words, but they are kind of peppering this concept of like choosing a model again in an Appley way throughout the system. I think over the next couple years, we're going to see more and more of that in the OS. It's very interesting.

David Barnard (00:20:27):

Let me set something up for you, Thomas, and I want to get your take. But again, this was actually Fable five wording, Sherlocking at OSscale that Apple did show off a lot of use cases that previously were app exclusive experiences. For example, the camera mode, you take a picture of your food and you get nutritional insights. Now it's not tracking your calories and everything like that, but that's pseudo competing with the CalAI and Nutrition and Ladder and other apps that have adopted those kind of technologies. With writing it roof reads system wide and seems like it's going to be much better at that. Grammarly and a bunch of other AI apps have helped with proofreading. And kind of to your point, Charlie, I've relied heavily on Claude for proofreading where I actually go to the Claude app and I wonder if now I'll do that less.

(00:21:22):

And then one of the big ones was natural language calendar entry, which is like directly competing with Fantastical. And I will say, and I tweeted this out that my wife is going to go nuts for that. That's the kind of like practical improvement that's literally going to save her hours a month because we have four kids and like hundreds of events that she's scheduling and for her to just be able to type in like repeating every two weeks soccer game, whatever, she's going to go nuts for that. And it seems like Apple's delivering. So I was going to say if Apple delivers on it, but it seems like Apple's delivering. So I don't know that we should even question that and say she's going to go nuts for that feature in the fall when she gets it. And then the last one is photo retouching and object removal and those kind of things.

(00:22:08):

That was a huge use case for AI in third party apps. So we've got a pretty wide range of like direct competition to kind of tangential competition. What are your thoughts on how Siri AI is going to compete with third party apps, Thomas?

Thomas Petit (00:22:24):

There's always been a lot of share locking and in some cases it's been pretty bad, but in the majority of cases the apps that do something the system does have survived and even grown. I don't know if it's because Apple expands the market by bringing it or it's because people want more advanced, like they don't want just ... There's a bunch of things ... I think there's two use case here is what the very simple actions that you can straight do. And I think those are the most at risk like the calendar you mentioned, but then you look and there's like alarm clock apps that are making half a million a month to date, like very basic features and those alarm clock, like it's not like they're really doing something any different. So for example, if you just remove an object in a picture, that might be a little bit of a threat, but a lot of apps have a more complex suite of feature that fits better the needs of people.

(00:23:20):

So I'm thinking, for example, for CalAI, I don't think it's a big threat. Or if we look at object removal, an app like PhotoRoom that has like 25 different features around it, I don't think it's particularly a threat. Maybe it's even potentially, "Oh, I can do that. I want to do something else." And then the native feature can't do it. And that's why I'm saying in some cases the share locking has actually expanded the market for the other apps in the space. So I'm not particularly worried, but it's true that the Sierra integration may change because it's not like, oh, they've released an app that do it, but the integration and the habits, just like Charlie mentioned that which changed the way we interact with the Brother with apps and so on, I see this more of a threat than one particular feature, one particular app that Apple is share locking, but more like, "Oh, there's a complex change of habits." And then suddenly my app is not there anymore because the habit has changed, not because the feature has been replaced.

(00:24:20):

I think this is a lot more of a threat.

David Barnard (00:24:22):

And I want to dig into App Intense next because that's kind of like a guard against us in a way because you can integrate with Siri. But you made a really good point too, Thomas, in the notes that there are verticals that Apple's not going to touch. And the example you used was looks maxing. And so that's something to definitely think about over the summer is that if you're in a vertical that is a little more directly touched by some of these changes from Apple, like maybe proofreading or things that may get taken over by Siri, pivoting more toward the kind of use cases they're not going to touch is a strategy to think about over the summer.

Thomas Petit (00:24:58):

You're not going to move to a vertical because Apple is not going to do it, but it's true that it doesn't cover everything. The thread is different depending on what you're doing is pretty obviously. All

David Barnard (00:25:07):

Right. And then as an EU citizen, what are your thoughts on it not coming to the EU? One of the things I didn't even think about is that it's also going to be a challenge for EU developers because they're going to have to get a US account and it's going to be a lot of hoops for them to jump through just to enable the features for their worldwide customers.

Thomas Petit (00:25:28):

Oh, I see beyond this is a problem not for developers to access it because they'll find a way, but maintaining a non-parity version all the time, like this is madness, this is something that we really try to avoid. I mean, in some case you localize pricing and this and that, but like core feature, having to maintain, oh, the users can't do this here and I'm pushing it very hard and it's in the onboarding, that's a nightmare. So I hope eventually you will change it. I felt when Charlie said, "This is really revolutionary." That's not the words you use, but you say that I was really impressed and a thousand person is going to change things. I was both super excited and at the same time, off was not going to have it. It's super frustrating.

David Barnard (00:26:14):

Do you have a US account? Are you going to potentially move to a US account more regularly?

Thomas Petit (00:26:20):

I don't have a US account right now, but yeah, I might move to one. I mean, I use US accounts for some testing, but my personal account is still in Europe, so that's something I might to work on, which is another nightmare that I'm going to have to migrate a bunch of things if they do. I think it's not going to change super short term, but in the midterm, I think we'll see a reversal of that because it's too big to miss. I guess the UE wanted to be cautious because things were moving a little bit too fast, but this kind of discrimination is going to be too big not to catch up. So hopefully they move fast, which is not their specialty, but yeah.

Charlie Chapman (00:26:59):

There is an interesting, I don't know, potential path forward that isn't necessarily opening it up completely and you can see that with the way that they did their private cloud compute version of, I guess, Apple intelligence now. So developers have free access as long as they're under certain thresholds, like two million downloads.

David Barnard (00:27:22):

We'll talk about that later because I found a bunch of caveats.

Charlie Chapman (00:27:24):

Okay. Yeah, yeah. And we can get more into that, but specific to that, this discussion is the way that they design those APIs is in a way where once you get over that cap and you can no longer use this feature, you can just swap out the model but keep using Apple's APIs that they defined and it'll actually use separate models. You could imagine a version of that potentially being built for more of these features so that you don't really ever have to maintain separate versions for the EU compared to the US or elsewhere, even though they might not have access to like Apple's version of this stuff, but not this year.

David Barnard (00:28:05):

Yeah, that's interesting, but they still won't get access to App Intense and Siri AI and all the things that will hopefully be heavily implemented in the fall. The other limiting factor is that most of these features like SiriAI, from my understanding, maybe you can correct me, Charlie, but it requires an iPhone 15 pro or newer. So iPhone 15, 16 or 17 pro, not even the iPhone 15 or 16 non-pro. It's like there's like a pretty big disparity on which ones get these features.

Charlie Chapman (00:28:43):

I missed that. It's not the same ones as the existing Apple intelligence because the very first Apple intelligence was limited to the pros, but then the next year it came to all iPhones. So the iPhone 16, I believe, the regular 16 had access, but it was the 15 that didn't, but I could be wrong about that.

David Barnard (00:29:02):

Well, maybe it has expanded. I didn't get a full breakdown of the list and in my notes it is iPhone 15 Pro plus, so maybe the 16 is included in that. But either way, it's like the iPhone 14's not getting it, older device. So now we have another bifurcation on a device level. And so maybe to your point, Thomas, as frustrating it is that the EU doesn't have it, you're probably going to have to support that anyway because you're going to have customers who don't have the latest phone and have to figure out how to serve them some equivalent experience.

Thomas Petit (00:29:36):

Yeah. I had a very similar discussion right this morning about this topic actually on to what extent do I keep supporting, what's the percentage threshold of users and revenue in which I keep supporting this feature and this and not necessarily supporting a feature, but keeping having branches because it's never easy. And I guess everyone will make their choice at which percentage mattered to them and what they What they want to support. And there are use cases where you have to support very old device because the audience is very specific to that and it's a litle bit painful. But yeah, I can see where there's going to be branches of whether it's Pro or not Pro, like recent device and then EU and then this and the fun of being a developer on this platform.

Charlie Chapman (00:30:21):

And the current version of the plain iPad, assuming it uses the same rules as the regular Apple intelligence, that one does not support Apple Intelligence. Oh wow. I assume the most popular iPad that exists out there doesn't support these.

David Barnard (00:30:37):

Yeah. That's actually good. I'll have a test device at least because I upgraded my wife and two kids and myself in the fall with all new devices. And so I don't even have a iPhone. I don't have a single iOS device now, not on iOS 26, but at least I do have some of my younger kids have the original or older iPad. So I have test devices now. Good to know. You're going to say something, Thomas?

Thomas Petit (00:31:03):

No, the iPad case is interesting because for most developers, not a particularly big use case enough to care, but I do happen to have one case where it is fundamental usage and they have a lot of specificities, the iPad that most people don't realize. And one of them is that the device lives much longer and people don't upgrade as much like the system. And we have a lot of heavy users, payers who are on super old version of iOS and they just never update the iPad. And the same person would update their iPhone regularly, but the iPad is just there until they're forced to do it because Apple would make a huge bump or whatever. So yeah, the iPad sometimes can be a little ... But I think for most developers, that's not particularly a concern because the focus is not there. But yeah, they tend to be a very differently.

(00:31:53):

I hope we won't have too many features, AI features that get dropped from that, but let's see.

David Barnard (00:31:59):

Yeah. Well, let's dive into App Intense next. So as good as it sounds like Siri is, Charlie, and I'm hoping to get in that, get off the wait list here any minute, but as good as it is, I would assume your thoughts as the week has progressed is like app intense and going deep on Siri AI is kind of a non-negotiable over the summer for most apps?

Charlie Chapman (00:32:24):

I assume so. That's been the kind of weird story. Because we've known this has been coming and the App Intense story has been happening over the years, most people I've talked to, we all are kind of looking at each other like, "So there's nothing to do. It should just work."

David Barnard (00:32:42):

Right.

Charlie Chapman (00:32:42):

Because

David Barnard (00:32:43):

You already

Charlie Chapman (00:32:43):

Supported

David Barnard (00:32:44):

App Intense, right?

Charlie Chapman (00:32:45):

Exactly. Yeah.

(00:32:47):

They deprecated the old Siri intense if that's a thing that matters, but most people aren't using those anyway. So for the most part, it seems like things should just work. I think the big thing is going to be living with this and trying to understand like, "Oh, actually I should support this action that I never would've thought of before in the old shortcuts mindset." But quite frankly, I'm not sure. I haven't had a lot of success using it with third party apps surprisingly, but I haven't really figured that out yet, at least in my experiments over the last eight hours that I've had access to it.

David Barnard (00:33:24):

Yeah. Yeah. It'd be interesting to see. I built a list of carrots and sticks related to app intense because I think as with any new technology that Apple releases, they want as many developers to adopt it as possible. And so from a carrot standpoint, like Apple famously features more apps when they adopt the newest technologies. There's personalized collections in the app store that we'll talk about in a little bit. There are feature apps in the keynote. You're more likely to get your icon on a wall in the keynote or even like your app displayed in the fall keynote or future keynotes. You're more likely to win an Apple design award. But then also it has a potential to create such better app experiences. And when you create a better app experience, it's better for your users, better for monetization, better for retention and all of those things.

(00:34:19):

So there's a lot of carrots. And then the stick is that you'll be invisible if you don't adopt these things, that if somebody says some sports related query and you're a sports app, if you don't adopt app intense, you may be completely invisible as Siri becomes a more primary user interface for the iPhone. Any thoughts there?

Charlie Chapman (00:34:44):

Yeah. I mean, like the example you gave earlier of calendar apps or mail apps or something like that, if your friend shows you like, "Oh yeah, you can just ask Siri to tell you when your next flight is, " and it knows how to dig into these and find it and then you try it and it doesn't work and you're like, "Oh, that's because I'm using this third party app." You're just going to bail. You're just going to switch back to the default because it's that kind of an experience. And so that's both app intense and I don't think we've talked about it, but they have expanded some ways that you can integrate with spotlight index, which is just the way that search works across the OS. And so it's like those are ones for certain types of apps where users are storing data inside of the app.

(00:35:29):

I almost feel like it's going to be a total requirement that you get on board with those

Thomas Petit (00:35:35):

And

Charlie Chapman (00:35:35):

Find out how to integrate as well as you can, or people are going to abandon you just to get better access to it through Siri. There was a little bit of that before already with like reminders or something, but that experience we've all tried to ask Siri to remind us for things in the past. It was bad enough that it wasn't that much of a stick, but at least in my eight hours of playing with this, I think it's going to be a lot more so now.

David Barnard (00:36:01):

Yeah. Apple's privacy protections actually do make this a lot easier to implement. So like if you're like the burner app with chat, your WhatsApp and have chat, like all those kind of apps are going to need to be indexed by Siri because when you want to ask a contextual question, like even with Jacob who tweeted a screenshot showing, he just asked, "When was the last time I was at this restaurant or in this area?" And Siri found notes and email and iMessage and location and photos and it's looking across all these different contexts to answer the question. And so not just data storage, but if you're a chat app or a email app or a calendar app or like anything where there is data that would be relevant potentially to these deeper Siri queries, if you don't do that spotlight indexing, you're going to be left out of the context for that query.

(00:37:04):

And then to your point, Charlie, people aren't going to want to put as much data in there if Siri can't get access to it. So that's another kind of like carrot and stick. The carrot that is like hopefully data from your app will get surface more stick that if you don't adopt these things, you might just be invisible and like push users away from your app. And then Thomas, you want to jump in on your thoughts on all this?

Thomas Petit (00:37:30):

No, it felt too ... I don't have a big hot take here, but I did have the feeling that this is going to become very big and mandatory. And it's true that there was a first version of the app intent and I don't know, I've only heard developer talk about it, but in practice it was a bit of it of nothing and this time it felt that maybe not in full because I feel like it's going to take a little while to perfectly figure out how to integrate all these, but I can definitely see how those interaction within one, two years for many users, they matter so much that as a developer it's like, you have to have this. You cannot not look into it, which so far was pretty much it. It was like, "Well, yeah, I'll deal with this later." And it had no consequences.

(00:38:15):

I think there will be very serious consequences for those who don't, and probably some early opportunities for those who adapt very early. So it's not one feature in particular, it's like how it's kind of a backbone of everything that kind of impressed me for the, but let's say for the big term, like one, two years, but I'm thinking user adoption here, I'm not thinking developer adoption. So definitely want to follow very closely, play around, follow what others are doing. I believe it's going to be very, very big.

David Barnard (00:38:42):

Yeah. And I remembered what I was going to say is I was going to get back to the privacy angle and Apple kind of giving you cover to implement these things because I had this terrible experience with the GroupMe app. GroupMe, I'm in some kid thing for one of my kids' schools and there's just like parents are just chatting all the time and like the turnoff notifications and then I went in there and I assumed that the GroupMe AI could just summarize. And so I like at the AI summarized the thread and then it just randomly summarized the latest news and then I realized it was like public to the whole group chat. And what I realized is like from a privacy angle, GroupMe didn't want to reveal all these private group chats to whatever random AI. They didn't want the negative user perception of like, my private group chats are getting exposed to this AI that's going to store the data, learn from it or whatever.

(00:39:40):

And so that's kind of an interesting perspective on all Apple's privacy, which at times I've been frustrated with some of their messaging, but it's like that drumbeat that they've been hitting on for the last decade now that we're in this new AI era, I want an AI to be able to summarize my group chats. I want to be able to go on WhatsApp and just say, and I don't want Facebook reading all my private messages, but Apple's been so clear about the local models, the private cloud compute that it kind of gives us as developers ground cover to implement all these things and implement these cool AI features and be a part of Siri without users having to worry about privacy. So I thought that angle was really interesting too.

Thomas Petit (00:40:26):

It's super interesting from the privacy standpoint because it enabled us to bring features that maybe we didn't. I think it has a lot of implication besides this. Cost is one, like the fact that you can run on the device and then it moved to the cloud and then frankly, for a lot of users, a lot of tasks that they run through AI, they don't need super advanced, the latest model. They can be run with a very basic model and just like the same way internally sometimes we have to choose which model we use to do what, especially now that the price is rising. It's interesting for this feature to think through, "Hey, this is a pretty basic thing. I'm going to run it this way." And these questions are, they're pretty new, but they're very exciting. And I think for most, yeah, for many features, running locally will be just default choice because cost, simple, privacy, many, many reasons that make it viable this way and only for selection of feature, I mean the summary of the group chat, you probably don't need Fable5 to do this.

David Barnard (00:41:32):

Yeah. I know you've worked with a lot of kids apps over the years, Thomas. Does this kind of open the door to be ... And have you read anything specific on are kids apps totally fine completely using Apple's AI stuff?

Thomas Petit (00:41:47):

Yeah, that's an interesting one because obviously the privacy angle is particularly acute there. It doesn't solve everything because I mean when I guess under 30, like six to 13, it does open up a lot of alleys. I work a lot in the under six when they can't write yet. So there's not so much that you can expose to the AI because the kids, they're just interacting like crazy with the device. So it's not so much that, but it doesn't solve some kind of safety nets in a way that you still have to really care what to expose users to, especially in kids have all the stories that you have bedtime stories and stuff like that, that you make with AI is a litle bit tricky to ensure that ... I mean, it's easy to ensure that they don't go to weird topics, but it's hard to ensure that is it going to be ... And not safe, but yeah, I don't know what's the word, but perfect for my kids.

(00:42:49):

Some stuff are harder to do with AI there and I don't think that's going to be the solution. But for some specific features, yeah, definitely. If we can run locally, don't need to expose anything and I haven't read any update on what legally we can do about that and what ... Because obviously there's a lot of kids data that we can't send to any third party whatsoever, even if it's feature fundamental. But I guess in this case, it's not going to apply because it's a third party, but it's the device. It's not like it's your device. It doesn't reach anyone. Yeah, I didn't. So you think about it. I

David Barnard (00:43:24):

Have to brainstorm with that. From like a privacy standpoint is treating their private cloud compute as if it is a local model as well, like that it's not a third party, it's just a device and nobody can ever see it. It's not a third party,

Thomas Petit (00:43:41):

So

David Barnard (00:43:41):

That's interesting. That

Thomas Petit (00:43:42):

Was my understanding as well is just it doesn't move to external models, that's it. Yeah.

David Barnard (00:43:46):

Yeah. But then it gets into all the complications around devices that support it and don't and your fallbacks and all those kind of things, which is frustrating. And in some ways, as with all things Apple, it's like they introduced a lot of things this year that in three or four years we'll be able to more fully rely on it as devices pass out and more and more devices support Apple intelligence and stuff like that. But I did want to jump to the Apple Foundation model. I did dig into the caveats around the free private cloud compute. It sounded amazing like, oh, we're going to get free AI. Less than two million first time downloads is the big thing, but then I saw somebody on Twitter post a message that they weren't eligible and the message that they got from Apple made it sound like if any app in your developer account has had over two million downloads, you're not eligible.

(00:44:35):

It's not an app per app. You have to be part of the small business developer program. So you still have to be under a million dollars a year. It still only runs on Apple intelligence compatible devices and then you still have daily usage limits per user where ad cloud users get more daily usage limits. And so once you start ticking off all these boxes, like the way I'm looking at it is that for devices and users where you can use it and if you still fall under all of the ... I don't even know if I'm eligible because I've had apps in the past do more than two million downloads. I don't know if they're going to count like my historic apps or the ones that are only live right now and I don't even know where my weather app is. It may be pushing two million, but what I've been looking at is like it will reduce costs overall, but you're still going to have to have the fallbacks and have other models running for devices that don't support it for when the user hits their limits.

(00:45:31):

And so as exciting as it sounded on the surface, it's like there's enough caveats where it's really cool, you're going to get some free stuff, it's going to be privacy friendly and all that kind of stuff, but it's not kind of a panacea for small apps like, "Wow, we can integrate all these AI features." And then model quality is something like we'll take a while to figure out over the summer, like is the cloud compute model anywhere near even a Sonnet 46 or a Gemini 3.5 flash or some of the somewhat cheaper models, like will it compete with those or will it be terrible? And then if you have a system prompt for one, we have to like create a whole different system prompt for the Apple AI because it responds differently. So there's a lot that we'll have to figure out over the summer as to exactly how good this is going to be, but there's a lot to dig into.

(00:46:25):

If you're excited about that, be excited because I think it is going to reduce cost and be useful, but there's a lot of caveats that you'll have to think about. Any comments there?

Charlie Chapman (00:46:33):

I mean, at least from the developer sentiment side, I think it's a bigger deal for like very small indies or people trying to kind of get their foot in the door as a way to play around with like really no upfront investment cost. I think of it similar to how WeatherKit a few years ago kind of reopened the door for people using weather apps as like a little like a playground. Most of those apps didn't become like major businesses or anything and if you did grow, obviously you needed to pay for it and also pull in maybe different weather data that's more accurate for different areas or whatever. But as a way for people to kind of get their foot in the door and learn, it's really nice for that. And that seems to be where most people were excited about it more than anything.

David Barnard (00:47:25):

Yeah. No, that makes sense. And then it sounds like Apple's APIs are really well designed for those fallbacks and like it's going to make it really easy or they're trying to make it easy to implement knowing that you're going to have to have fallbacks and figure that kind of stuff out. Cool. The retention messaging API, I feel like that was one of the biggest, most exciting things. We've known about it. RevenueCap has a bunch of customers who are already using it. We've seen that it can be very performant. Apple announced some numbers. Well, I guess let me just explain what it is. So we've all wanted to have a cancellation flow and some of us have implemented the app. RevenueCat has customer center that does a cancellation flow, but now when somebody goes to the app store to cancel and they hit cancel subscription, a page will pop up that you can potentially put a message on and potentially put an offer on.

(00:48:18):

There's all different, and I don't know that we need to get into all the different permutations in this conversation, but there's a bunch of different options and permutations of this. And so right there inside the app store, you're going to get a chance to give a message, a photo, a win back offer, a switch plans offer right inside the app store flow. And so this is something that we've never been able to touch before is that it was a total black box that when somebody went to cancel inside the app store, you had no way to offer them anything to say anything to them to do anything. So this is really exciting and Apple said the average lift was 82% and that for apps that gave promo offers, it was 223. The math on that, I'm not sure exactly how they're calculating it. Apple always loves to go 10 times faster than the original iPad from 10 years ago.

(00:49:14):

So I'm not exactly sure what they meant, but inside RevenueCap, we've seen apps be very successful with this and it's one of those things where, especially at scale, even if it is a few percentage lift, that can be a lot of money. So it's something I'm super excited about. Charlie, you want to dive into any of the details or fill out some of what I shared?

Charlie Chapman (00:49:34):

Yeah. I mean, I think the big thing with the announcement is just that it's still happening, but the version that we had before had no UI in App Store Connect. It all had to be configured through API calls and backend talking with their services and tools like RevenueCap built that out so it was easy if you were RevenueCat customer. But the thing that's coming later this fall, I think they said later this fall or early next year, I think was the actual wording, is that they would add it into App Store Connect with a UI. The part I'm not clear on, and maybe either of you have talked to people who have gotten an answer, is that later this fall or early next year referring to the UI and App Store Connect only, or does that mean we're going to have to wait for the stuff they announced last year to get pushed out to everybody until then?

(00:50:25):

Because like you said, it's still slowly rolling out.

David Barnard (00:50:28):

Yeah. It seems like they're rolling it out faster and faster, and that's what I heard the last month or so. They are accepting way more people into the beta. I would guess even late this year or early next year, it will roll out into general availability. I mean, the reason they roll things out like this is that it's a whole new app review surface because they don't want you inside the app store to be able to say whatever random thing you want to say. And that wasn't an interesting thing to note as I dove into the details is that you can't programmatically respond with a customized message to the user in the sense of you can't respond to their server request knowing which user it is and say, "Hey, David,"

(00:51:13):

This, that, and the other. What you can do is have a pre-approved by Apple. It has to go probably through an app review process. You can have multiple snippets of text that maybe do talk about, and they had a health and fitness app, it was their example in a lot of the demos. And so you could have a retention message that focuses more on yoga, one that focuses more on walking, one that focuses more on running, whatever. And then with a server request, you can then just say, "Hey, this is a more yoga focused user. Show the yoga version of the message." And so I think the reason they've been slow rolling this is they're just having to figure out internally what kind of images do we approve, what kind of messages do we approve? And it's a whole new review pipeline that they're figuring out and standing up currently.

(00:52:00):

But yeah, I get the impression that late this year, early next year, it'll be general availability and like every single developer can take advantage of it. You don't have to get approved. And so yeah, super exciting. Thomas, you haven't said anything yet. What are your thoughts on all this?

Thomas Petit (00:52:13):

I'm going to have to stop to call it the retention API then because it's in App Stock Connect. But yeah, there was a bit of frustration from people who couldn't get in because those who did get in did see an uplift. So I haven't seen any plus 82% or plus 240%, but it was still a win and I know there was frustration. So it's great they're opening it up to everyone. What caught my eye with this is the segments, the possibility that maybe I'm going to make a discount to that person, but maybe I'm going to switch plan to that person, not just like adopting the, let's say yoga versus workouts versus this, but also that, which to my knowledge was not possible in the current version. I'm not able to, I have to propose something that's like, okay, discount for everybody or shorter period for everybody or whatever.

(00:53:04):

And I think this is really a good potential because not all users are susceptible to the same message when they're going to churn. So really looking forward to that one. So for those who don't have it to have it and for those who have it to have this new feature and the segment one I think is going to create another uplift on top of the uplift.

David Barnard (00:53:23):

Yeah. One use case I'm really excited about and so you guys be thinking of use cases you're excited about, but I've always been a little iffy on weekly subscriptions, but I do hear a lot of people like, "Well, it's a cheap introduction to the app." And then the theory is that if they like the app, they'll switch to an annual plan. Whether or not that happens at scale, we've never dug into the data in RevenueCat. It's one of those like I've been meaning to do for years, but I think that's actually a killer use case. It's like, "Hey, if that is a really easy onboarding $5 a week and then they go to cancel and then you offer the $40 a year plan, I think that that for weekly and even monthly where people were just like looking to get in at the lower price, but once they figure out they really like the app, then you can offer them the annual plan.

(00:54:14):

So I think that has a potential to save a lot of monthly and weekly cancelers by giving that discounted annual plan as an offer right inside App Store Connect, which is super cool. I mean, the app store app and right in the main cancellation flow. So super excited about that one. Now the caveat is like you still have to build a great app with a great experience that people actually want to keep using. So this isn't some magic thing that's going to fix every weekly subscription app because a lot of the weekly subscription apps, the point is that people aren't sticking around for years and years and years. So it's not some panacea, but I think it will be potentially a way to more effectively use weekly subscriptions for an app that is generally more retentive. Any use cases the two of you are especially excited about?

Thomas Petit (00:55:02):

In this case, it's when people consult, so you might be right, but there's a lot of experimentation on when and how do I push those retain user who are on an expensive weekly plan and do I do it at all because if they don't console, I'm happy to keep them on the weekly plan, which is ... But yeah, no it is ... And that's exactly why I want the segment, because that weekly retained user that goes to console, I'm not going to offer him the same than the yearly guy who hasn't opened the app in a month. And that's exactly why the first version, it was great because it was the first time that we could access the subscription part that is outside of our app. I hope Apple keeps building on it. So now it's enough just to connect. Now we have segments. I'm like, " Okay, great.

(00:55:50):

What's next? "I hope they're going to iterate further on it. It's great.

David Barnard (00:55:54):

Yeah. Any thoughts, Charlie, before we move on?

Charlie Chapman (00:55:57):

I mean, no kind of like you said, it's more of a thing you can do. It's not a use case specific thing, more it's a thing you can do to improve things for an already existing kind of business. But other than the weekly thing, that is an interesting observation I hadn't thought about.

David Barnard (00:56:12):

I'll jump into the chat for a sec. Does RevenueCat offer handle switching plans now? We do already handle that and actually customer center, you can offer plans to switch to right within the Revenue Cat customer center and then if a user switches a plan through App Store Connect, that's already handled. And then from the retention messaging API, that is not yet available to anyone from my understanding and that's part of what's coming later. So we will be working to support it as soon as the switch plan retention messaging API thing is available. We'll probably support it day one once Apple releases it because we already have a ton of customers who did get into the retention messaging API beta. So we've been working hard on that and implementing things as they come and fixing things and it's kind of a beta for us as well, figuring out exactly how Apple handles it, exactly how to show the data in our charts and things like that.

(00:57:12):

So wanted to jump into that one. All right Apple announced monthly build annual plans a couple of months ago, but kind of went into a little more detail at WWDC. Charlie, you want to give us the details on that or are you super familiar?

Charlie Chapman (00:57:30):

Yeah, I wrote our blog post about it a couple months ago or whatever, but I don't know exactly what new details they added. As far as I could tell, it was just them kind of rehashing the- Promoting it. Okay. Announcement, but there could be something there, but I didn't see anything.

David Barnard (00:57:44):

For those who didn't see the news, what is the monthly build annual plans, Charlie?

Charlie Chapman (00:57:49):

I mean, I think the simple way to say it is it's a way to do an annual plan, but users only pay for it monthly. So you can have your monthly plan that is one price and then you can have your 12 month commitment plan that is discounted, but you still only pay monthly, but you are going to get charged for an entire year. Even if you cancel, you'll keep getting charged until the end of that year. This is a somewhat common practice on the web Adobe famously uses this, but yeah, it is a thing. The big thing here is that it's not available for Apple, it's not available in the US and Singapore, I think are the only two countries, but Google has had this for a little while and I believe the country, it's only supported in a couple specific countries. I think I pulled it up earlier.

(00:58:36):

I think it's Brazil, France, Italy, and Spain. And so whenever I was writing about this, I didn't have hard data. I actually still don't have hard data. I'm very curious if you do, Thomas, but sort of our thought was maybe experiment with it specifically in the countries Google plays with it because there must be some reason why they think this is effective there versus other places.

(00:59:01):

Yeah, you go ahead. I'm curious.

Thomas Petit (00:59:03):

That's where European have stuff you don't like that's going rare. But the first time I saw this, so it was a few months ago, I was like, "Ah, this is nothing." I discarded it. And then I realized I was wrong because for some user it does really matter that they're not getting charged the whole 40 or 80 or whatever it is. And so then maybe I was wrong with that. I haven't seen a lot of implementation yet. Apps I work with, they've been shy to jump on that one because it didn't feel like a really big win and the geographic limitation was like, okay, no, but I do have a personal hot take on this, which is completely hypothetical. I'm not sure Apple introduced this to sell a lot of them. I believe Apple introduced this to soon change the guidelines that when you sell a normal yearly subscription, you cannot show the price equivalent monthly or weekly in your paywall.

(00:59:58):

And they They were never happy with that and the fact that people put it in big. I have no clue what I'm ... This is not coming from Apple. I don't have any ins or whatever, but I know there's been a lot of resistance around this and negotiation on how big can I put it and can I put it on the left and at the bottom and stuff. I got me thinking if they're really angry at this, then introducing that feature is perfect for introducing the guideline after. Okay, if you want to show the monthly equivalent, you say this and you sell that product and that's it. I'd give it a low chance to happen, but it's not a 0% chance in my opinion to get rid of the monthly or weekly equivalent price on payroll, which would not be a great news.

David Barnard (01:00:44):

Yeah. I was going to say, I'll take the other side of that bet and guess that they're going to litigate that with AppReview and that AppReview has already clamped down on that enough and we have a pretty good understanding that if you show the monthly or weekly equivalent, you just need to do it in smaller texts than you say build annually at whatever number and that both numbers have to be prominently displayed. So I kind of think that they've already kind of litigated that through AppReview and that I doubt they would do that, but it is an interesting take. You never know with Apple, who knows. The other thing around this that I wanted to bring up is the kind of user trust angle and making sure it's clear. Adobe got in trouble with this, but they got in trouble with this because they did not make it clear.

(01:01:34):

It was not very clearly explained. So when you go to cancel your plan, I had this happen and I tweeted angrily about it because I went to cancel my plan and my annual renewal that I didn't even know I was on the annual cycle, my annual renewal had just happened the week before.

(01:01:55):

They're like, "Hey, your cancellation fee is like hundreds of dollars." And I was like, "Wait, what? I'm canceling." But I had just renewed. And so it was the worst possible experience because when it had just renewed, I had just started the full year and so then I had to pay for the whole year to get out of it. Now I contacted customer support and I think they were getting more and more lenient as people were complaining about it. But I do wonder, one is like the early people to implement this may have similar kind of user frustration, user trust issues if it's not super clear. But then the second point here is that if Apple normalizes this and makes the language really clear and requires you to be really clear on the paywall and things like that, that it could be a really good opportunity.

(01:02:46):

I mean a great example of this, like I use the ladder app and it's $30 a month or $130 a year. My wife uses it, my daughter uses it. So like if all three of us all subscribe to the annual plan at the same time, it's like almost $400 coming out of the monthly budget. Whereas if they gave us the annual commitment at a monthly pricing, I would actually prefer to pay it that way. And it's just like almost like a gym membership that the three of us pay on a monthly basis. So I like it as a concept. I'm not at all opposed to it as a concept, but I think the confusion is why it's been problematic in the past. And so I wonder if Apple adopting this and Google adopting this, it's going to normalize it in a way where it can be very clear to users.

(01:03:33):

They'll understand and it will over time not be a user trust issue or a frustration when they get a cancel.

Thomas Petit (01:03:40):

This is a very good point. I'm super curious how the renewal rates are going to compare to the normal yearly. Obviously nobody has data yet because the product is just a few months off, but I have no take on that. I'm very curious to see what it's going to look like. It's possible that we are going to sell filter user who are, let's say by selling the level of intent is going to be lower by nature because people don't want to ship at that much money. So potentially the renewal rate would be lower, not because the product drives a lower rate, but because it is sold in the first place to users who are less likely to renew. But that's just an hypothesis. I'm just very curious. I'm not sure it's going to be lower at all. I'm curious. And then if the renewal rate are at least as high, then yeah, it makes for a pretty compelling reason to at least try it.

(01:04:35):

At the moment, I haven't seen that on this, still very early and nobody seems to have ... Some features, everybody jumps in as soon as they come out. That one has been, let's consider it on the roadmap.

David Barnard (01:04:48):

All right. The next topic is cross developer bundle and suites. So this is the opportunity to bundle not just across apps within your own app store account, but to bundle with apps across the app store account. I was initially a little confused because it's like, wait, didn't they already introduce bundles? But what they introduced at WWDC23 was contingent pricing where let's say ... And like a great example of this today is Strava and Runa. So Strava acquired the app Runna and I don't know that they did this. I haven't paid close attention to exactly how they've run that acquisition, but in the past they could have said, if you're a Strava subscriber, you get Runna at a very steep discount. And that is contingent pricing. You get pricing in one app contingent upon being a subscriber in another app. And that was kind of the first step to these kind of like cross app promos.

(01:05:49):

But what they're introducing today or what they introduced at WWC, and it sounds like this one's like later in 2026 so this is not like immediately available, but now you could say, "Here's a bundle subscription." And a lot of apps have hacked around this with their own systems, but it requires logins and like a lot of complex backend logic to do this. But now as like a system level feature, you could have the Strava run a bundle subscription and just offer it as like its own SKU inside the app and then it's maintained as its own SKU, the data comes in as its own SKU. It's a lot kind of like simpler to manage because Apple's supporting it at a first party level. And then my understanding is that it's up to 10 apps can be in a bundle. So this actually creates some interesting opportunities to potentially work with other indie app developers to create a little productivity bundle.

(01:06:45):

If you have a suite of apps to support this in an easier, more straightforward way, like if you avoided in the past because it was too complex, it's really interesting. Any details to fill in there, Charlie?

Charlie Chapman (01:07:00):

I don't have a lot of specific details. I know the contingent pricing one when it was first rolled out and maybe even still today, it was kind of like invite only and then application only and I don't even know if it was available to everybody. I don't have a good sense of if that's going to be the case here or if it's going to be more generally available. Obviously I have a bunch of questions how this is technically going to work in terms of like who owns the customer. I mean, I know Apple owns the customer, but yeah, there's just a lot of weird things, but I do think there's a lot of opportunities here, especially for if you make a specialized app tool that is your biggest competitor is part of a big suite. Like Adobe, for example, if you make like an image app that competes with Photoshop and that's kind of your heads down focus, you can imagine kind of partnering up with sort of your indie brethren or whatever the equivalent is.

(01:07:58):

Oftentimes there's these sort of online suites of like families of separate apps and I could see that being a way to kind of team up against like a bigger competitor in that way, which is sort of an interesting way to think about it. But honestly, I'm not entirely sure outside of that use case who this is for. I'm really curious if Thomas has customers that are excited about this or stories that I'm not really thinking about.

David Barnard (01:08:26):

Yeah. Part of the buzz at the mansion party, I did discuss this with a few people and it was just the idea that part of the reason bundling works so well is that if you use any one thing in the bundle, like Amazon Prime now is kind of a bundle and that it really does strongly drive retention because if you use any one thing in the bundle, you're going to more likely stay subscribed to the whole bundle versus like if you have five different apps and five different subscriptions, it's more to manage, more to think about, more opportunities to churn. And so from a retention standpoint, I think bundles can be incredibly powerful, not just across different companies, but even within the same company offering a bundle if you have multiple apps. But yeah, I'll pass it to you, Thomas, for any thoughts.

Thomas Petit (01:09:09):

Yeah, I think they can be powerful, but they're hard to implement. They're hard to put in practice. So the cases I've had were not on the contention plan, but they were like outside of IAPs. And all in all, I think the great part about this is that we see Apple is evolving the SKU towards more flexibility, more options and so on. And I think that's great and they should keep doing it because outside of IAP, this is something that was possible before and sometimes it's frustrating when we come do a bunch of things in IEP. So I think it's going in the right direction. That one in particular, yeah, if you manage to sell it probably for retention is really good, but they're typically hard to put in practice because unless you see like, I don't know, you said like in the productivity bundle, maybe you see it as every extra sale is incremental anyway, but in slightly bigger organization, there was always the discussion of, "Ah, yeah, but I'm bigger than you, so I'm not sure I want to make this deal with you.

(01:10:09):

" They're always the one going, "I'm the bigger one, others are benefiting from me. " And then there was a lot of shenanigans in the deal to happen. There's clearly a lot of apps that I've adjacent use that make sense to bundle and are not competing, that's great. But in my experience, they've been hard to put in practice at least at a certain scale. So maybe if you're small, you see this as a, "Hey, it comes on top, it's fine. It's not going to eat my sales now." And if none of us as a big brand, we're just benefiting all. But then as soon as we start having a bigger brand ... So I can understand it for Strava and Runner because now they're the same company, but let's say Headway would make a bundle with ... When you start having being really well known, then you care a lot more about who you are getting associated with here.

(01:10:59):

And I think that might be a limit in how many of those we're going to see. In any case, I'm super happy. That means more option, more SKU, more message to Apple, "Hey, we want more flexibility with the IAP," and that's what they're doing. So even if that one is not a game changer, I'm still happy that it happens.

David Barnard (01:11:15):

In the same breath that they announced bundles, they also introduced Suites. I meant to dive into that this morning and didn't. Charlie, did you dive into that at all? Do you understand what the suites are compared to the bundles?

Charlie Chapman (01:11:29):

Well, so I'm not sure at the bundles side, more so on the group and volume purchasing. I'm talking specifically about suites. I know, but I think this concept applies to both similarly,

(01:11:42):

But it has to do with whether ... I'm guessing, again, I haven't dug in on this one, but my assumption based on how it applies to group and volume pricing is that this has to do with the concept of something that's in a bundle can be, you can purchase each individually, whereas a suite is something where you can only purchase it as part of that broader suite. That is how it works within the group in volume purchasing. I am not confident that that's how it works here, but that would be my guess considering they use the same word.

David Barnard (01:12:15):

Yeah. No, no, no. Actually that aligns with the little research I did do yesterday and I watched a video on this and meant to dive in because I was watching on a plane at 2X. It's a lot. Yeah. It's a lot to take in. But yes, I think you're right that it has to do with suites are essentially a bundle, then where you can't individually purchase the other subscription. And it's a weird name suite and that's part of, I think, what's confusing me, but that sounds right. All right, let's move right on then to group and volume pricing and this is super exciting. We have been at RevenueCat and just as a ... I think even before I joined RevenueCat, I was bugging Apple about this one. There's so many great prosumer apps. Why did it take them 18 years to support seat-based licensing? Whatever the reason, I'm glad they now support seat-based licensing.

(01:13:11):

So Charlie, it seems like you've dug in a litle bit to this. What are your thoughts on how it works and the logistics of it?

Charlie Chapman (01:13:20):

Yeah. So it kind of works the way I would hope that it works. So it's broken into two different categories. So there's group purchases and volume purchases, but essentially both of them are ways for you to buy seats for multiple people and then assigning them to people based on their Apple ID. The volume purchasing option is through the Apple Business program or the school manager. So those are obviously kind of at the enterprise level, but then there's also group purchases exist just outside of that as well. I as a consumer can buy my favorite ... Well, when Mimestream comes out for iOS, the email client, I could theoretically buy five seats of that and then distribute it to my team that way. And then all the sales are happening to me specifically, but they all get access through their Apple ID. And then within that, you can do pricing tiers.

(01:14:25):

I believe the limit is there's five different tiers and the way that that works is

(01:14:30):

I'm not sure how customizable these are or if it's a hard numbers that you have to set it at, but you can set a different price depending on how many of these seats are being purchased and it's graduating. So the first five would be maybe at like a $20 price and then you can say the next 10 are going to be at a $15 price and then the next 10 are at this. And so it's a way for you to do discounts for a larger amount of seats. The proof is in the pudding. I'm sure there's going to be details once we really dig in that we're like, "Ah, I doesn't do this. " But man, this is just like so many people have been asking for this so often. And on the Mac especially, this is like the reason so many people stay out of the Mac app store is just very simply people need this.

(01:15:21):

Even people I know who want to be in the Mac app store and so this is I think a really big deal for a certain group of people, but I think all of them know who they are.

David Barnard (01:15:30):

Yeah. And I mean, to my example earlier, I hope Ladder implements group pricing because then I could get my wife, myself and my daughter all on the ladder wrap under a bundle with a discount, which I've been a little frustrated. They don't have a family plan and they don't support family sharing. So yeah, this is exactly the kind of use case outside of like institutions and job work-based stuff, that's a perfect example of just like being able to do a family plan where you don't have to call it the family plan. It's just now like, hey, five people and then each person gets it at a 30% discount or whatever. What are your thoughts, Thomas?

Thomas Petit (01:16:14):

Yeah, the MacApp store is an obvious one I didn't think of because I'm not on the MacApp store, but there's many apps that are not exclusively end users and are like prosumer kind of middle ground. And that was so frustrating in this use case because all we could say that like, guys go to the web, like we have no other ways to do it. So yet another example of an SKU that gets more flexible and I'm happy about it. This one is common in some specific vertical. I had it where for example, suite of consumer types of clients that edits their videos together, like small teams that are like two, three, four people who are like co-editing something together. So that really answered needs that existed for a long time and that was a frustration for a lot of people. What I'm thinking next is how much we can build on top, like probably through the app intent or not, but like actually, oh, this group are together and I'm going to have features that groups can use together.

(01:17:12):

And so not just, oh, you can buy five seats, but like, hey, you and your four buddies will go to panel three buddies in this case, or you and your family in ladder or you. As a developer, what I can offer them to do, and a lot of apps are still very much single player apps like with not so and moving to full social environment can be complex and not make sense for a bunch of verticals, but having interaction with just, "Hey, this is my group of four." So I'm very curious on the features we can build on top after we sell those seats together.

Charlie Chapman (01:17:45):

And there are APIs, I don't know the full extent of it, but there are APIs I think at the very least to make sure that you can manage your seats within the app and see who those users are. I would imagine that those can also be used to just kind of automatically treat them as a team and allow communication between each other sharing.

Thomas Petit (01:18:06):

That can open up features that are really cool. Plus, just add them, that's it, don't let me ... But sometimes there's friction when you need to add people like this is not always the best. So yeah, hopefully we're going to see stuff being built on top of that.

David Barnard (01:18:19):

Yeah. And there's so many big apps in the app store, Notion being a Revenue Cat customer and a perfect example of this is like if you need more than one subscription, go to the web and it's a hassle and Apple's kind of limited them what they can say pushing people to the web because of that, because of all the rules around IP and stuff. And so yeah, it just simplifies things. So now Notion can just be like, "Hey, you've got a team and you want to pay through the app store, buy your licenses right here." And it just makes it so much easier. Now with the five tiers and the flexibility there, maybe it's still not going to fit every use case. Maybe Notion has enterprise plans where they're going to sell 2005 at a certain price, but it at least covers the first use case and will probably cover a lot of use cases for a lot of apps being able to bring those B2B offerings back and make it easy for smaller groups and small companies and things like that to do seat based licensing without having to go get an enterprise deal with the company.

(01:19:26):

So yeah, excited.

Charlie Chapman (01:19:28):

Even outside of the enterprise, I think there's some really interesting stories even already enabled here. I haven't heard of Apple specifically talking about it, but one of the thoughts that I had that I really want to kind of play with is the idea of gifting. I love Flighty. I use Fly-D all the time. I beg my mom to use Flighty whenever she's flying because I want to track where she's at. Did she make it here? Did she make it there? And I want her to have the pro version so that it's easier for her to pull in everything through her email and everything. I would 100%, especially if I could get a little discount, just buy that for her, gift it to her. I'm the one managing all that. She never even has to think or care about it because it's just through her Apple ID.

(01:20:15):

I think there could be a lot of interesting stories there where it's outside of the normal family plan, but it's often within your family or friends or something

Thomas Petit (01:20:25):

Because

Charlie Chapman (01:20:25):

You're paying for it. And then even extending it out into like, you could imagine Apple doing a referral type program thing where the other person pays for it but they join your group and if you make a bigger group, everybody gets it cheaper. And these are all kind of schemes that exist in the web world that you could imagine it being really easy to do within Apple's system in the future. So I'm personally, this is probably the thing I'm the most excited about, at least as a RevenueCat employee in terms of what I think we could do now and where I could see this maybe going kind of in the future

David Barnard (01:21:01):

Yeah, super exciting. And that's a great example with Flighty and the cool thing there is like that's a great way to increase ARPU per average revenue per user to pick up incremental. It's already complicated enough and full price. Are you actually going to like buy a gift subscription for your mom and then have to manage that? They do offer ... Flighted specifically does offer gift subscription, but it's only on the web, it's not within the app store, it's like harder to manage and those kind of things. And so like now it's like they can pick up those incremental user. I'll probably do the same like add my wife and a couple other people who don't quite have the fly enough to make it worth it, but at a discount, like now I might have four people on my flighty plan. So yeah, I think it's a great point and super exciting.

(01:21:54):

All right the next topic is something we probably should have led with, to be honest, we're now 25 minutes in. I was super excited and Charlie, I first learned about it from your tweet because apparently you watched the video before I did is that Apple introduced creative assets. You can now customize your header on the app store with an image and or video that can also be used in search instead of your standard screenshots. So App Store Discovery is getting a massive upgrade this year and I mean it's like there's only upside here. Yeah, it probably won't work perfectly for every app, you're going to need to experiment, but then Apple's also made it really easy. So like they've changed the way App Review works and I don't know if this is already rolled out or like coming in the fall kind of thing, but you will be able to upload a bunch of assets, new screenshots, these creative assets and headers and like all of your kind of app store metadata.

(01:22:58):

They've kind of like broke it in apart now where you'll be able to submit a bundle of things at once without having to do a new SKU or a new version number to your app. It's been so annoying having to increment your bundle add a new version just to like change some description text in your metadata or whatever. There's been a hack around that for screenshots now because with the custom product pages you can ... So this kind of the foreshadowing to this was that you could create a Crustom product page and submit that independently and then swap it in as your primary screenshot set. So there's been a little bit of a hack around like not having to increment your version and upload a new binary every single time you want to make a change, but this seems to be kind of like opening it wide.

(01:23:49):

So in addition to all the cool things you're going to be able to try on your product pages and in search, it's also kind of streamlining this whole process of being able to get assets and change assets without having to ... Well, you still go through App Review but not having to upload a new binary. Thomas, I imagine you're especially excited about this. What are the thoughts? And then I'm sure you've been talking to a lot of people in the community about this over the week. What are your thoughts?

Thomas Petit (01:24:17):

Well, the first one in the community is those who actually upload those assets like this library is really welcome because it's really painful. All the options are scattered around and then the promotional artwork is there and the CPP are there and this is there. And so there was a bit of a relief of, oh, I'm going to save time here, so that's nice.

David Barnard (01:24:37):

And

Thomas Petit (01:24:37):

It's all

David Barnard (01:24:38):

Supported by the API now too, which that's super exciting. And then I've been using the App Store Connect CLI that somebody built. So it's getting even easier with AI to be able to just like throw a folder at it and say, upload all these.

Thomas Petit (01:24:51):

Historically, it's been very time consuming and this is not a high value task. I'd rather have the people who are there who are doing that, like create more of these asset, look more at the data on these assets rather than just spending time uploading them and managing them. And especially when you have a lot of them, like on app that I work with, we're always at the limit of the 70 CPPs and it's like there's a whole slot management going on there that's going to be a little bit easier. Me personally, I'm more excited on how these assets are going to perform for users. So the two assets are a bit different, but they're both really interesting. The first one is something that existed, but to my mind is completely new because the restriction have been lifted. So historically the header was only for some apps, not everyone.

(01:25:39):

So it's great it's for everyone, but it's not that it's that it was very restricted what you're allowed to put in there. And if I make the story really short, basically you can put your logo and a blank color and that's it. Yo couldn't be very creative with it. And many apps I actually have like, "Hey, you know what? Let's ask for the header to be removed because one, we can't put what we want. Two, it pushes my screenshot down below the fold and I'm actually losing visibility on the message that I want to express because I can't say anything in that message. And three, I can't upload it. If I want to change it, I need to ping Apple, Hey, can you change this header?" And sometime that would take a very long time. So for me, it's really interesting that now it's going to become like a proper asset because we can put a lot more stuff that is a lot more creative.

(01:26:29):

So I'm excited about that. And there's a thing there which we can use the asset for the two data. So the two day tab is the ad that you see just below the first featuring when you open it. So it's a prime spot of the app store. You open the app store and there's an ad there and historically it's been very frustrating because that placement is not meant for performance. It's very hard to get profitable returns on it. So it's meant for brand awareness. But the thing, when you run brand awareness campaigns, you want to give a message. There is something you want to say. It's not, "Hey, this is my icon. I'm that app." You want to say something about either something is new or maybe it's inspirational, maybe it's a feature, maybe it's a benefit, maybe it's a one-time thing, an event or whatever.

(01:27:18):

And basically today, a lot of apps that I work with, they're like, "Oh, I'm not doing that until I can actually tell something to the users." And so I think a bunch of apps that have completely discarded the today tab as an option are going to reconsider it because it gives us the liberty to share something and be more creative and it's going to be more exciting. The reverse of the coin is let's see how Apple does review this asset because they clearly ... And what I was thinking is, so this asset can also be a video. It can be dynamic. It's not static. But then opening up the fact that people are going to put some animated thing at the top of the app store, I guess the review process is not going to be as easy as we will because of this connection with the two ... Even yours might be completely legit, but gets rejected because Apple is like, "Ah, but what if they start using it as a two-day tab ads, then it's not possible." So let's see how they're going to get with the review, but it's super exciting to have it.

(01:28:14):

The one on search I think is nice, maybe less of a game changer, but what's really nice is today you just have the choice between the three screenshot or the horizontal. The problem of the horizontal one, which gives you a bit like you can express things a bit differently is that it occupies less space vertically and I've seen compelling data that I'm only using the three screenshot because it pushes the rest down. I'm basically occupying more real estate. So by very nature, click rates are higher when I occupy more space, regardless what I put in this space. So this new asset rebalance a bit that, okay, it's the same space as the screenshot, but you can express your message in like you don't have this restriction that is three screenshot that are separated. I don't think it's massive, massive, but again, nice add-on and I'm really looking forward to testing it.

(01:29:06):

I think this one comes for iOS 27 users only, if I'm correct. So that's going to be September. Yeah, I

David Barnard (01:29:10):

Think it's an update to the app store app in

Thomas Petit (01:29:13):

IOS 27.

David Barnard (01:29:14):

Yeah.

Thomas Petit (01:29:15):

But I've already been started brainstorming about what we can put on the header with two Teams because we're like, yeah, so far I was like, okay, great. We've got the icon in there and yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of people do go in different direction there. What do I put as a content there? Because what surprised me a lot is besides the creative, we can put text in there, taglines. And Apple's own example has text in there. So I was like, "Oh wow, this is really big because there's very, very few assets in the store where you can express your message." And typically the big one is the first screenshot because the rest, I mean the icon is too small, the header is too fixed. So this is really exciting to test taglines and stuff like visuals, but also tag So I'm looking forward to it.

David Barnard (01:30:01):

I'm going to give that feedback to Apple that they should create an asset that's the same size as the three screenshots because you don't want to have to make that trade off between a horizontal image that's shorter. So they should create a four by three kind of poster frame.That one is

Thomas Petit (01:30:20):

There.

David Barnard (01:30:21):

Oh,

Thomas Petit (01:30:21):

Is it now? Okay, perfect. There's two assets. There's the header. And then there is this asset that can replace the screenshot. And it's the

David Barnard (01:30:30):

Same.

Thomas Petit (01:30:31):

But it's bigger than the original screen. It's like a bigger horizontal if you will. I conflated the two topics. Excuse me. There's the header and I don't even know what it's called, this new asset. I forgot the name. But yeah, basically, that's why I was commenting on it.

David Barnard (01:30:49):

Yeah, no, that's super exciting. Good. They thought ahead on that one. They probably had gotten that feedback for years already. Any more thoughts from you, Charla, before we move on to the next topic?

Charlie Chapman (01:31:01):

Just a quick question, which is I'm assuming, but I haven't heard confirmed or denied that this works with the same custom product page and AB testing that we have throughout the app store.

Thomas Petit (01:31:13):

So my initial thing was, oh, this is on top of the CPP, but then I read the line. I was like, "Ah, n, no, no, not as easy as that. " So from what I understand, the header is just one for now. We can't fully go blind, but I can imagine Apple will iterate on it because it's pretty natural to get there. I read it wrong the first time. The way I read it was like, hey, full liberty of applying this. But they did mention that some stuff you can ... I wonder if it's going to work like the CPP on organic keywords and not on ads. It was not fully explicit. So it's not fully rigid, but it's not the full liberty we have now. It's somewhere in between. Let's see how it goes.

Charlie Chapman (01:31:51):

Yeah. Yeah. Because that's the big thing, right?

Thomas Petit (01:31:53):

Is

Charlie Chapman (01:31:53):

Whether we can properly

Thomas Petit (01:31:55):

Test

Charlie Chapman (01:31:55):

This or not.

Thomas Petit (01:31:55):

If it's not, I believe it's going to come in an iteration. It does make sense. It's not a lot of complexity. And if they iterate on these assets, it's because they see it makes a difference by use case. So I can see it's going to be going there not too long.

David Barnard (01:32:09):

But you can use a different header image per custom product page, right? So even if you can't test headers, you could potentially create two custom product pages that are exactly the same just with a different header and then test the different headers against each other.

Thomas Petit (01:32:26):

I hope, but that wasn't until explicit to me.

David Barnard (01:32:29):

Okay. Yeah, we'll have to dig more-

Charlie Chapman (01:32:31):

Fingers crossed.

David Barnard (01:32:32):

Yeah. Into the details of this.

Thomas Petit (01:32:34):

But that's why I imagine the first time when I heard it, I was like, okay. And then I went to look at it again and it's not super obvious to me. So let's reconfirm. Maybe I'm wrong.

David Barnard (01:32:44):

All right. The penultimate topic I wanted to discuss was the app store cleanup because this is a fascinating one. I mean, Apple's been cleaning up the app store over the last, even I think a decade ago there was a first big kind of roundup, but Apple being so explicit about it makes me think that this is going to ... It's kind of the next evolution of this. And I believe their exact wording was something on the lines of if your app is not finding success and not being updated, so if you're not getting very many downloads and you're not updating the app regularly, you're at more risk for getting removed. Fascinating that they're explicitly saying this and then they've already been more and more ... I mean, with the rise of AI and the flood of apps, they'd already been rejecting more kind of copycat apps and limited utility apps.

(01:33:39):

It's like just because you can, they don't want 10 million timer apps. They explicitly mentioned timers as one of the categories where they must be seeing just a flood of that because it's like an easy hello world kind of project. And that's kind of the impression I get is like, one, they are trying to crack down on copycats and then two, it's like you can send your Hello World app via test flight to all your friends without putting it on the App Store. And it sounds like they don't want like 10 million Hello World apps all over the app store and maybe they'll get even more flexible with ... I mean, TestFlight's pretty good now where it's almost an app store experience. You can send a link, people sign up for the test flight, but maybe this ... It feels like they need a little better outlet of like, "Hey, I'm a hobbyist, but it's just fun to get an app on the app store." So that's where it's a little frustrating that they've been rejecting all these apps where if somebody's just playing around and wants to get it up and have a few of their friends download it, TestFlight is kind of the release valve, but it's not a perfect release valve.

(01:34:58):

But overall, I think it's a good thing for them to continue cracking down and cleaning up the app store. But any thoughts from the two of you?

Charlie Chapman (01:35:06):

Yeah. I mean, from my perspective, I think as you said, always the app store needs to be kind of kept cleaning up. As somebody who used to live in more Android world, it was noticeable the difference in those two platforms in terms of cruft or things you had to kind of dig through to find quality apps. And so I appreciate that. I think some of the verbiage, I'm sure it was to give them flexibility, but it said things like if you're not updating frequently or attracting new customers, and I'm guessing again, that that's really just for it gives them flexibility, but I do hope that that's more like they take into account if you have a customer base of a hundred people who use it regularly and it's not growing or anything, it's like there's no reason to get rid of that. But I don't expect that that's really going to be the case.

(01:36:03):

I think this is just them doing their regular tweaking of the rules to give them a little more flexibility to ... They need a stronger broom given the amount of dust that's been pouring through the windows post AI.

David Barnard (01:36:16):

That's a great analogy. I love it. What are your thoughts, Thomas?

Thomas Petit (01:36:20):

No, Charlie put it really nicely. They need to clean up the store. They always did, but this year more than ever and ahead more than ever, so it's pretty normal. I was also very surprised at the exact wording. Apple always has very particular ways to express words and guidelines, so I'm not surprised about that. But the fact that they focus so much on it doesn't attract new users because there are apps that attract new users that should be cleaned out of the store, in my opinion. Yeah,

Charlie Chapman (01:36:49):

That's a good point.

Thomas Petit (01:36:52):

It's not the only criteria to not attract users. There can be decent apps that don't attract new users, but they're also terrible apps that attract a lot of new users. And that's the one I would love to see cleaned up. But I guess it makes sense. The fact that they're so vocal, explicit about it, we will clean up I think is also should serve as a warning because I don't blame anyone as normal to play around and all, but with AI, the average quality of a lot of apps is really low and I don't think it's in Apple interest to let it go. So yeah, I think it's pretty normal that at least they say it, they could have done it without saying anything. So good on them to communicate on it.

David Barnard (01:37:39):

All right. We're going to move on to the last topic and that's your signal to just start flooding the chat with questions. So any questions on things we've discussing that you held back, any questions on other WWDC announcements that you think were important that we missed or any question. And Charlie's way more tactical than me, so maybe we can even get some technical questions in there. And of course, Thomas is the GOAT on all growth related topics. So start throwing all your questions in the chat and we'll get to them once we talk about Scan, SKI Network or now at AttributionKit app. Thomas, you brought this up as one of the things we should discuss that it was interesting to not get a single update, not a word, not anything about

Thomas Petit (01:38:33):

Ad

David Barnard (01:38:34):

Attribution kit. The

Thomas Petit (01:38:35):

Last year there was always something new. It was not necessarily big, but I mean it's been five years now that Apple, six years from the announcement, but five years that it's implemented that Apple has this solution from measurement and every year they're like, "Oh, there's a new version of it and we heard your feedback and we're adding view through and we're adding whatever." And this year nothing at all. And to me it was quite telling that you look at the market situation and scan is not adopted at all. Nobody's using this or I'm exaggerating, it's not nobody, but everybody's using other ways than scan because it hasn't been very, very effective. And the fact that they don't even iterate on it was like either they're going to drop the ball on this and come up with something completely different, which might be like new ad pocalypse or they just decided today, it's very unclear, but it was very telling that they don't mention anything because there was always something.

(01:39:35):

It's the first time there's nothing about it. I don't think Apple is very satisfied about the current situation and they obviously can't be satisfied that the product they release is not being adopted, but it made me really curious, maybe because the WWDC was not the place for this and there was speculation on are they going to keep another bomb for a different point of time? I don't think personally, I think nothing's going to happen and we reach a situation where Apple is not particularly happy, but the scan has failed and the most obvious alternative, which is nuking the IP, like Lucas said, like the IP address, which is widely used for replacing scan is not really an option. It's important for some features. It would cost Apple a lot of money to do the private relay for apps like that would be insane. And let's imagine they find a way to new kit that doesn't cost them anything.

(01:40:39):

The repercussion on the app economy would be so big that it's against their own interest, literally. I'm curious because I don't think it's the end of the story. I think we're in this statue quo of, okay, the last four years there's been changes and then we reach a place and the future one is probably going to be different, but it looks like for a year at least we're going to ... As a marketer, it's been tough the last year, just not how worse it got, but that every six months it's different and it's been a little bit maddening of not be able to build tools with the long-term vision and so on. I think a little bit of stability is good for now, so I'll take it.

David Barnard (01:41:20):

Yeah. It's tricky because technically by the letter of the law, Facebook, TikTok, Google, M&Ps, everyone is fingerprinting-

Thomas Petit (01:41:35):

Probabilistic attribution.

David Barnard (01:41:36):

Probabilistic attribution, but the reality on the ground is that it's just mass fingerprinting across all these different services, which-

Thomas Petit (01:41:47):

Technically is worse than the IDFA. It's even worse because there's no uptown.

David Barnard (01:41:51):

You can't opt out. Yeah, exactly. I think the worst abuses that ATT was trying to protect against, like the data brokers and things like that where you could ... Because fingerprinting, while it works for short term attribution and things like that, it's not as good at tracking an individual user across ... And like some of the worst abuses were, and as a weather app, I knew this intimately, was that all these companies would ask to buy my weather data and what they would do is I would, if I had implemented, which of course I didn't, but what they would do across all these other apps that did is that they would have the exact location of a user in real time, 24 hours a day associated with the IDFA in a deterministic way that could then get populated out to all the different ad networks and data brokers and shady players and hedge funds and all that kind of stuff.

(01:42:56):

And so those kind of worst abuses are at least thwarted by ATT without having the IDFA, because fingerprinting is not reliable enough that once you go out of the house, you get a different IP address, then your cellular IP address rolls over way more than your home IP address does. And then you do have private relay and other things that make tracking harder and rotate IP addresses. There's a lot going on where fingerprinting

(01:43:27):

Violates the kind of letter of their law and even the spirit of their law in a lot of ways, but it's also not nearly as bad as the kind of things that were going on when the IDFA was available. So it does feel like maybe we've kind of hit a stalemate where Apple is like, well, it's okay if Facebook is probabilistically making all these attributions. They are tracking users more than would be ideal from Apple's perspective, but it seems like they've just kind of made peace with that.

Thomas Petit (01:44:00):

So it's less bad, but the fact is that it's everybody, like everybody who run ads use fingerprinting 100%. So that's why I'm saying Stellate isn't a good way to say it. No, but Stellmade is a very ... Because nobody really won here.

David Barnard (01:44:19):

Well, and I mean ATT hurt Apple. I mean, we all saw it in the App Store economy, that transition time apps struggled to find new users, struggled to advertise cost effectively. And so the part of the stalemate is Apple doesn't want to drop a bomb again and impact the app store economy

Thomas Petit (01:44:38):

Again. That's why I think the IP address is going to stay because that would be too big. The consequences would be very big for everybody, like for Apple, for us, for Facebook, for everybody.

David Barnard (01:44:50):

Yeah. Yeah. All right. We got a question in, and this is a good one for Charlie. Any plans for RevenueCat to build or add us on a similar to AppStack asking because Adapti recently went in that direction?

Charlie Chapman (01:45:04):

Not to my knowledge. I don't know if you're in conversations I'm not.

David Barnard (01:45:10):

Yeah. We do have a great integration now or it's about to launch with AppStack and then part of the frustration I think for folks is that AppStack has been kind of in beta where you have to beg to get in. And I've heard people say they know Lucas, the founder, and he still isn't letting them in, but they will be letting more people in over time and we have a great integration that's either already shipped or will be shipping soon. So that's kind of hopefully going to be a solved problem in the coming months. So as Charlie said, not that Charlie and I have seen that we're going to build this ourselves anytime soon, but I know the integration is either launched or being worked on.

Thomas Petit (01:45:54):

And if you want AppStack to go faster, Lucas need more hands on deck. So if you have great engineers to send him, he's looking for engineers.

David Barnard (01:46:03):

Great little plug. Anything else top of mind for the two of you as we wrap up?

Charlie Chapman (01:46:07):

Maybe more of an RC question, but why not provide a quick and easy way, UI or API for users to be able to cancel subscriptions and reset free trial eligibility. You can only test once. So I mean, the big reason is because we can't like Apple doesn't let you do that. On Android, you actually can to some degree and on the web we have that also. So those do exist in Revenue where those APIs exist, but on Apple's end, they don't give you the ability to manually cancel a subscription.

Thomas Petit (01:46:42):

They

Charlie Chapman (01:46:42):

Own that customer relationship and they don't really give us a whole lot of control to sort of tap in. So you just have to have that copy and paste email response that says, "Go here in Apple settings to cancel it yourself." Or you can use our customer center, which has the links that will take you straight to the settings page where they can do that as well.

David Barnard (01:47:07):

Yeah. And there is hacks around the free trial eligibility as well. One is that you can use, I believe, promo offers instead of intro offers to offer a second trial. So you can offer a seven day free and then convert to whatever and you can do that as a promo offer instead of an intro offer. The other hack around it is that the trial eligibility is per subscription group, I believe. And so you can create a second subscription group. It gets a little tough to manage multiple subscription groups and you can get into a situation where people can have multiple subscriptions simultaneously and that's the point of subscription groups, but there are kind of hacks around the free trial eligibility reset. This is actually, this is a good one. I'm going to note it down as feedback for Apple because I have heard on the podcast, I think LinkedIn does this and I've heard from other huge apps that do this is like after six months you've improved the product a ton, you want to give somebody a new free trial.

(01:48:14):

So being able to programmatically reset the trial eligibility is a kind of thing that would make sense for Apple to do. The reason they don't provide an API for canceling, I'm very intimately aware of this because one of my tweets ended up in court documents because of this. The reason they don't is that they did used to have an API to cancel subscriptions and they were giving it to just the larger and maybe kind of rolling it out in that kind of private beta that they do with things sometimes and Hulu used it to say, "Hey,

(01:48:55):

Go sign up on the web and get a discount and we'll automatically cancel your App Store subscription for you. " I stumbled upon that, tweeted about it It kicked off a whole conversation inside Apple and that whole conversation, including my tweet, ended up in court documents at one point. So blame Hulu for why we don't have an API to directly cancel. And as Charlie said, Google does have that and I guess maybe they aren't seeing the abuse or aren't worried about it on that front, but the cancellation, that's the reason the trial eligibility, that's actually a really good feature request that I will personally pass on to Apple because that's a good one.

Charlie Chapman (01:49:38):

Well, I appreciate it. It was fun hanging out and I'll see you back in the office next week virtually.

David Barnard (01:49:46):

See you on Slack and Zoo as always. And then Thomas, thanks so much for joining. It was great to have your input and this is always a blast. So thank you.

Thomas Petit (01:49:56):

Yeah, thanks for the prep. You did a lot of the work here. It was a lot. So thank you.

David Barnard (01:50:00):

Hey, me and Fable, we got it done and my flight home watching all the WWC videos. All right, thank you so much and thank you everyone for joining. This was a long one, but there is a lot to discuss. So hopefully you found it valuable and hopefully a lot of people come back and just watch this at 2x to catch up on everything because a lot of new ones. I thought we shared some good insights and some things you might not get if you just watched the videos. So I think it was valuable. So thank you, Thomas. Thank you everyone. And we will see you next week, Thursday, 9:00 AM Pacific 1800 Central European Time with Nic from Noise. So bye everybody.

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.