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

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH3jkj2WbM8
Duration: 57 min
Language: English
Words: 11900
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/ZH3jkj2WbM8

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[0:00] hello hello welcome to our annual WWDC recap with Revenue cat we are going to be sharing this as a sub Club podcast as well so for those of you listening on the podcast this is actually live let's do a quick round of intros most people on this podcast probably know me and Jacob most people in the webinar should know a little bit about Revenue cat and us but we'll do a quick round of intros Charlie tell us a little bit about you and what you do at Rue cat yeah so I'm Charlie Chapman I'm a developer advocate here at Revenue cat and my job is to

[0:33] come out to events like these or online and just like talk to developers understand the pain points they're having and bring that back to the team as well as when we come out with new features explain what it is that we can do how we can help out your subscription app Business specifically kind of on the engineering side of things and Jacob is CEO of Revenue cat it's kind of boring for you to tell people what you do because you the most I don't have a real job it's a fake job it's never boring but it's definitely fake uh why don't you give us your best Revenue cat

[1:04] elevator pitch well I think Charlie kind of around it there but yeah we help developers make more money with the power of computers we started as an sk1 rapper store kit one rapper which we'll get to later today but we make software that helps you do inapp subscriptions more or less and do it better and monetize better and be a more successful app that's our dream and then yeah like David said my job's made up I do podcasts that's what I've been doing the last two days so yeah and then I'm David Bernard used to be developer Advocate that got confusing because I'm not actually a developer so we made up a

[1:33] name I'm growth Advocate at Revenue cat I host the sub Club podcast run the subcl club Community host webinars speak at Advance I'll be in New York City in two weeks for app promotion Summit I'll be intervie I will too actually so I'll be oh nice yeah I'll be on stage interviewing the senior VP of growth at Babel so we'll be in New York City get in touch if you're in New York or in New York 4 APS we will be hanging out for a few days before meeting up with folks so without further Ado let's get into it wwc 2024 I personally think the absolute

[2:06] biggest news of WDC 24 was the deprecation of everybody's favorite original API for inap purchase that's so bad it's storit one before it was storeit one it was just storeit storit snit who really wants to know that stuff but I think snit I've never heard that one before Google my Twitter for snor Kit there's a couple that's like the joke I would make every four months snor kit more like snor kit but I do think it's a good time to take a moment to remember our good friend storit later known as storit one later later known as original API for inapp purchase classic TM but a history lesson

[2:51] storit didn't come out in iOS 1 it came out actually come out in iOS 3 I believe because it wasn't in the very first iteration of App Store so it was do 2009 that we first got store kit and it piggybacked this is so beautiful just the Elegance of technical debt it piggybacked on the basically technical foundations of iTunes the old iTunes buying stuff and the whole App Store infrastructure originally was built on the iTunes infrastructure you know Apple always be shipping which was built on everybody's favorite very popular web framework known as web objects if anybody's ever heard of that they used to sell it in a box us to know that

[3:30] because at il1 they used to have it like in one of the like displays of old Apple stuff you could buy a box version of web object so anyway that was the origin of storit and it all run on Oracle from what running on Oracle backends yeah that's awesome you know classic classic Cutting Edge web technology and yeah you know what it kind of held up that was what 2009 to 2024 that's what 15 years yep 15 years of inapp purchases with storit they extended it in 20 1 to add recurring purchases which it was never designed to do which kind of I'm not too B out about because it created an

[4:07] opportunity for me to start a business but they just kept extending it and extending it extending it and it's really is a loadbearing part of the app economy is this little web objects SDK and framework and API that's lasted this long when did Circuit 2 come out like two years ago three years ago they kind of announced like hey a newer fresher like more modern take on how to do Commerce with an app and then you know we knew this day would come now they've deprecated it it doesn't mean it's going away I actually think it will probably be around forever like I don't think they'll be able to fully deprecate it

[4:42] because there are probably apps out there don't use Revenue cat that have like I AP code that's a billion years old and like maybe someday they will but like it's going to be a while till they can really rug that one I don't know that Apple would ever say this but my guess would be that something like 80 % of all like revenue on the App Store still goes through store kit one cuz so many big apps trans there's so much Legacy code there's a big bias there's gonna be a big bias for the biggest apps being the oldest right and so like they're just gonna tend to be on store

[5:15] kit one and it's a big lift to migrate from store kit one to store kit 2 there's if you're starting n new store kit 2 is a much better user experience but like if you're trying to like mesh an old system in a new system ask me how I know it's not super trivial so anyway just to say goodbye to an old friend it was good to know you Revenue cat's about to deprecate kind of our last dependencies on store kit old store kit receipts it took us even a few years to like fully get migrated over we'll still support the technology and the receipts and revenue cat will always still work

[5:47] with probably some degree of both systems but a pivotal moment for about 12 people uh and us being in that group but yeah yeah I mean actually there's probably thousands of Engineers around the world who deprecated skill sets day in day out have to deal with stor kid and all The Oddities and the bugs but this I'm just really worried what's gonna happen with like support because like I can see them breaking stuff in store kit Original Classic and like there's just not going to be any incentive and it's gonna be like oh upgrade to store kit 2 which is like not something you can do quickly you know

[6:21] yeah no they specifically said I mean and this is them like them deprecating it as saying like stop using it like we're not going to stop supporting it but believe in the if I remember correctly not still supporting can mean like we're not going to fix weird Edge case bugs though no no no but in the if I remember the slide correctly they specifically said like will not receive updates I mean they probably will fix some critical but if it's like second order they're just going to be like you store kit too is the work around right yeah they're not going to add stuff to the receipts they're not gonna yeah yeah

[6:52] so goodbye store kit one so long farewell well now now when we say store kit though it's just going mean store kit too because that was the other thing they did they rebranded it as original API for inapp purchase which yeah so beautifully Apple to name it that but yeah we'll see you later so personally I think the second biggest news out of WWDC was ai ai ai and apparently now that stands intelligence yes yeah so I don't want to go too deep today because I'm actually hoping to schedule a podcast soon talking about kind of the future of apps in a post aai world because I think there are some

[7:32] interesting discussions to be had but because it was such big news this week I did want to touch on it and Jacob I thought your framing so we recorded a podcast with Mojo and I thought your framing was really good that the AI Revolution is really just a new and the next app Revolution what what did you mean by that I was waking up earlier this year or maybe late last year in cold sweats because I thought apps were over I kind of had the feeling that like oh crap like this Chad gbt thing is really powerful you could see like a few more iterations on this and like maybe

[8:03] you just talk to a thing and it does 90% of your Computing needs that might still happen to some degree but I think one thing that I realized that had come to before this but kind of became really clear from Apple's sort of integration of AI across the entire OS is that the mobile device and the app Paradigm are going to be super important for this next Revolution Computing this like aiiz of like everything we do because it's on always it's connected and it has context and that's like one of the biggest things that the mobile device has that a lot of other Computing platforms don't

[8:40] have is they have context I find this with like some AI desktop apps I want to use and stuff is like to get them to understand context you have to connect to like a million devices and a million services for one I don't love giving random new AI app my like calendar and email and stuff like that's not secure right and so like the mobile device has a ton of advant ages here and then Apple obviously as the Arbiter you know they've got this great privacy brand they do understand this stuff like Apple's been building CPUs and gpus now for when did the first AIP series come

[9:12] out it's probably almost 10 years now been more than 10 years yeah yeah so like apple knows how to build Vector processing chips I assume the new iPhone will have either dedicated or rebranded Hardware specifically for running forward passes on llms and things like this so like I really think and I guess to the point that the AI Revolution really we shouldn't be afraid of it is that like Apple's teeing us up they're going to give us like apis to access their llms the llms will or I say llms or whatever AI Apple intelligence features will be able to access your app we'll talk about app intense a little

[9:45] bit later but then also I think you'll be able to dip into all of these features kind of at the OS level to supercharge whatever little niche problem or big Niche problem like you're solving and yeah I'm a lot less worried about apps getting left behind by this because I just think it's so easy to implement it's accessible the platforms are going to be pushing it and providing it to developers I really think like AI will eliminate a certain number of use cases that used to maybe could have been apps like solver there's a bunch of apps that kind of got semi-locked this week but like I don't think they're in danger

[10:18] because even if AI eats the bottom couple layers of the stack it's also expanding the surface area of what can be done with apps right and it's just creating new opportunities and open AI app Apple Google like all these like Foundation model companies are not going to be able to go after each one of these apps and that's where developers come in to like connect this core technology to like a need so Dave you told me not to talk about it much but it's gonna be a good podcast it's gonna be a great podcast I'm hoping to get Ben Thompson on actually boy me and Ben we have

[10:47] history I don't know you and I Jacob I feel like maybe are well we're definitely biased and we're very like app people and I think Ben he even talked about it recently I think on a dithering or whatever I think he's kind of bought into like apps aren't going anywhere just like the desktop didn't go anywhere with mobile it's like it just becomes different use cases like you were saying but he's a little more AI Bull and so I think it'd be fun to have him or someone like him as a kind of balancing factor to have a deeper discussion on the future of AI and apps

[11:16] but I wanted to pass it to Charlie because I think there are immediate opportunities with apple intelligence in iOS 18 especially for Indie developers who love jumping on that like release bandwagon to get attention the fall what are your thoughts on like how developers can take advantage of this to get attention in the fall yeah it's been really weird because watching the keynote everybody was very very excited thinking there's all this stuff that we can hook into but then throughout the week as we've all been actually digging into the apis as often is the case with these things the actual hooks we get in are a little less full featured from our

[11:50] perspective as thirdparty developers as I was expecting that they might be for example there's that image generation tool it's basically just a glorified photo picker from a developer perspective like we can't do like prompt engineering I don't think but then the big one is being able to hook into the Siri Apple intelligence stuff this is kind of one of Apple at its best where they're basically just taking advantage of the app intense system that they already had is new this other than Siri just yeah it's weird this is a thing that already existed the my like Indie app I have is a like media app so I

[12:24] already implemented all of the media app intent stuff so my understanding is I don't need to do anything what it does mean is I get to in September or well later this year whenever uh these features actually come out I'll be able to Market it as if it's a new feature but I don't think I even have to write any code for me to plug into it there are a few new types such as like photo apps that can do like editing on photos or something like that I mean this is going to work really well I feel like because just seeing how some of the

[12:53] limit in the chat GPT ecosystem like some of those limited hooks that they have with other third parties work pretty well in the way that llms can sort of semantically understand app intense better than Siri ever could right like you can write a like human text I don't know if they're gonna in that's the that's the key because I've supported Siri in my apps for forever but how often do people say play this music from Spotify and they say that the exact right way ever works right like I just think of the Larry David sketch of him yelling at Siri right never ever works right but if it starts to work

[13:29] will be in a different world I think it'll create an interesting new funnel from like a business perspective the Paradigm for forever has been like open app and then you track somebody through the user experience and now potentially this shrinks that funnel but then grows this other one of like your entry point is a tech Bas very clear intent entry point into your app and as Apple intelligence gets better over time it might not even open your app you can just provide the app but then how do you as a developer bring people along and help them learn about the features your app has if they're not looking at your

[14:05] UI I think there's going to be a lot of new challenges in the future as this gets more and more fleshed out and that's I think what developers should be thinking about over the summer is which you know so like you you've already built out some app intents but maybe spending a couple hours brainstorming like okay how would somebody think about for you wanting some form of white noise dark noise Brown noise whatever and then are there new contexts that you put in those intents like I think developers should be exploring this over the summer so that they're the most ready they can be for however it rolls out I think

[14:42] you're right though Charlie like going back to my fever dream of like the end of apps this is a slightly and this is why this stuff so hard to predict is like this can really actually be a Big Boon rather than it is Siri and the OS maybe taking more of like the computational load and like not the computational load so much is the user interface right like now the interface of your app becomes less important which could be negative but the functionality you provide I mean I think of challenges like well how do you get somebody to pay for dark noise now like if they're just

[15:10] like asking for like where do do you put a pay wall in the app intent like how do you do you could hear if somebody asks for a noise that's premium you just like pre-roll an audio that's like you know hey you access this if you want all these sounds whatever but I mean silly example but there's going to have to be rethinking if it becomes like a significant new channel for like entry into the app it's going to have to be rethinking of how we even like monetize and or the only Channel yeah like does it become like ASO or SEO where the way I need to think about my app being used

[15:42] is like maybe the way it gets into a White Noise app is you just say hey Siri calm me down and then like oh being smart you know what I mean and it's like you have to learn all these new ways of telling the system that you can solve this problem one of the things that lm's is really good at is just this like textual human communication right and like I think that's probably the thing that's got me most excited and where app intense never saw them there's app intense and then there was also like you could access the search like you could put stuff up for search inside of Siri

[16:13] right or inside of like Spotlight neither of those ever felt like they were meaningful entry points into apps I think this might have a chance to actually fix that so it's exciting yeah it's so early Apple announces these things and then it's like later this year so we don't know how much is coming in iOS 18 and then we probably will see kind of some early implementations and then it's going to evolve over time and stuff so very early days but it's exciting so definitely something developers should be checking out but speaking of early I wanted to pass it back to Charlie one more time for Vision

[16:46] Pro again still very early days what are your thoughts on how developers should be thinking about Vision Pro at this stage even with 2.0 having been announced a couple days ago I I mean I think selfishly I was hoping there would be a little bit more but realistically I shouldn't have expected there to be that more this year I think my general feeling is the same as it's been since the beginning which is like it's a fun platform to experiment but understand as like if you're trying to make a business this is a really really small audience still if anything the biggest announcement was just the fact that

[17:20] they're opening it up to New Markets it's definitely still a experimental I still think of it like it's a publicly available dev kit and I think that's can fund it for a very long time to understand if there's Market here or not right and they should they shouldn't like I don't know how long until they killed the Newton you know what I mean like it's not unusual for companies to like roll a new platform and then if it doesn't pan out in a couple of years like have to kill it Apple being as well funded as they are can expend a certain amount of energy to see if they can find

[17:48] a niche and get it to take off so oh I'm a I'm a Vision Pro Bull I think we're just in the early days I'm with I'm with Charlie this was a developer kit and it's going somewhere but it's just going to take a while to get there it's a phenomenal experience tell James Cameron movie if you make a I don't even like James Cameron movies that much but if you made an exclusive James Cameron movie for AP like I'm buying that right away I tweeted about this a while back I think what it really is going to take and I'm kind of shocked Apple hasn't and

[18:15] maybe this is kind of their patience as well right is that they know it's a developer kit now maybe there's going to be a vision that's not a Vision Pro that's going to be kind of more consumer friendly so maybe they're kind of holding their cards a little bit like they want want to make that you would want to make Avatar 3 exclusive for AP now until there's like a thousand device that's more consumer friendly the platform is more mature all those kind of things it has to be it has to be the price of a nice TV which is like $500 $800 right so I think it's going

[18:45] somewhere but it's still early days and so I mean the way I continue to think about it is if you have the bandwidth and kind of the financial backing to be able to explore things that don't require an immediate return on investment it's a fun fun place to play like there's cool games there's awesome experiences like people are doing really cool stuff on it and and the immersion and like apple immersive videos like it's really cool but it's just early so if you can afford to play play but it's not a like build a business on it yet is my perspective exactly I did a presentation at a conference earlier

[19:23] this year talking about it and the big banner slide was this is not a gold rush trying to articulate that yeah yeah this isn't the original iPhone or the original iPad don't play that same Playbook there and expect to come out getting the pot of gold at the end like you did in those eras do you remember off the top of your head at least directionally what the numbers were iPhone launch then iPad launch then watch launch cuz you're slides in that anybody who hasn't watched Charlie's presentation if you're curious about Vision Pro he did a phenomenal presentation I watched it on the flights I did this last month is really good so

[19:54] yeah you shared like the at launch of these different platforms the scale was just so different yeah the iPhone was bigger than I was expecting whenever I like started running the numbers and then the iPad was just at a completely different scale yeah and the the Apple watch was still bigger than the iPhone it was just seen as a failure because the expectation was so high and then you see the Vision Pro number and I mean none of this is super surprising but seeing it graphically laid out like that was a good reminder of what to actually expect if you're trying to run a business on this app store yeah and then

[20:25] like orders of magnitude it's like hundreds of thousands of if for people on the podcast I'm like holding up my fingers like with a little teeny tiny sliver of like Vision Pro hundreds of thousands of units and then the iPhone even was like tens of millions of units by the time the App Store really started taking off and even at launch I believe it was maybe even over 10 million and at least within the first year it was in the tens of millions and then iPad was like tens of millions very quickly and so it's like you just see this tiny little sliver and Charlie's charts from his presentation

[20:55] compared to like these massive platform launches that were the kind of more gold rushy so anyways early days and a lot of opportunity but not something especially business relevant today so I'm going to move on this is going to be me monologuing a bit but Charlie and Jacob I'll kind of pause here and there for youall to jump in but Apple announc a ton of stuff and since this is a recap webinar and I spent the most time deep diving into all this stuff I'm G to go through and just kind of talk about because they did a lot of cool stuff so a lot of this is in the there's a what's

[21:28] new in app store connect wwc video if you want to go more in depth there's like five or six videos we'll be referencing in talking through this stuff that you can go watch for more detail but I know tons of folks aren't going to sit down and watch the whole video so I'm going to give the Highlight Reel of what Apple announced in app store connect you can nominate your app for featuring now and it's cool because it's like a whole new UI because you get to actually say when these new features are launching when your 3.0 is launching when your new app is launching in and

[21:59] then you get to pitch it to Apple in a more directed way so that's a cool new feature of App Store connect and an opportunity to get your app in front of apple and hopefully get it featured similarly there's like marketing asset creation App Store connect now I first read about this on the web before I saw the video demo so I was like ah like any designer is going to be able to like throw something together I was like ah it'll just be for Indies but then I saw in the video it's like in apps or connect you can generate these like promotional images that that are

[22:29] animated and have like these glossy little thing like apple actually did a really good job with this so not just Indies I think are going to use this it's like you can go into App Store connect and like build these little promotional images that like play really well you have some ability to like customize them and stuff or it minimally I think it's just like text customization and then it kind of autog generates a lot of this like animations and stuff but it I mean it looks really nice I it looks like you kind of hired somebody yeah but if they all look like that it's not going to be differentiated

[22:56] right so but but how many people are going to see multiple of these right it's like you're targeting your audience with a specific thing and maybe it's good that they're similar it's like are these not like the assets that get used in like promo banners and stuff like that no it's like a different external it's like for you to be like hey I got promoted here's like about it or put it in your your distribution yeah yeah that's cool that's a nice it's really nice that's just a gift from Apple thank you yeah thank you doing something with that 30% I'm glad and then one of the cool things too

[23:28] is that Apple will Now notify you when you get featured and then they create special artwork uh highlight that you got featured that's so nice there's certain platforms you would subscribe to almost just for that just to know where and when you were featured right uh so do you know David my understanding from the conversations I've had here is that that's only for app of the day does that also include the different lists that you get in throughout the store and different countries I did not see details on that so TBD but I would imagine if it is currently just for app of the day they'll expand it over time

[24:01] to yeah I hope so cuz that's the challenge is like especially as an indie when you see the sudden Spike and you're trying to figure out what happened uh it's it's like oh in Turkey there's a list in on the Today tab but it's not necessarily app of the day and finding those is a real pain so that would be sweet if we could get more clear notifications on that yeah but to Jacob's Point these thirdparty tools that tell you like app figures has a great view you can go into to see where all the different countries you're featur featured in and what lists you're featured in and stuff I don't think

[24:30] those are going away yet but it's cool that Apple's moving this direction and then has these like custom artwork that you can share to promote that you got featured by Apple so cool little detail deep links for custom product pages this is another really cool one I don't know that a lot of kind of smaller apps have been experimenting with this because it's been more of a bigger apps create an ad highlighting like Strava they do both running and they do cycling and so if you create an ad more focused on running you want them to land on the app store and see stuff more about running

[25:01] than cycling and so big apps have been doing this but I think Apple's just making it easier and easier to do this stuff where if your app has multiple primary use cases different features you can create these custom product pages and this has been around for a while to creating custom product pages but now when somebody buys through that custom product page it can deep link into your app to give a customize onboarding so straa might say okay now you saw an ad about running you saw the App Store screenshots about running and now when you open the app you're going to get the runner onboarding not the cycling

[25:35] onboarding again just another really cool expansion of the capabilities of the App Store that provides a better way for you to customize that whole end to end experience and this is you know a longtime complaint of the App Store it's a big black box you have very little control this is Apple just ticking away like giving us more control of how we want our prospects and customers to experience our app on the app store and then once they have then deep linking into the app with more customized experiences so super cool and then it is coming to App Store search ads and this I think was announced before that so now

[26:13] you'll be able to create different crust and product pages for different search ad terms so again Strava it's like if they're buying a bunch of running Search terms they don't want to show their normal product page they want to show the custom product page and then again they want to link from that custom product page to a custom onboarding so really powerful stuff does that make like attribution easier that's what I was just thinking yeah I mean I know there's like ways that some people are doing this but this almost feels like an official kind of API for that yeah it depends on how many of these you can

[26:44] create right yeah that's true that's true but even so if you're just trying to run like some localized or you could create some broad buckets that would be helpful yeah and this is something I had been looking at and I haven't dug deep into it and this maybe something we should investigate write a blog post or something but I do think it gives opportunity to at least like more broadly get some understanding of how and why your customers are coming in but they're trying to prevent tracking and so if only 10 people click on a specific link to a specific custom product page there's probably still going to be some

[27:17] level of an anonymity but if they're deep linking into your app I don't know exactly how Apple could enforce that because you could probably just be able to like pull that out but I think it's to Jacob's point is that even if only four people click on a link to this specific custom product page you can't create like 50,000 product pages to where you can individually identify but even if you can create it yeah yeah like I'm looking at it now yeah it uses deep links or Universal links so like you can basically assign a universal link to any of your which is interesting because I

[27:49] don't know I guess they cach that when you install and then on first open like you'll get a Handler to handle that Universal link that's actually really powerful very cool stuff we should definitely dig deeper and write some content around this there are some cool updates to test fly the kind of long abandoned barely moved product you can now send your public invite links and then they land on more of like an app store Page like it has screenshots and explanation of your app and things like that so when you're trying to recruit testers the experience of recruiting testers has been pretty poor so they made some pretty big

[28:24] improvements to that you can set criteria for that as well so if you like really need people on iOS 15 because you're making sure you have your backward compatibility you can say only allow people to join if they're still on iOS 15 or something like that so and then you actually get stats on the enrollment so like how many people landed on your page how many actually enrolled like how many met the criteria how many didn't meet their criteria so kind of cool I would love to see them invest more in testl personally the features I want to see is more around like group management and like being

[28:57] able B to like email the users on the beta with testing notes and like there's a lot of stuff they could do to continue improving test flight but hey again a nice step forward a nice little enhancement they added there sorry did go back a topic 35 you can have 35 custom landing pages it's not infinite and that kind of achieves what Apple's vision is on and we'll talk about add attribution later which is like some amount of attribution but like what they really just don't want is you to be able to like narrow down to a person and so it's a pretty good way to to achieve

[29:26] that so you can imagine setting up 10 campaigns or 20 campaigns that each link to a different maybe even the page is the same but then you handle that deep link through to your app and now you have a way to like attribute what campaign they came from which is kind of interesting so yeah very cool next upep was reduced screenshot requirements that was the title of the section and they could have just this could have been the only thing they announced and I think it would have been a win was this the third most important thing announced at wwc2 yeah I mean this is this is where you

[29:56] wish you had the old session CU there would be cheering in the the room so so the gist of this is that for those who have not had the pleasure of working an app store connect still to this day you have to upload different iPhone size screenshots for different sized iPhones I think the latest requirement is luckily you don't have to do that across across languages do you yeah oh you do oh my God so it's like every language you want to support I think it's two or three different iPhone sizes and two or three iPad sizes what they did now and I think this is a like coming this fall thing as

[30:35] well or coming later this year thing is that when you go into App Store connect you can have one set of iPhone screenshots per language and then one set of iPad screenshots per language so just massively reduced complexity and there's all these tools that do this for you butan had stuff built into to do this right like there's yeah there's all kinds of automations but but I've always generating them was a pain in the butt like how do you make that many images right and so for people who like automate this and just do like really simple screenshots and there's tools that help you automate this but like all

[31:08] my screenshots are in sketch and so I always have to like do multiple sizes and the sketch fil is insane luckily luckily App Store connect is really responsive and fast so it makes it really easy right I can't tell you how many times I tried to submit and it's like you didn't do this and I'm like did what and then it's like three layers deep is like oh I didn't update one screenshot size in one language or they use web objects in Oracle so you know it must be fast I don't even know if they still do I just like I hope they don't I love to

[31:43] give the Apple backend teams a hard time this is another podcast I'd love to do an ex Apple employee if they're ready to just kind of like like those Anonymous like True Crime was like like shadowed out yeah that's when we actually used the Java framework that was 30 years old to you know that'd be good I'd love that a history of App Store back end would be a fascinating oh my God to a small audience David some stories just shouldn't be told that's one that we're gonna probably lose to history but it's okay all right App Store search enhancements this one's another cool one again like lots of little things

[32:19] stacking up to just make things better for the App Store and developers so currently if you go to the App Store and go to the search tab you get kind of like this customized view where it's like suggested searches and suggested apps and things like that which is really cool that's been around a few years so now though when you tap into the search field because currently if you tap into the search field nothing changes so now coming this fall in iOS 18 when you tap into the search field it actually gives you recent searches that you can clear and then it gives you suggested searches like personalized

[32:52] suggested searches it's just another cool thing where when somebody's going to search and they probably have something in mind but if they don't or if they get distracted it's going to hopefully help more apps get discovered by people spending more time in Search and having more personalized recommendations all that kind of stuff so another cool thing there's now Enterprise program API is not super applicable to us but again another cool thing Apple's doing is allowing more direct access to Enterprise feature so if you're doing any kind of Enterprise distribution less painful through the API App Store analytics API this is kind of cool you can now get a lot more details

[33:34] about your app store performance through the analytics API so tools like app figures you know maybe eventually Revenue cat I don't know we'll have to look at like exactly how useful this would be for our customers to kind of mix some level of data the challenge though as always with Appstore analytics is that they're always anonymized and they're also always opt in and so it's something I always keep in mind if you're looking at App Store depends like Financial reports and stuff like that are not often I like this is more of they like usage analytics and stuff like this so like if you're trying to find out like how many

[34:10] active users do I have well you have to go in and like some of that's anonymized some of it isn't and there's little I don't know you know I'm sure Ariel at app figures is digging into this and has already been using aspects of it but you have to know which ones are opt in and which ones are Global so some some of the stats in app store analytics are Global some are opt in and so you have to look and then you look at the percentage and it tells you like my weather app had like 25% opin rate launching in a pro had like 20% opt-in

[34:40] rate so you have to take the number and multiply it by the opt-in rate to get a sense for what's going on because Apple can't do division for you like whatever I mean it's kind of important though if somebody's gonna be looking at the numbers and apple just multiplied it I always thought that sure the audiences aren't the same yeah yeah they don't behave the same and then similarly Apple added a ton of analytics in app store connect and I think this was part of the dma I think the dma like required them to share more statistics with developers so they added hundreds of new metrics to

[35:14] apps or connect so there's a lot more going on there nobody should ever need more than a hundred metrics I haven't looked at them but like what do you need to know there's like seven that matter anyway I'm glad Reg has opened up the other 393 to us anyway another uh another thing announced earlier this year that seems to be kind of En closed beta is contingent offers again another cool opportunity this is one where and we've seen some apps doing this so like actually speaking of straa again Strava is doing this thing now where they promote other apps I don't know what kind of deals they have with those apps

[35:54] or if it's like a sponsorship a partnership an affiliate or whatever but with contingent pricing Strava could say hey as part of your Strava membership you get 20% off weather up and you can bundle the pricing and this is going to be at the App Store level and then the cool thing there with contingent pricing is that if somebody unsubscribes from straa they're no longer had that contingent pricing and so then their pricing would go up on that next renewal so Apple baking this in at the App Store level again it's in beta right now so we haven't seen it massively in use but think there's a lot of opportunity here

[36:29] for like affiliate deals I mean I'm thinking about this for weather up like when they open it broadly like what apps can I work with where when somebody signs up through a contingent offer they get 20% off and then I give that app a kickback and I think it's cross remember free app of the day yeah it's still that's still going on back in the day is it a thing I thought I thought Apple kind of banned it when they said like no like pseudo app stores on the App Store I don't know if it's the exact same site but people will do this for ASO because

[36:58] you get a massive search in downloads so people will give like lifetime access for free and things like that for a day but yeah used to I mean cross per has always been good I think this feature as I understand it's going to be more targeted at people that can do big bis Dev deals so it's going to be like larger apps probably take advantage of this but still another arrow in the quiver for us Y and then we've got some bigger things to dive into offers streamline purchasing store kit views inap purchase testing enhan ments but last small thing is they actually mentioned this in one of those wwc

[37:34] videos and I think a lot of people don't even realize this exists apple offers support via phone or email in nine languages 247 this always reminds me of the technical support incidents that like people forget exists like you can get code level support from Apple with these two free technical incidents every year that like nobody uses and then people talk about I can never get a hold of Apple you know whatever they offer phone support I've called them before about like changing an address or something like that and I thought it was interesting that Apple mentioned this in that wwc video I think because so few

[38:10] people actually use it and they really do want to help more developers via this channel so it's kind of cool that they do that and then that they specifically called it out in a wwec video this isn't like technical code support this is like I have a problem with App Store connect I need to change my business address or something like that right okay yeah yeah it's App Store connect support but the technical incident still exists and again it's like I feel people know about that this is a separate resource but if you need code level support from Apple you have two technical incidents a year

[38:42] that you can use like look at up I would just always I feel like whenever that would come to mind well a lot of times it would be like you're dealing with app riew and I don't think they help in that department typically appu has their own escalation methods yeah but I'm was like I'm not going to call these App Store connect people did this to me I'm not going to call them they just going to do more of it to me but I'm sure they're helpful in in some cases so yeah good let's talk about wiback offers and I know Jacob you've been doing a deep dive

[39:09] on that do you want me to give the overview or you want yeah I mean I yeah I can talk I can give you a break David so so yeah winback offers so yet another kind of offer so it's the fourth the fourth offer is it fourth but how do we count for so intro offers there be like free trials and introductory offers there's promo offers which are like basically anytime you're in your app and then now we have winback offers no but offer codes offer codes you have an offer code wait then what's what is the thing where you can put an app in promoted when you can put an iip into

[39:37] the app store oh that's totally separate because that's yeah it's separate but I think it also has the word promoted so like technically not related but they've got some branding organization issues but anyway we got four types of offers now yeah yeah so anyway so intros are like free trials is the big one but then you can also have like the first time somebody starts a subscription in a group you can give them like a cheaper deal so that's one option those you can only have one or none on any subscription product within a group I believe right and it's you only get it once within the group but each product

[40:06] can have a different so one could have a free trial one could be 30% off something like this promotional offers can be applied at any time in a person's active cycle so like if they have a active subscription you can apply it to that and reduce the price of that offer I think you can actually do it to a new subscription as well but there's some stuff there where you have to have it signed by a server like it's this really kind of somewhat overly complicated process but it is possible those promotional offers and now we have winback offers and so winback offers are basically very similar to the first two

[40:37] categories but they apply to folks who had a subscription and it is now lapsed which is something that wasn't really obviously easy with the existing promotional offers and so now not only is this a new category of offer it actually has some new functionality to it that's unique to the other so one you can actually set who this applies to in appstore connect I haven't seen the demo but it's like basically you have some selectors on like this can apply to these laps subscribers so you set it there and then what a couple things happen so one you now see this in the auto renewal status field on their store

[41:14] kit 2 response like you'll see like eligible winback offers as an array that comes back from some of the store kit 2 responses but then there's some other things so another place you'll be able to optionally see this is on when they open the app they can actually get a popup which this is kind of huge so like you can turn on this win back offer somebody opens the app and like app store will automatically pop a modal that's like hey you're eligible for this which is actually pretty powerful the other place you can see it is on the App Store and this is kind of cool what did

[41:44] they call this seamless purchasing David what was the name of it streamline purchasing streamline purchasing so on the app store Page like they'll have it there as a winback offer and they can purchase it which like I guess you could see somebody like wandering over the page Maybe maybe they uninstall the app they go back to reinstall it and it's there I'm not so sold on that being well we'll get to the efficacy predictions and then I guess similarly inside the app they have in their own store kit views and like you'll have programmatic access to any eligible winback offers you can decide like how those are

[42:14] displayed but like the accessibility is controlled from the Apple side now that's cool I think some things that make this a little less effective and powerful than like it could be or like what we traditionally think about winback offers are like a very powerful thing for like reactivating and raising your LTV because like there's a lot of customers they'll subscribe for a while they stop using the app they're life moved on but they already know who you are they've already spent money you know they have the need right so marketing to that group can be a really just an easy lift for your Revenue but one of the

[42:44] problems I see with wiback offers is like there's still no way to communicate with these folks oh wait Charlie am I wrong so there is they didn't go super into detail but in their session they did say there is a way to generate an offer link that you can distribute your own way now sure my understanding is you have to perfectly match their eligibility criteria or you could send somebody a link that they're not eligible for right yeah they talked about this in the session it was like you can create this link and then like share it on social and it's like well if you share it on social you would need to

[43:18] say like if and this gets into the eligibility because what you want to do is be like here's a winb back offer list of people make them eligible for a thing also communicate directly to that group of people like here's a thing you're eligible for and again I think apples they're a little tied around their own feet here because by privacy stuff and all that crap they can't really do this but it really like hamstrings like how powerful and it's frustrating because they have the information they know the people they could even possibly be like hey if somebody's opted in to push in the past or whatever let me send them an

[43:49] apple branded marketing reactivation thing if they've oped in obviously that's a bigger ask but anyway it's still something but I still think that makes it less than as powerful as it could be for most developers there's another one too which they kind of briefly mentioned they said that the editorial team may feature your winback offer across the App Store in the today tab well but like in a personalized way so you would I'm guessing it's I didn't write that quote I missed that if they said that but I was wondering the same thing is like will show to eligible people from what I understand the App

[44:21] Store is now actually very much a Tik Tock style feed in a way that apple is doing like user level personalization on like lots of the pages now so yeah it's like if the person is eligible it may pop up in their today feed as part of it if they're eligible and they go to the app tab it can show up in line along with the rest of the like categories and stuff in the app tab so I I mean I think this is really cool this is like apple kind of again helping developers make more money helping themselves make more money along the way but like giving

[44:58] developers and the cool thing about this one is that it's like you just configure a few things in app store connect and like it's done so like yeah is it in and of itself the way it's currently built going to be this massive lift no but it's like you spend 10 minutes filling this out and apple promotes it and it shows up in the App Store when somebody's searching and a perent or two you pay in complexity right so now you have this like thing if it's not that effective it's like not a program you want to be like thinking about running so here let me give the be case here

[45:27] that like you have to be opening the app to see it no because you see it on the App Store because apple on the okay but still like contriving we don't actually know how much that's going to be visible and stuff like that because like every other app that has a win back is going to be competing for that same space right right maybe that happens whatever but like you have to like open the app so like who is this now it's somebody who has churned but is's still actively using the app which at that point I can just like make you see my pay wall right

[45:56] like I'm already got you right like I don't necessarily need this and again like the thing that makes winback offers so powerful in the wild is that you've got marketing channel access to these people you send them an email or a push notification or something like that that's what makes wiback so powerful again it's like apple gets like close but then they just like Miss like the like fundamental thing that makes something powerful right and well I'm I'm going to be begging Apple for a server to server notification when somebody becomes eligible because that would be really powerful cuz then like we at Revenue cas or individual

[46:28] developers could then send that push notification when you get the server to server that somebody becomes eligible but still you were talking about complexity and there's actually not that much complexity to support this because it uses the same thing as promotional offers talking about the technical complexity I'm just like now you have to remember like oh yeah I've got this win back offer running and like who gets hit and who doesn't get it maybe it's minor maybe it's fine and and having it all be like basically for free with App Store connect if your app has subscription like that's pretty cool and you don't have to do like the jws authentication

[47:01] and like the promotional offers is a great feature but it's like not been adopted like we at R really should do more work on promotional offers to make it way easier because it is really powerful yeah but this is like the baby step for anybody can just set it up and it's way easier and then in an email support or whatever you can use these custom links and like it's a nice step in the right direction and making it way easier for developers yeah I suppose if you had a really broad targeting Charlie what were you gonna say I was just going to say functionally it's just like

[47:29] introductory offers like it feels like when you set up a trial it's almost like it's not an afterthought because it's strategically that's way more important but they're really simple to set up it's just a drop- down editor that looks very similar to that and then you just kind of have it and especially if the editorial stuff is real like that's a new entry point in your funnel right yeah yeah well yeah I'll concede it's better than nothing but we'll see interesting at least I think it's got us Revenue cat inspired to like lean into promo offers a little bit more we been talking about today and slack and I

[48:01] think there's a lot of stuff that we could do we've already been working on some stuff related to this but like it's given us some good ideas about how because you know again with us because of the Privacy domain that we operate within like we have a bit more like individually identify like we can connect Who's got what subscription to like a person or like to a push notification token or like whatever so we can connect them that lets us do like you could see a world where in Revenue cat you create an offer just like you would do here we with promo offer instead of with a winback offer but then

[48:30] we also have like the list so we can help you actually communicate to that set of customers I think that's actually where most of the leverage comes from in these winback campaigns yep so anyway nice job Apple we'll do better free money you know if it's one or two% lift in a year it's free and cheap and not super complex to implement so I think it's great and if Apple does create a server to server notification for this then it becomes even more powerful in that for way less effort than promotional offers you'd be able to set up targeting and send out notifications and stuff so super cool

[49:03] and then we touched on it briefly but the Streamline purchasing is interesting that people can actually do the full transaction on the App Store so the app pay sheet will come up on the App Store and they're like paying on the App Store watching the session it was interesting you can turn this off and actually I don't know if it's opt in or opt out I think it's opt in it's opt out okay so I believe so so when you set it up it will automatically allow people to purchase in the app store if you don't want that you can show them the offer in the app store or

[49:36] apple will show them the offer in the app store and then when they tap the button it actually goes to your app where then you can provide a customized experience so if you are creating those something to keep in mind decide whether you want to opt in or opt out to this streamline purchasing all right we are at the hour this has been going I think that's all the major stuff there's a couple little things on there we didn't talk about but there's a bunch of impr to store kit views which is cool and some stuff that on in app purchase testing enhancements but you all use Revenue K

[50:02] you don't need this crap well but use storit configuration files I gotta make Josh Holtz happy because that's his that's his thing but like anybody who's using Revenue cat or not for any storit stuff you should be using storit configuration files to test everything and they made it better this year that's the short answer yeah exactly two last things I did want to touch on briefly Apple announced this thing called Advanced Commerce apis and there's not a lot of information on this yet but in the announcement it says that and for those on the podcast I'm doing air quotes complex monetization use cases and so the examples they gave was content

[50:41] creator apps with Creator subscriptions that's currently a huge pain and we get tons of customers coming to revenue cat can you solve this in a way that the App Store doesn't the answer is no because Apple doesn't support it so apple is specifically saying they're working on this to allow looking for partners there's a form that we can link maybe in the yeah you can sign up to get notified and it sounds like it's going to be a little bit more of a white glove kind of thing but the way I read it and there's other examples complex skew bundling digital content across multiple apps in the same

[51:13] developer account the announcement kind of read like apple recognizes and probably has recognized for years that there's all these complex use cases that the App Store does not currently support with the standard subscript I and Ina purchases and this is them saying okay we're going to start allowing broader monetization options on the App Store maybe they've finally realized that their Monopoly on purchasing has led to some negative consequences and it's time for them to like kind of do what any other purchasing API would allow you to do which is good if this is like Downstream dma stuff like I'm very happy like I'm I'm now Pro dma because like

[51:53] this has been just a problem we've needed for a long time I mean we get so many requests at Revenue cat like they're never like I mean there are some huge examples of apps doing this and I think they've gotten a little bit of wink and not help from Apple to make it happen but like there's a ton of small apps that would benefit from trying to do some cool stuff here there's just like a lot of apps I think there a blog post about this somewhere like the apps that don't exist there's a lot of apps that don't exist because the stuff is too hard and hopefully like they'll

[52:19] start with like some development partners and then they'll bring it down and open it up to more people but I think that would be very good I am all for more business opportunity on the App Store and this is like you know with apple I continually get my hopes up and then get let down but this those things it's like they're moving forward with like Shing model and new monetization and like up on this link to be notified I'm I'm gonna like put all my emails in in that box because I want to know what's going on and then the last thing I did want to touch on is ADD

[52:51] attribution kit we're going to do a blog post on this Eric sufer already wrote a great blog post on this but it's kind of SK ad Network 2.0 it's new and it has some nice things it seems a little more from the developer experience perspective it's a little more under like rockable I watched the session on it it made more to me than skn yeah but it was kind of like a small Evolution like there's some new features but it's fundamentally the same thing like fundamentally same thing it's just like maybe the DX is a little bit better and they fixed a few things um y but I was

[53:21] hoping it with the Rebrand it would be like all new and like new capabilities and like the kind of contribution framework everybody's kind of been hoping Apple would build this is not quite that but it's newer features and better and whatever but hey I think one of SK no like we're never going to get back to the attribution world we were in and like Apple's clear like if you want to do attribution you have to run it through us which is like a little crazy but that's the rule they've thrown down I do think the DX matters I think like SK ad networks like abstractions were

[53:49] weird like it didn't make sense in a lot of cases those are still in the new ad attribution kit but I do feel like it's a little bit more friendly the frustrating part though and this is like with pretty much all Apple announcements is that from my reading of it is that like most of the features require at least 17.4 iOS 17.4 iPad OS 17.4 but then some of the new features like one of the big new features is re-engagement so you can actually specifically because what's happened in the past is like you just run a bunch of ads and sad network doesn't know whether or not they had

[54:23] previously installed the app previously engaged so they just show as if they're a net new user well that's not good you want to understand like who's been remarketed to and re-engaged versus like who's a net new user so this re-engagement stuff is actually really cool and that's kind of the biggest I think announcement for ad attribution kit but that requires iOS 18 so it's like okay maybe in 2028 I mean thankfully people have been upgrading quickly I saw sat recently 77% of people are now on iOS 17 or later so it's good think IOS as a platform people do move quickly to update but when 20 to

[55:02] 30% of folks a year in are still not on the latest version it sucks that all these fun new things aren't Backward Compatible I wish Apple would find a way to do what Google does and be able to backport some of these new things because now at attribution kit maybe 2025 and six like Facebook starts really ramping up with it like they still haven't even fully ramped with esad network so anyways we'll do a deeper dive maybe even do a podcast with Eric sufer to kind of unpack all of this in more detail but something to be on the lookout for and to know it exists even

[55:37] if we're not going to go into all the details here on this webinar podcast but I think that's about it it that's everything it was kind of light honestly for dubdub like there's enhancements we were kind of going into this with this assumption at least on the stor kid side because of I think all the resources that probably put into dma compliance the last 6 months like probably took a lot of oxygen out of the room for working on App Store stuff I don't have any inside information on that but you have to think it's not like apple they're human they only have so many resources and so many threads they can

[56:10] run on at a given time so I wasn't surprised to kind of see incremental good stuff but not like a big revolution this year in on the Commerce side so which it's kind of nice sometimes when it's quiet at least for me and my business it's nice when they don't totally totally turn everything upside down so yeah we can focus more on promotionals and other fun things this year instead of like all new storit 3 or something all right thanks everybody for coming thanks 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. sub club.com

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