For the last few years I’ve gotten into the habit of heading out for a nature-oriented holiday two weeks before WWDC (the penultimate week if you are studying for the SATs).

Typically, this time of year it makes little sense to start any major new projects, so heading out on a break before the intensity of the WWDC-to-September season makes a lot of sense.

This year in particular, this time away has been incredibly helpful.

The last 12 months have been a very turbulent period for developer relations at Apple. It feels like there has been situation after situation which has challenged our relationship and made it tricky to feel awesome about being an Apple developer.

With the benefit of a week away, I feel way more excited about once again heading to Cupertino for WWDC¹.

Nothing externally has changed, but my perspective has improved and I was able to remind myself of a few fundamental truths about my job.

The Work to be Done

I love making apps. It really is that simple. My very first job 25 years ago was developing handheld railroad inspection software for the Palm V, and I haven’t looked back since.

The ability to have an idea, open Xcode, and then a few hours later see that idea exist in reality is truly magical.

There isn’t another job I’d rather be doing. For however long I am able to keep making my livelihood doing the exact thing I love, I will be incredibly grateful.

A 166 Million-to-One Opportunity

Every now and then I’ll open App Store Connect and pull up the “Lifetime Units” tab to see how many downloads my apps have accumulated over the years. Right now that number stands at 166 million(!).

How can a single developer pick up their MacBook Pro, write a bit of code, and then publish it to 2.5X the population of the United Kingdom? It just doesn’t seem like that should be possible, but it is, and it is the App Store model which has made that possible.

I will forever be overwhelmingly grateful for the tremendous opportunity being an Apple developer has afforded me.

Fresh New Bits

WWDC is like Christmas morning to an app developer. We get to unwrap all the “presents” the talented folks within Apple Engineering have been working on for the last few years.

I’ve had the great privilege of getting to know many of these engineers over the years, and it never ceases to be a thrill to hear the excitement in their voices as they discuss the newly announced features.

People

Additionally, WWDC is the best time of year when I get to spend time with the broader Apple developer community. While smaller gatherings and other conferences are wonderful, WWDC is the time when the most folks get together from the most places.

Many of my best friends I’ve met at WWDC over the years. Whatever is announced on Monday, it is a gathering of like-minded people who care so much about the things I’m passionate about.

Let’s Get Started

This year has been a tough one, I won’t sugar coat that. I’ve had to work through some really complicated feelings about my relationship with Apple and my work. There remain some fundamental challenges for the Apple developer community. I hope many of them will be addressed next week. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t.

But I also know some other things for sure. I love my job, I’m privileged to have the opportunity to do what I do, and I love the people in this community (within Apple and without). After taking a step back from the drama and developing some perspective, I’m reminded of these great things and now head to Cupertino with a refreshed sense of excitement and anticipation.

This is not naive, blind fanaticism; I remain profoundly aware of the challenges ahead of us. But I am choosing a thoughtful positivity, which is appropriately grateful for all the positives this week represents and the tremendous opportunities it will hold.

Last week brought a rather dramatic turnaround in one of the longest-lived and perhaps most controversial policies in the App Store when a federal judge has required Apple to allow developers to use their own payment processing from links within their apps. The details of this decision, its merits, and consequences have been widely discussed. I’m not particularly interested in discussing the specific details here.

What really interests me is where this situation came from and where we can constructively go from here.

Let me start off by saying that I am absolutely an idealist; I want to believe the best in all situations. I want to drink the Kool-Aid (as it were) and live in the joyful bliss of optimism. I do that because it allows me to do my best work and make (hopefully) wonderful things. If I am forever distracted by the latest drama and allow myself to be wrapped up in it, I will be unable to focus on the work that I truly value.

A few years ago, I mentioned whatever the developer drama-du-jour was to my wife. She is very aware of the Apple developer business, having been married to me through the 17 years it has been my profession, but she isn’t mired by the day-to-day convulsions of it as I have been. She said something that was brilliantly succinct and insightful:

It sure sounds like Apple has forgotten what made them great.

That really stuck with me.

What drew me to Apple and gave me such affection for them was their professed desire to make wonderful, delightful, exquisite products that surprise and delight their customers. That ethos is both the implied and explicit brand promise. Because their products were so exquisite, they cost more, but that cost was justified by their quality and in an open market customers would choose their products because of their inherent excellence. That is a huge reason why the iPhone wasn’t destroyed by cheaper Android phones. The iPhone was simply better, with great customer satisfaction, and so it won.

Apple may have at one point in history viewed their developer offerings in this light. Seeking to improve their end-user customer satisfaction by building amazing, wonderful developer tools and services that allow and empower their developers to make apps that align with their ethos and values. That doesn’t feel like the case anymore. While there are people and departments within Apple which I am confident feel that way, by and large, at the highest levels, it has been made clear we are viewed as a commodity resource to be extracted from.

I am honestly not all that interested in following Epic, Spotify, Amazon, and others in changing their apps to take advantage of what this injunction allows. I currently don’t have any plans to offer payment outside of IAP.

However, what worries me most is reading the internal discussions at Apple and the posture and thought process that led Apple to this place.

Apple is at its best when it is focused on building great products that serve its customers well. I am a two-fold Apple customer. I buy many of their consumer products and services and enjoy using them in my personal life. I also own a business that is an Apple customer, which has paid Apple a huge amount in the last 17 years for the developer services it has sold me. I don’t begrudge them those fees at all, they have provided the basis and means of my building a business I’m proud of, and I am genuinely grateful to Apple for that.

Where I see Apple’s biggest mistake in their current line of thinking is that while I pay Apple huge sums of money each month, they don’t view me as a customer to be served. They don’t seem to see the benefit of making my experience and offerings better and better. They aren’t trying to win me over by being excellent; they are assuming my loyalty through strong-arm tactics and intransigence.

I’d love to see Apple adopt a new posture towards these things where they win on merit, not by fiat. Apple does have something of value which developers would be happy to pay for: a platform with highly engaged and monetizable users and a large collection of payment accounts attached to those users, which streamlines conversion. This is valuable and Apple has every right to be compensated for this value, but it would be wise to do so in a manner in which both they and their developers win.

For example, selling their payment processing system to developers at competitive rates which are inline with their value. Make your payment processing fees competitive broadly (credit card fees plus fraud and tax compliance), then add on a “convenience fee” commensurate with the conversion enhancement being the built-in provider allows.

Developers aren’t stupid — if they can make more money using Apple’s provided platform…they will! And then both Apple and the developers win. If their interests are aligned, both parties win, and the partnership between Apple and its developer community is sustainable and mutually agreeable.

If Apple serves developers as valued customers, regularly and consistently striving to find areas where we both benefit, then the path forward seems much brighter. Like I said at the start of this, I am an idealist; I want to believe that this change is possible through desire and choice on Apple’s part. That it doesn’t have be handed down to them through injunction and legislation.

Externally mandated change ultimately harms Apple, its customers, and its developers. I firmly believe they’d be much better off choosing a self-directed path of improvement, seeking to act positively rather than with miserly defense.

WWDC is just four weeks away. I’ve had the privilege of attending every WWDC since 2009, and I suspect this year will feel very different from others. This is an opportunity for Apple to reset their developer relationships and make announcements that clearly show a desire for our mutual benefit. I hope to shelve this distraction and get back to work, building wonderful products for this wonderful platform. We’ll see if Apple agrees.

Marco and I discussed this topic on this weeks episode of Under the Radar. Which expands on these thoughts in more depth.

Five years ago I wrote a post entitled 38,299 hours on my wrist, where to observed the five year anniversary of the launch of the Apple Watch. I took a look at how often I have worn one since it’s release. Yesterday, the Apple Watch celebrated its ten year anniversary so I thought I’d update the counts.

In the ten years since the Apple Watch was released I have worn one for at least part of 78,537 hours. My method for measuring this is to to search HealthKit for the existence of a heart rate sample during each hour. This isn’t a perfect method but should be very close proxy to the times when it was on my wrist, as the watch generally records a heart rate reading at least once per hour.

That equates to my wearing an Apple Watch on 97.1% of possible days.

Since August 2015 when I had the idea for Sleep++ (long before the watch got official sleep tracking support), I have worn the watch all day (& night) in 77% of those days. More dramatically, in the last three years I’ve only had two days when I didn’t wear it at all.

The Apple Watch has become an essential part of my life and lifestyle. Wearing it has helped to be healtier and more active. It has been my companion on countless adventures and helped me navigate while hiking in my favorite places.

Developing apps for it has been my favorite part of my job over this period. I really enjoy working on this platform and the possibilities it allows. I am very grateful for the role it has played in my life these ten years and look forward to continuing to wear it for years to come.

PS. I’m a bit infamous for wearing multiple Apple Watches at a time (typically all summer while I’m concurrently working on the new beta watchOS with the current stable release). For the purposes of this analysis I didn’t double count the hours where I had multiple watches on. If I did then the number of combined hours of “watch on wrist” time would be dramatically higher. 🤪

Last week I watched the iOS development community react to substantial rumors of a major UI redesign slated to be announced at WWDC25. The reactions were complex and I’d say broadly negative, which is a reaction I very much can understand and appreciate.

However, after wandering around in the (literal) wilderness for most of last week testing Pedometer++, my current reaction is now much more optimistic. Not because the fundamentals of the situation have changed, but because I’ve decided that it is essential that I develop a practice of optimism to navigate this complicated season in the Apple developer world.

Optimism isn’t enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a feeling, optimism is a choice. I have much less of the enthusiastic feelings these days about my relationship to Apple and its technologies (discussed here on Under the Radar 312), but I can still choose to optimistically look for the positives in any situation. Something I’ve learned as I’ve aged is that pessimism feels better in the moment, but then slowly rots you over time. Whereas optimism feels foolish in the moment, but sustains you over time.

I’m not talking about a blind optimism which ignores the realities of a situation, but more the realistic pursuit of the positives of a situation which (at the risk of sounding a bit like Paddington Bear) if you look for, you can nearly always find. Realistically focusing on how things can go well and the positive outcomes will help me sustainably continue to grow and improve my chosen field of expertise which is ultimately my career goal.

So with that in mind…here are six positive reasons for optimism about a possible major redesign coming to iOS 19.

1. It would provide a point of differentiation for my app against other apps who wouldn’t adopt the new design language right away (either large companies which have their own design system or laggards who wouldn’t prioritize it). Any thing I can do which stands me apart from my competitors is helpful and so Apple providing an opportunity where the system rewards those who follow their leadership quickly is a positive.
2. It provides an opportunity to grow my personal design skills. I am by training much more of a developer than a designer, having had to learn most of my design skills on the way. So an opportunity to think through the design of each of my screens is an opportunity for personal growth and improvement. I’d expect to be a better designer after this process than I was would before I started. It is difficult to justify putting in this kind of ground-up work on its own, but if it is encouraged by the platform then I have the benefit from the exercise.
3. It is rumored that the redesign will pull many aspects from visionOS and the way it is visually structured. Having spent a lot of time last year working on visionOS that sounds really promising. visionOS is a fully “SwiftUI-first” UI system which really showed in how it was constructed and how developing for it went. While I have lots of frustrations with visionOS development, the UI system and the related SwiftUI toolset related to it are not one of them.
4. Any holistic design refresh will involve delving into some of the less considered parts of my apps and then allow me to reevaluate and improve them. So often there will be parts of my apps which get neglected over time, which isn’t great for the user. However, if I have an external impetus to get in there and work on them the app overall will benefit.
5. Maybe a bit silly but honestly I just like working on “new” things. I really enjoyed learning how visionOS’s system worked and delighted in the related beautiful apps it resulted with. I would enjoy going through that process again for iOS and have a regular opportunity to do the difficult work of making my apps beautiful in a new way.
6. Something I regularly remind myself as I look at new Apple announcements is that I never have the whole picture of what is to come for the platform, but Apple does. They know if things like foldable iPhones or HomeKit terminals are on the horizon and how a new design would fit in best with them. If you pay attention and try to read between the lines they often will provide the clues necessary to “skate where the puck is going” and be ready when new, exciting things get announced subsequently.

That is the list of things I came up with. The process of coming up with the list was itself a useful exercise. By focusing on the positive outcomes I felt much more balanced in my reaction and think I am now better able to look towards a summer of potentially challenging work with a more hopeful, growth based perspective. I’m not saying in all of this that anyone shouldn’t feel negatively towards Apple or its announcements right now, but this is just a practice/approach I’m cultivating to preserve my mental health and allow me to continue to do my best work in my chosen area of expertise.

The above image represents the sum total of the progress I made yesterday. It sure doesn’t look like much. It is a grid system for an upcoming widget feature I am working on for Widgetsmith. I’m almost embarrassed to post it as the collective effort for an entire day’s professional work, but that is ultimately the point of this post.

I always find coming back from the Christmas break (or any break for that matter) challenging. The regular routines of my working life are joyously disrupted, providing a welcome break and opportunity to re-charge. But when I now sit down at my computer and face the wide-open expanse of possible work endeavors, I rarely have a clear sense of where to start and how to get back into the swing of things.

I’ve faced this struggle hundreds of times over the years of my career and navigated it with varying degrees of success. Over those years, I’ve built up a variety of “tricks” to get me going again. These are little habits or rituals which help steer me towards any degree of productivity again.

The above screenshot is an example of what I call my “Accomplish One Thing” rule. On any day when I’m supposed to be working, I have developed the habit of looking back at my day and looking for at least one thing which I really accomplished that day (ideally something tangible or visible). I tend to think about this as I’m clearing up my desk, ready to return to home life. It really doesn’t matter how big or small that thing is, but there needs to be something which I can point to.

The real magic of this habit is how it helps me earlier in the day. If I know I’ll need to have something tangible to point to later on, I find I am much more inclined to choose meaningful, but manageable tasks on these early days back. Tasks which are useful but also scoped to not overwhelm or daunt me. Obviously, not all jobs which need doing are atomic enough to be accomplished in a day’s work, but usually I find that I can either break larger tasks into smaller pieces or structure the sequence of work to allow for some of these.

The goal here is not to make massive progress; it isn’t about getting back up to full speed again, going from 0 to 100 miles/hour in one swift step. It is about building up my working inertia again. Speed is useful, but inertia is powerful.

Inertia in my working life is the thing which I find most powerfully motivates and animates my progress. It gives you that sense of inevitability about accomplishing the outcome and desire each morning to keep the ball rolling. Inertia is what will get you through the inevitable slumps, disappointments, and mistakes later on in a project. So I want to get it accumulating as soon as I can.

So yesterday I built that grid; today I’ll tackle the next thing I can accomplish in this project, and who knows what will come on Monday. But I know from experience that if I can string together a few days of tangible progress, the future will sort itself out.