Hello? Hello, everyone.
I’m David Bernard.
And you’re here for our livestream chat about w w d c.
We’ve got Charlie Chapman, the new developer advocate at revenue cat on the line.
I am now the growth advocate at revenue cat. Charlie is actually a developer, so less confusion moving forward on that point. Not making views with me, not actually a developer anymore. The CEO of Jacob of revenue cat, Jacob Eiding. Jacob, thanks for joining us today from your kitchen. I’m a children’s art act advocate today. So a is for alligator, everybody.
Nice.
So today, yeah, we’re gonna talk about WWDC, and we’re gonna have a q and a at the end. So there is a questions tab in this webinar platform.
If you wanna ask a question, ask it there instead of the chat that, we will I’ll ask those questions based on how many up votes there are. So if you see a question you like, upload it, and we’ll get to those first. And if you see a question you’ve that you wanna ask and it’s already there, just upload it instead of duplicating the question, Last thing is we will be recording this, and it will be emailed to all all people who registered and posted to YouTube soon afterwards.
So without further ado, VisionPRO.
I wanted to kick it off with the thing everybody’s talking about. So First. And you have a couple of VR experts here. Yes. Yes. It’s a good good way to start the conversation.
So let’s start with just just hot takes. We can get to I I I do think it’s important to talk through kind of the developer opportunities, the business opportunities.
But Jacob, you’re getting a you’re getting a VisionPRO, day one. You’re gonna be on the line. Right? I’m really bad with mine. I love it, Ohio. Probably.
But I will not stand in line. I’m that’s that’s a past life for me. I’ll get it when it’s easy.
But yeah. I mean, I can give the I was, you know, making cracks on Twitter as one does, but at the same time of, you know, being like, wow, there’s goofy, creepy anime eyes. And then, like, the all the stuff about it that I think is somewhat unsettling, which I don’t remember the iPhone being unsettling. I just remember that being, like, cool. So I don’t know you’d score that like you will.
But I think it actually, maybe if you saw how people use phones in twenty twenty three, you would see how unsett it is, basically nobody looking at each other and staring at them anyway. So we’re already disconnecting from anybody because of technology. Now, those are my cold takes. My hot takes are, it’s like, oh, we have a new computer thing.
Right? Like, that’s the first time. I think since you could count the iPad, I think the watch never really materialized as a software platform. The iPad did.
And so that’s where I was getting me really jazzed up, like, a third of the way or halfway through the video, and then thinking about it going forward, is that, like, we have potentially a new I mean, it’s not gonna be commercially viable this year, but in two, five, ten years, whatever.
By commercial, I mean, consumer grade like mass market, new computing paradigm, which, like, we’ve learned anything. It’s when it’s, like, when new computing paradigms come out, it’s always it stacks. It doesn’t necessarily deprecate all previous computing platforms. So, like, and I don’t see this thing replacing the phone necessarily, not anytime soon.
And so, you know, we had the personal computer, and then then came the, I guess, laptop and then came the phone, and then came the tablet. Right? And, like, everybody still has their per almost everybody still has their personal computer and still has their tablet, And so now we’re going to have yet another platform. Right?
And I think in terms of, like, the business impact, like, that’s a new place for software to live, and, I guess, like, thirdly, the exciting part, that’s that’s gonna be the App Store, be the App Store on your face, which I think is what everybody’s dreamed of forever. Right? But the platform’s gonna be there. The commercialization’s gonna be there.
I guess it’s yet to be seen, like, is the utility there? And, like, what kind of apps warrant being made in that device because, like, three d environments are tough. Like, I don’t know. There’s just a lot you’re gonna need to build to make an engaging experience there.
Versus, like, apps, I think have been really nice because they can essentially be text and some images and, you know, and relay a lot of functionality. I think on the on the the Pro, VisionPRO, it’s gonna have to probably have a little more depth than that, but then maybe not. I don’t know. Maybe everybody uses this at this, like, virtual world computing thing, whatever, I think it’s yet to be seen.
I guess the the the takeaway is it’s I’m excited. I don’t know. I I I know that you guys are excited.
Yeah. So Charlie, Jacob jumped ahead and and started talking business Before you react to it, just give me your give me your hot takes — — data corrections. — you’re excited about it as a as a platform. You’re excited about it as a consumer of personal technology devices yourself?
Yeah. I mean, it it’s one of those funny things where at first it was like, I mentioned to see what they’ll do from a just technology standpoint, and I expected them to deliver on that. I wasn’t ever sure about, like, what is this really gonna be as far as a platform or general use?
And the, you know, during the keynote itself, they definitely sold on that, and I came out of that extremely excited. But very quickly, maybe someone with that enthusiasm died down as I thought through logistically, like, are we really gonna be you know, doing like normal work in this thing. Are you like utility apps and like that type of ecosystem really gonna make sense? Or is it all gonna be kinda niche stuff?
But it was the conversations with everybody throughout the week, people who got to do the demo, and people who’ve maybe played with it a little bit longer, and that that’s what really kind of got me very excited because it does seem like there’s a specific utility there that nothing has ever really been able to breach before.
And like going through the sessions and seeing that, yeah, Apple’s approach to this is it’s the App Store in your face, as Jacob said, like, it really does feel you know, I just watched the, like, App Store Connect videos where they explained it. And the the remarkable thing was how unremarkable it felt. Kinda like the iPad when it came out, it was like, it’s just a big iPhone, but that was kind of the selling point. It’s like, it’s to develop for it, it’s just a big iPhone. But then we saw all these new I’m getting into business too. But we saw all these new, like, new ideas that just made sense with that platform spring up everywhere, and so that that’s what’s really exciting to see how or if that will take off.
Yeah. Personally, I’m I’m super excited. I’m just still such a huge apple fanboy. And I’m I’m excited.
And so was everybody that I’ll throw that out there. Yeah. They were very selective. Condition your condition your reviews on on who actually got to wear one.
But They were very selective in that. Very well. Yeah. Yeah.
But but yeah. And I I think, you know, you hit it too, Jacob. On the I think the iPad is a good analogy. You know, Ben Thompson wrote about it too, where you know, Steve Jobs took the stage when introducing the iPad and said and I I don’t think Apple has clearly communicated this as as Steve Jobs did in the iPad announced, but we said there’s certain things the laptop is amazing at.
There’s certain things a smartphone. The iPhone is amazing at. And to put in advice in the middle of those two things, it’s gotta be really good at certain things. And then he sat down on the couch and read the New York Times.
And the way I’m looking at it is that as a new computing platform, yeah, it probably won’t work in it, eight hours a day. You know, it’s probably not gonna be you know, I don’t see it in the short term, you know, being nearly as big as a smartphone market, even in the early stages of smartphone market, but I think there’s gonna be use cases where it’s just incredible. And then, you know, I sit down with I pad in the chairs right back there, a few hours a week to catch up on the news. It’s just nice to, like, step away from the computer.
I was talking to an Apple engineer who actually got to use it quite a bit leading up to the announcement.
He said there really is something that he would get in there and just kind of be in a flow state that that there’s something about the kind of combination of, like, isolation and and having windows all around you. Like this. Even if it’s kinda janky, it’s super it’s super engrossing when you use it. I have an oculus quest I bought a couple years ago. I had tried, like, the o g oculus. Somebody brought in and hooked up to their massive PC in, like, twenty fifteen. And I was, like, this is novel.
And then when the quest came out, I was, like, oh, it’s too cheap not to just, like, pick it up. And, like, there is, like, a moment when you wear that device where you’re, like, this is something, like, this is cool. Now, that device has fatigue issues, the software’s not that good, it’s low grade hardware. Like, it has all these, like, issues, which I think, like I think there’s something to be said about the the the troubles of starting low.
I think, like, Facebook was trying to hit a consumer price point right away, which creates a lot of challenges, probably because it’s just not that possible to hit a consumer price point right now. But, like, Apple’s done this before, you know, like, that they’ll they’ll get to scale on this high price point, and then they’ll start to work it down over time, and as the the supply chain ramps up and all that stuff. So, I mean, if the demand is there. Right?
So I think that’s the thing I’m still always, like, a little skeptical about? Like, this is this is this the VisionPRO future or is this the virtual boy? Like, the the the the failed Nintendo type thing? Like, I still think it’s something that probably demos really well, but unless it doesn’t matter how good something demos.
If it doesn’t have a killer use case for a large portion of the of the of the population, be it in business or consumer or whatever, it’s not gonna take off just not going to. Apple will under invest in it, maybe they’ll eventually kill it. Like, that’s the reality. And so until and I think that’s honestly where the the first party software won’t matter, but honestly, two tech developers.
Like, I think that’s the that’s the are we allowed to talk business now? I think that’s exciting gambit. I think that’s exciting gambit. I think developers will have to take right now, and and, you know, if I were giving advice, which I shouldn’t, but which is like, dude, should you, as a developer, an indie developer, whatever run out and, like, build something specific to VisionPRO, because it depends on your risk tolerance.
Because I think, like, until you get the device in your hand and we kinda see how it shakes out, you might not know what the use cases are, But, again, you could build up the skills, learn how to build for it, and then, you know, your first thing’s probably not gonna be a hit, but then at least you have some experience on the platform.
The the the folks that I think the the the apps that will make an impact are gonna be the apps that are already well well suited for this, some creativity stuff. Obviously, I think media consumption and all those things, but those are very thin. Like, I don’t even think of that as, like, something we need to build, like, HBO or, sorry, excuse me, Max will just work right on the VisionPRO. You won’t need to do anything special, probably. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of you know, I’m all about software cottage industries. Like, what’s this what’s the cottage industry of software for the VisionPRO.
And because if you look at, like, the Quest Store and the SteamVR store, there’s actually quite a bit of good and this is almost exclusively games category, there’s a lot of innovation in there, a lot of cool little widgets, and things like this. But I think it none of it’s quite a kinda quite kinda hit total product market fit yet, but doesn’t mean we’re not going too right. It’s it it could be the Nokia phone and the iPhone. Right?
We could be at the moment where it becomes good enough to become something that people actually are excited for. And then there’s, like, this self fulfilling prophecy. Right? Like, Apple knows what they’re doing.
They get a bunch of David Bernards to go line up for the first one that builds that first it doesn’t matter how good it is, and you’ll have the haters line up to, like, you know, hate on it. And then this, like, PR cycle just runs away with itself until it be doesn’t matter, you know, if it’s the greatest thing or not, they they buy themselves time to iterate and make it the greatest thing. And then, you know, next thing you know, we’re just walking around with goofy goggles on twenty four seven. So Yeah.
And I I I think you know, you’re saying cottage industry. One of the things that that’s has struck me working deeper and deeper in the subscription app space since joining revenue cap four years ago is just how many little niche apps can actually do really well. But the thing is they do really well because you have a billion people on iOS. You have, like, four billion people on Android.
And I I I’m a little skeptical of the initial business opportunity, especially for subscription. Absolutely. Because if you build a gimmick and charge twenty bucks upfront, or you build content, and it’s, like, five bucks to get this experience, that’s one thing. And that that’s kinda what we saw early on with the App Store.
Right? There was already, like, ten million iPhones by the end of by the end of two thousand eight after the app store had launched, there were thirteen million iPhones that had been sold. So I think Apple’s probably gonna sell as many as they can make, but how many can they make in twenty twenty four? Like, maybe a couple of million max So now instead of selling into a billion devices, which we’re kinda spoiled now to think about market opportunities in the context, of a billion IOS devices.
Instead, you’re selling into maybe, like, two million by the end of twenty twenty Doesn’t matter. You know what Apple’s gonna do? They did this to me with the watch and they did this to me with the iPad. Me and my my the company I worked for is they go, oh, we’re gonna do some featuring for this new Would you like to develop something for it?
And it doesn’t matter. But you you should see guy you should see my Apple TV app, I made. It’s great. Nobody’s ever used it, but it did get us a feature one time.
And I and Apple’s developer relations is really good about this. Right? Like, driving adoption to their platform and stuff. And I guess that’s the that’s the cold water to take away for developers here, like, if, again, if it’s for fun and for play, like, go dive in, go nut, sometimes you just follow your muse.
Somebody somebody will come up with a stupid app that makes a ton of money on the VisionPRO, like, in the first year. If there’s gonna be a beer app or whatever, there’s gonna be the Equivalent VisionPRO app that that’s some fun, really cheap experience that goes viral or something like this. But, yeah, with the with the lack of distribution of units, it’s like going viral is gonna mean something very different. I think, you know I I I I just keep thinking of, like, triple a game titles, some sort of that stuff.
I think it’s gonna be interesting.
Media, and and, I guess, like, potentially, like, CAD things, and stuff like that, like like creative visualization. This going to be something that I think is used for a lot. I used, like, when I designed our house, like, I I did use my oculus to walk around in the house we designed, and I found that experience was, like, Oh, and then it was terrible. I had to, like, send files around and zips and and bings and download weird apps from the quest store.
It was a total mess. It was a total mess that only, like, only, like, a nerd’s nerd could figure out. But, like, if you can make that you can make that easy for either architects or, like, you know, shopping. Like, I think there is a real world here where those use cases don’t happen every day, but, like, maybe maybe in a certain subset of the the economy they do, I could see this start to become a a mainstay.
And it’s something you’re gonna put in your office, you’re not gonna be embarrassed about. Right? Like, hang the quest up. It’s real clunky looking.
I don’t know. It’s not something you want in your in your sleek architecture office, then everybody’s gonna be sharing the dirty headbands and all this stuff. I don’t know. There’s a lot to work out.
Right? There’s a lot to work out. Charlie, how are you thinking about it? You you’re excited.
You’re gonna build dark noise for for VisionPRO?
Yeah. Like, that’s the thing that from the at the, like, indie level of of things, everybody is very excited and thinking through like how they can make their app better. I have a friend who makes a cooking app and we were sort of joking like, oh, you can cook with the headset on. And then the joke slowly turned into oh, you could cook with the headset on.
Like, your timer’s hovering above the actual thing that you’re cooking Have you ever seen what a what a kitchen iPad looks like after a year? You know? Well, but that’s the thing. Right?
Kitchen iPads are extremely popular though. Yeah. With that.
Crusty though. Well, right. Exactly. So there there’s definitely a lot of excitement at the, like, getting prepared for the next device, which who knows how far away that is.
But I also think at the, like, the commercial, like you mentioned CAD, but, like, there’s a huge segment of the iPad popularity that’s businesses. Right? Like, everybody, like, you can probably hear there is a lot of construction happening around me right now. I I was I was trying to hear if it was here or there.
Yeah. I’m I’m trying to hover my finger on the button to submit. Right? But, yeah, iPads are super popular in, like, in, like, those kind of industrial commercial settings.
Right? Yeah. And not that this would be popular there in the same place. But in terms of, like, what is this a similar use case for businesses where this potentially makes sense.
Things where, like, you’re doing something where you need you need your hands. Because that the input method, we haven’t even talked about it. But to me, that’s where they really kinda killed it — But not having control over every other VR heads that I’ve used. — every controller VR controller hand heads controllers are just they’re just so awkward.
You feel like you have lobster claws like it’s Yeah. So, like, some kinda they’re it feels like in the enterprise, like, logistics world, there’s something to be said about computing device that you don’t you need to use your hands. You’re not carrying around this tablet thing that you always have to look down at.
It feels again, I don’t I don’t know what those are, but it feels like there’s a high potential there. I mean to that point, those — Yep. — part of what makes all that work is the price is driven down because it’s, you know, consumer grade. Kinda like a really fit, if you remember.
But for those for those use cases, maybe not. Right? Like, thirty five hundred dollars for, like, something people use in a construction or, like, in some b to b setting is not unreasonable at all. And actually It’s already kinda consumer priced in that aspect.
And Jake said some Jake Moore friend of the show in the in the chat said, I I think consumers will spend big on experiences that make their thirty five hundred dollar investment worth it, and that’s actually a a good point. It’s that they’re probably it’s probably gonna do some really interesting things to what how you have to price. Mhmm. And, like, if if the buy in is thirty five hundred minimum to get on the platform, you can charge eighty a hundred, two hundred dollars if you have a decent experience on there, especially if it has a b to b use case.
And this is where we’ve seen too some of the apps with the best retention and the best pricing leverage and all this stuff do have some business angle to them. Right? And so I I could see that you know, this is all just prognostication at this point, but, like, I could see that being the niche that grows the VisionPRO faster than the Consumer niche initially as, like, prosumer pro spaces stuff, you should see the speculation on some of the pilot forums I’m on, like, people imagining, like, never having to have cockpits anymore, which is a little bit Farfetch, but, like, you can kinda see it.
We You know, you spend a lot of money on these glass display cockpits, and it’s like, well, you kinda don’t need it anymore if you could upgrade this hardware. And honestly, that’s what the the Armed Forces do, like, you know, pilots and and jet fighters have had heads up displays for a long time. It’s it’s it’s a proven technology in that space. Now they still have other screens.
It’s not just that screen. Right? And that’s an augmented reality case fully.
But but, yeah, I I mean, I don’t know. We really have we really have no idea, but Apple people love spending money, and they just gave us a new way to do that. So we should all just be happy. Yeah.
I think the the pricing thing is key and and the business model too. Right? Because if it’s if you’re building the next Iber, and and to Jake’s point, I think people will be willing to pay a lot of money for experiences But I think the business model for that probably is, like, paid upfront and or Hundred fifty dollars to the app, eighty dollars for the app, something that. Yeah.
Yeah. Paid upfront if it’s if it’s a kind of you’re gonna experience it a few times and move on or the NBA court side. It’s like, well, if you’re gonna actually watch you know, season after season game after game, well, that makes sense as a subscription. But maybe you just pay eighty bucks for one pay per view of the finals or something like this.
Right? Right. Exactly. So I think you’re gonna have this combination of of of experiences that that make sense for subscription, but need to be priced higher because you only have a million people.
I mean, the It’ll be different. It’ll be different. All the all the calculations, like, ten percent of if I can just get ten percent of the market and, like I mean, I I actually ran the numbers because I I was working on a tweet storm and then just abandoned it. But Tinder, like one of the biggest apps on the app store, eleven million subscribers out of a billion iOS.
Actually, that’s five billion iOS and Android users.
So so, like, the biggest app that’s ever existed or one of the biggest one of the best at monetizing, you know, one of the most profitable, you’re talking like zero point zero one percent or zero point one percent, whatever the math is on that. But just a crazy sliver of the of the market. So if you’re thinking, oh, two million devices are gonna go out, like, how much of that market can I capture? And there will be that one app that, like, goes viral and, you know, maybe it does capture five percent because everybody just has to experience it and everybody who’s got the VisionPRO is super, you know, following all the news and looking for the new apps and everything like that.
But I think in general, the kind of financial case for building an app is gonna be tough to make. But but on the other hand, like you were saying earlier, Jacob, how risk averse are you know, do you wanna beach head on this platform? And are you willing to put six months of development into it — Yeah. — to to form this beach head that it was a long haul?
Do you wanna write off that thirty five hundred are, you know, harder acquisition you made, basically.
You need a val you know, but it can’t be a hobby. That’s how the IRS defines it. You can’t write off hobby expenses, so make sure it’s something serious.
David, I I I I I clicked on the questions, and everybody’s asking about store kit. So I wonder if we should get to the real meat of the the webinar. Be really right here.
Yeah. I know. I think that was important stuff to talk through though because I I think a lot of people are gonna be thinking, like, should I work on VisionPRO now? You know, how should I think about monetizing?
You know, will my subscription app be a good fit? So for those of you hard. Who are thinking of those things. I hope that was helpful.
But, yes, moving on, I think the biggest news out of w w c did not come into keynote did not come in the I don’t think it was even in the state of the union. So I think we saw this in the docs later, but that is verify receipt has officially been deprecated, Jacob. Seven seven — Eulogy for us. — absolutely chat. F’s in the chat for verify receipt, everybody.
You want me to talk about my good friend verify receipt? Yes, please. So so for folks that don’t know, verify receipt is this endpoint that’s been with us for for a very long time.
It’s essentially the way to convert a base sixty four encoded ASN one container containing all this crap that tells you what is, you know, what what off the device receipt it it just converts it into a JSON blob. It initially started as very much just a convenience layer that you’d send to Apple, and then it would just translate it and send it back. It didn’t really, like, pull new information.
But then when subscriptions came around, it kind of evolved into this thing that actually gave you the up to date status information for receipt. So it went from being this kind of, like, functional thing that in theory you could rebuild yourself to becoming essential because it had the back end connections to get the latest information off of an apps an app store receipt.
And, yeah, that’s that’s what we’re still using today.
It’s, you know, we we get these blobs, we send them, they send us a big JSON, you know, and then, you know, revenue cat and every other, back end provider in the world has to translate that. Now, last year, Oh, and I could tell all kinds of war stories about this endpoint. It’s great. It uses web objects.
There’s something in the stack called Voldemort. I know that because it’s spit it spit out some interesting Java stack traces at us a few times. Once a year or so, it will just return a web page. That’s great. You send it a you send it a a base sixty four blob and it sends you back like the App Store, the iTunes Connect login page, or not the iTunes Connect. It’ll send you iTunes. It’ll send you, like, the old iTunes login page.
And so, yeah, it’s just a it’s a lovely endpoint.
But rewind two years when store kit two came out, Apple actually introduced a new endpoint, kind of properly designed for this use case, part of Storekit two, where, like, you send in just the original transaction ID, along with your, I assume, your API key, and they will return to you the status as it’s represented in store kit two land, and it’s much cleaner. It’s much more orthogonal and kinda point solution and directed and just better. But, anyway, so they didn’t say anything, like, you have to use this, store kit one still works perfectly fine on the device. All of that stuff is there.
In fact, Dorkit one, circuit two on the device might actually be a lot of the same bits under the hood and things like this. They’re they’re not all that different. Obviously, the data storage are the same. So if you make a purchase on store kit one, it shows up in store kit two and vice versa.
There are some caveats we’ve discovered there in the last couple years, but but for the most part, that’s true. But, yeah, Apple kinda slid this one under the radar, but they’ve officially marked the old endpoint as deprecated, which no idea what that means exactly precisely.
I think it depends on who you are. Often deprecated just means, like, don’t don’t start touching this. Like, if you’re new to the game, like, don’t do this, which is interesting because I guess, two years after stork it too, we’re ready for nobody to be touching it. But then, also, it, like, kinda leaves a lot of legacy infrastructure in the wind a little bit because I mean, I’ll say, we’re we’re working on porting the back end bits on revenue cap to this new endpoint.
We actually had started that work already, and now that this is officially deprecated, we’re going to accelerate that work. I doubt Apple’s gonna pull the rug soon, but it does probably mean they’re going to stop including new features and bug fixes and information to that endpoint, it’s probably gonna become deprioritized.
Well, as much as Apple can, because I imagine a ton of their revenue is flowing and using that endpoint still and all these legacy systems that are ten years old. So, like, I don’t know Yeah. I don’t know how they’re gonna attack attack this.
My my guess is it’ll be a long deprecation. Apple tends to be pretty especially for back end stuff and backwards compatibility, they tend to be pretty, pretty easy to work with on this stuff.
But but Who knows? Your guess is as good as mine.
And so yeah. In terms of, like, what it means for developers, I guess, like, most folks you know, we talked to probably weren’t building their own backends, but if you are building your own backends, don’t don’t use it. You had to use the new store kit two stuff.
The good news is if you do have a store kit one based infrastructure, you can send if you’re extracting original transaction IDs from store kit one stuff, you can just send those to the new store kit two APIs, and it just works fine. So, like, I I would suggest maybe slowly porting that over, like, start maybe you can have both running at the same time, have some AB testing or not AB testing, but have some, like, sort of canary testing where you can you can use either, but I I do think it’s one of these things that should be on every back end team’s you know, one, two, three year road map is to swap this stuff out. How big that is, it’s probably gonna depend on how how messy your implementation is.
Yeah. And then, I mean, one of the big things about store kit too though is that it requires I was fifteen. So that’s if you’re building a new app today, you wanna make it iOS fifteen and newer compatible that’s great. But for some apps, you wanna you know, a lot of the big apps we work with, you know, that extra, you know, two percent of the population that’s still on older versions, it’s it it can be a non insignificant amount of money. Well, There there’s a difference here because the the client side and the the back end side are so the back end side works with iOS everything. So, like, you can have a Stork at one implementation still and support back to fifteen fourteen or thirteen or whatever.
You can you can use the receipt, pull her off of there, extract the original transaction ID.
Now that actually isn’t free, though. Like, the transaction ID is does come in some of the SK transaction objects.
But it it’s also in the receipt. If you’re only sending the receipt, you’ll need to extract the original transaction ID from the receipt And if you don’t wanna use the verify receipt endpoint, you’re gonna need to parse the ACN ASN container and extract it from there, which is not rocket surgery. We have, like, a blog post about it. Like, it’s doable, but it’s, like, do you wanna do it?
Like, I don’t know. So, yeah, it’s certainly we’re in this messy transition period where somehow I mean, Storchid two has, like, fixed a lot of things, and and and is generally a better architecture, but, yeah, moving everything. And and because nature of subscriptions in these back end systems and stuff, there’s not a, a huge incentive, and and b, there’s kind of a lot of risk because if you blow it, like, I mean, I know this. Like, we live this every day at revenue cap.
Like, we can’t blow it. Right? Like, we’re constantly taking our time and wanting to do things right. Make sure we’re not missing the edge cases, and all the times that’s what it’s all about.
So, yeah, it’s certainly like something Apple needs to do, needed to do, but it’s not like super fun for getting involved. So Yeah. It’s I mean, it’s especially hard for us doing backward compatibility while migrating to store to and supporting both simultaneously and all that kind of stuff. But for those apps who have not started on your store kit to transition, it’s gonna it’s gonna be a lift And then, I mean, for revenue cat customers, you know, that’s our thing. We’re gonna make it very simple for you.
But, yeah, if you if you have your own store kit implementations, it’s it’s gonna be a lot of work to do. Charlie, anything to add before we move on, No. Not for this one. I’m I’m still, you know, new here and trying to understand how all that back end stuff actually works.
So appreciate Jacob’s explanation there. And the so I I I I fully expect ten years from now on me to still be talking about store kit one, verify receive endpoint on company calls seems to be the one that was getting in the last week. There’s gonna be employees, like, my daughter’s age being like, what the hell is he talking about? Like, this guy, go to the board, get him out of here.
Alright. So that’s verify receipt. And the funeral that the that the long, slow funeral for verify receipt.
A decade from now, maybe we’ll finally put a really wanna try to be the last call though. If they tell me when it’s gonna shut off, I’m gonna really try to be the last person to make an API call, and I wanna verify too. So if anybody from the back end team is I think I I think we’re owed that at, you know, at a at any Well, we’ll probably just accidentally Actually yeah. We brought me up.
I’ve talked to snorkehead engineers before, and they say they they see our traffic. We’re we’re one of the larger traffic to the verifier receipt imports. Yeah. No.
Love my my Apple folks. There wasn’t just death announced at WWE, the death of an API, but there was also a lot of new stuff added. So Charlie. I know you’ve been following this closely, the store kit views.
Tell us about those and how we might expect to use them.
Yeah. I’m I think this is actually really exciting.
It’s essentially like a collection of Swift UI views that Apple’s providing out of the box for basically, for generating paywalls for you. So it’s really, really simple like on the surface. So the idea is, like, there’s one called door view, which all you have to do is pass in a collection of your product IDs as you set them up in App Store Connect, and it’ll just generate a paywall for you. It’s obviously a very apple looking paywall, and there’s there’s a degree of customizability there. And I I do think that they they have added quite a bit there, but if you’re I think if you have a robust, you know, app that you’re trying to optimize the paywall for at all, you’re very quickly gonna run into the edges here and wanna do something custom yourself.
But for just like getting up and running, I think I think there’s a lot of power there. And then there’s another view called subscription store view, which is essentially the same thing before subscriptions more generally. And that that has a little bit more customization.
You can like control you can add extra buttons, although Even the extra buttons are from a list of, you know, acceptable buttons by them for things like restore. Can’t wait for the inevitable app store rejection because the buttons do not Yeah. That that was yeah. I was at a watch party with a bunch of devs, and that was a joke everybody made is, yeah, we can’t wait to start seeing Apple rejections on paywalls that they designed. Yeah.
Yeah. Because like Like for example, terms of use and privacy policy are links. Those are auxiliary buttons that you can configure to turn on, but they’re not on by default, which I have personally received rejections for not having a privacy policy link in my payables. So You better not you better not link out to a page that’s on your website that fifteen links away, you can buy the product because Yeah.
Yeah. Exactly. That will also Yeah. You gotta make sure those privacy policies are — Are very clean, and there’s no They’re just in a in a pace bin somewhere.
Yeah. So that yeah. It’s it seems pretty exciting, like, you know, at first, this is w w d c for me is always a mixed bag because On the one hand, I’m excited, new stuff, computing comes together, all that. But I think me and probably a lot of other developers out there are just always afraid being killed by the giant behemoth that is apple.
Right?
And we I kinda we went through this roller coaster last week on this being, like, Oh, cool. And then like, oh, no. And then, oh, actually cool on the stuff because yeah. I mean, like, what does it mean for stuff like revenue cat? And and others in the ecosystem, like, our partner Superwall and things like that. There’s a lot going on right now on Paywalls.
And and I guess the reason being why and Charlie kind of mentioned this, like, customization and stuff like that. The Paywall is this really high leverage point for you to monetize better. Like, you can win and win or lose a customer at the paywall pretty easily. Are you adequately you know, are you adequately communicating the value proposition?
Are you pricing correctly? Are you surfacing that pricing correctly? Are you making it appealing? Are you talking to you know what I mean?
That’s the user’s moment to buy is going through that moment in the app. Right? So whatever you do on that page can have an outsized influence you know, versus everything else you might do in your app as to whether that user goes through those final steps. Right?
And so there’s just it’s a it’s a very important part of the app, So the the benefits, like Charlie mentioned, it’s, like, time to value or time to market goes down drastically with this stuff. Right? So it kinda reminds me of how, like, settings and table views used to be. Like, I don’t know if you remember you just having to set up table views for settings?
It would be I would just, like, not finish because I’m like, I don’t wanna do this table view to, like, do the settings. And then they let you statically configure table views and I interface builder back in the day. And I was like, oh, okay. I’ll do app again, because now I don’t have to build a whole table view just to, like, do a settings page.
And it kinda feels like that. It’s kinda like, hey, this is like one of these, like, drudgy things you gotta do to, like, get something out to market. And maybe monetization isn’t, like, your core focus right away, or maybe you’re just experimenting with it, and, like, that feels really good.
I think we’ll also have to kinda see how the market reacts and, like, how many people do this because you could see a thing where, like, everybody’s well, I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to decide how to go. If everybody does it, there might be a lot of value in not doing it because then your product looks differentiated. Right? Or it could go the other way where, like, everybody does it. And if you don’t do it, your app looks super sketchy.
It’s like That was what I was gonna say. I I think from this is me guessing, but I would guess that from Apple’s perspective, there’s a bit of shaping them it a little bit here in terms of, like, guiding developers for a certain look and feel, which is why even if you’re completely custom it’s worth paying attention to how these are are set up because there might be some user expectations. Although like Jacob said, there might be a lot of value in not looking like that as well. Yeah.
I mean, Or it just raises the bar. Right? Like, we were dissecting this thing all week, and Andy on our and Nacho and my team, I was hanging out with him in San Francisco. And they were just telling me, like, this thing’s really slick.
And how is it really slick? It does look a little goof. Like, it does look a little basic. Like, it’s kinda just looks like a basic view.
You can customize stuff and things like that, but it it it looks to me like you’ll be able to see this and go like, oh, they stork reviews. Like, that’s a store kid view. Like, they did the they they did the thing from the from the, you know, whatever.
But, you know, the things that does do extremely well, and are kinda hard to replicate to get all the cases for. They handle things like trial eligibility, like automatically knowing whether or not first group like you’re eligible for a free trial, and then reacting to that. They handle all the price formatting, they handle They even handle do some smart stuff when you have multiple products, of showing you, like, sort of discounting in relationships between the different products. I haven’t fully dug into it, but it’s a lot of it’s there’s it’s more than just, like, you know, subscription view shape stuff, which is which is awesome.
And, you know, I I and I think to a certain degree, it’s just gonna raise the bar in terms of, like, what your expectations are for a payroll that’s not using this because, like, if it doesn’t have this functionality, yeah, maybe Apple does start rejected. Like, I don’t know. They could feasibly say that. I think they’d have a revolt on their hands because I think there’d be a lot of really mad, like, very developed apps that that are doing it a different way, and I kinda be surprised as long as they need the criteria, but it could be something like I mean, we’re all use of that.
Right? No matter how well developed your app is getting rejected for you. Small thing on your big wall is kinda par for the course.
Yeah. They yeah. I don’t know. Like, I I I yeah. I don’t know if Apple’s gonna play hardball with it or not.
I can imagine they’re trying to save some amount of money and time in the review process. So maybe I don’t know. I I shouldn’t put too much hope in the review process but, you know, maybe if you are using this, like, it will be a get out of jail free card. Right? You’ll kinda get a pass on how your subscriptions and and and either that’s by by pros like by standardization or just reviewers know once they see an Apple Paywall, they kinda oh, they’re using the STORE GitY thing, it’s fine.
So, we’ll see there.
But, yeah, next what what what’s the new design? Wait. Wait. Wait.
Wait. That was a long time to bite my tongue. This topic. Go ahead, David.
Sorry. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I think YouTube outlined a lot of the benefits and drawbacks.
Personally, I think there’s more drawback here than potential win. You know? Using it. The the paywall is such a key moment. And, I mean, that’s why Jake more. I think who’s on on here in the chat, built a whole company around it because it’s a huge point of leverage.
And to just use the system default, I think I think it provides, like, a good where you’re at. It depends where you’re at. Yeah. That’s what I was gonna say. It’s easy path to a quick Paywall to start your monetization.
But when you’re ready to start to start optimizing your monetization, so for for most mature apps, apps that have, you know, gone past and found a level of product market fit, you’re you’re gonna want to have and and Can I give it can I give a cold take to that quick? Give it a give it a cold state. So so so into the testing part specifically. Right?
So yes. Like, you you can customize and do all this stuff. Right? But if you wanna talk about, like, quickly testing things, the more customized and special your paywall is, like, the potentially more difficult it is to customize for tests.
Right? Like, oh, you wanna try different groups of products. You wanna try different this and that, you gotta, like, hook that all up yourself. With the store kid view, yeah, okay, it’s baseline a little crappy, but that’s fine because you can a be the, like, critical changes and you can iterate on that quickly.
And then once you’ve got something that’s sort of, like, locally optimal, then you can go in and make it pretty or make it cool, right, or whatever. So, like, Yes and yes and no. But that’s why Superwall exists. Well, I mean, there will always be there will always be customers that wanted to not do that.
Right? But I think for I there’s actually more depth here potentially. But just for the fact that it’s, like, cheap — Yeah. — and easy to iterate, and often if you’re in that early and then when I say early stage, I mean, this is, like, pre product market fit to early product market fit, sub ten people.
Like, you’re just, like, starting to build and, like, figure out your pricings and things like this. Yeah. I I don’t necessarily know if if, you know, spending a bunch of engineering resources building out a paywall is the right thing to do, and that’s, I guess, that is an argument for tools like Superwall and whatever to, like, to to get leverage there.
But, I mean, I see this for for I mean, I I started working on an app last week, Thank you. Thank you. I haven’t written any code yet, but I did create a new new xcode project. So, you know But this’ll substantially cut that down. Like, I there’s a good chance I never would’ve finished it. If I don’t have to write the whole freaking paywall, because, like, for me, half of it’s gonna be a paywall, I just wanna if I can use a revenue account and get some subscribers on an app that I have.
This this will cut that down. Right? And so terms of like macro, I think it’s great. Right? More apps. Love more apps.
Yeah. No. I mean, point point and take in, but Yeah. I I think it’s it’s it’s a training wheels.
Right? Like, there’s a reason you put your tray I mean, I’ve done this four times now with my four kids. You put the training wheels on the bike. You know, I mean and that actually, there’s a whole thing now of, like, the balanced bikes Oh, yeah.
Training it might did not work for us. We’re full training wheels here. Yeah. So you put the training wheels on.
It’s easy, you know, you you you get the business of product market fit, but then then you wanna take the training wheels off and actually optimize your payroll. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I I think a lot of people it makes a lot of sense, getting to the getting it on the App Store faster monetizing easier. And then we haven’t even talked about, like, how we’re gonna support it at revenue cat. But I imagine it’s gonna make it super easy for somebody to stand up a paywall using revenue cat, user AB testing without having to write a whole paywall. So, yeah, it it it’s gonna make it even easier to implement revenue I think I saw it in Slack.
Do you want me to talk about that? Yeah. Yeah. Josh Holt was like, it’s gonna be three minutes to get revenue cut up and going.
I said five. Josh said three. So probably it’ll be probably it’ll be seven.
But but yeah. So so, you know, we were hacking on it kind of the weak me, I didn’t do anything.
Josh, I believe in you.
The the We were we were me and Nacho and Andy mostly, at least who I was with, were were hacking on it last week. And one of the things we quickly realized, if you’re using revenue cat, is like, we we’ve already spun this up. I don’t know if it’s in the main line yet or if it’s probably just in the in the in the current main branch, and we we might have shipped it yet. But, yeah, we have this concept of offerings in revenue cat, which essentially map to a paywall.
It’s like a group of products and some metadata and things like this. And we also just shipped metadata as well with those offerings. And we we’ve written an extension to, I guess, the subscription, shortcut subscription view, I I I guess, that you just pass that in and we take care of everything else. So, like, instantly, you have remotely configurable paywalls with the new store could be, which is crazy.
Like, that’s a lot of work saved. And, again, it’s it’s and Jake kinda mentioned this too, or in the chat here. He’s just talking about Super Bowl stuff, it’s like, the more people with paywalls means better for everybody. Right?
In terms of the folks in this industry, at least, or like the need for revenue cap. Like, we were joking, yeah, at first, I thought we were dead, right? And then I realized, like, actually, that the existence of this made the existence of revenue cat that much more valuable. Right?
So if you subtracted a little bit of utility from us, you then multiplied by us, and now you actually net net more utility. So I think that it I think it’s Yeah. I think it’s it’s a kind of a win, hopefully, for everybody.
And stuff, I hope Android we grew great if Android followed suit.
Because we could take advantage of that as well. So, yeah, if you if you want to ship something, the caveat being this is iOS seventeen only, right? So, like, which is not really gonna be a viable, target for a while. But, you know, if you’re working on something that you’re not so concerned about mass market adoption soon, you just want to get it out there and test and play with it, and you’re building something for the future. You know, what iOS seventeen will hit in a few months, probably mainline. And then yeah. So becomes a pretty viable way to ship a paywall sooner than later.
But, yeah, we’re our our take on it right now is we’re gonna try to make it as easily configurable and fast as possible.
And, yeah, we believe that with some things that we’re working on internally, which is, like, ways to sort of circumvent the App Store Connect configuration process, which we’re very excited about. Plus these paywalls, and and and we’re gonna make good on Josh’s promise in three minutes. Like, literally, sign up to revenue cap, drop your API key in a command line tool, and you can transact a purchase in Sandbox in, like, in in five minutes, which you know, revenue cat, we were originally, like, subs iOS subscriptions in hours instead of months or something like this. And so, like, How much more leverage is minutes versus an hour?
Who cares? Let’s just, like, compress it down to, like, the minimum time possible, but Yeah. The more the more folks we get using paywalls and subscriptions, the more people are monetizing, the more people are finding out if their apps are valuable to people, and, yeah, it’s good for the whole ecosystem.
Yeah. That’s that’s a great way to summarize it. Alright. So we have a few other changes.
I’m just gonna breeze through these because they’re not, like, super impactful. But there are new store kit testing tools. There’s a transaction manager that makes it easier to test. There’s some new configuration settings Actually, well, Charlie, give us give us select ninety second of each of those.
Okay. The new transaction manager looks nicer. Biggest thing is it lets you test errors coming from the database, which — That is great. — that is fast.
I think that’s gonna be really awesome. Does it let you test if spits back a web page instead of a Yeah. You know, I don’t know. I might have to I might have to try and I might have to file a a feedback request on that one.
Yeah. There you go. And then store kit configuration settings?
Well, that’s part of the store kit configuration settings. Oh, okay. The transaction manager itself is just kind of updated to feel a little nicer. I don’t I think the main new feature was the configuration settings in it.
Gotcha. And then there are some new fields in store get to store front country code, reason, and next renewal date. I can I can take this one? Alright.
Go for it. It’s It’s they added some new stuff to the back end response, actually, which, you know, often ends up, you know, in revenue cat land. That’s have we think about a lot.
But two of the big fields are the storefront and the storefront country code, which essentially This was something that revenue cat does. Like, we collect when you make transaction purchase, what store it was purchased on, ie, like, what, countries, store, which aren’t don’t map map one to one with countries. They call them storefronts. You can collect that on the device.
You never could get that on the back end. So if you hadn’t collected that at the time of purchase, you’d have a heck of a time trying to, like, figure out where did this purchase come from, if you’re trying to do any sort of revenue, understand And so, obviously, other people have complained, because we didn’t ask for this, because we had figured it out. But now they’ve added it, So which is good for us. Revenue Cat will get more more accurate, and then also anybody trying to roll their own subscription back end.
Like, this gives you a little one more piece of visibility and stuff. And so, yeah, there were some other fields. I think those that that was kind of the main one. That’s that’s important.
But but, yeah, so so more a couple more visibility things on the back end that just kinda help you more under and, and we’ll we’ll for the stuff that we don’t already have, we’ll be ingesting that and making sure it’s visible in the in the dashboard and and events and all that Yep. And then the next big one, and I see we do have a question about this, is privacy manifest Charlie. What is a privacy manifest? And does revenue cap have to do something? Do the users of revenue cap have to do something?
Yeah. So this is basically the ability for third party SDKs to include a manifest that apps whenever they consume third party SDKs, they can index code and I believe this is the only thing they can do with them. They can generate a PDF that’s like it’s I think they call it the privacy report. And then you can use that privacy report fill out your nutrition label, the privacy nutrition label that they added.
Was that last year or two years ago to the App Store. So it doesn’t automatically merge straight into your privacy manifest. Like, if you have the As far as I understand right now, I didn’t see away, and the way they talked about it was only by generating this PDF. I’m guessing it’s PDF.
This is a this is a I can guarantee you what happened was that’s what supposed to do. And then about some time in April, they were like, we’re not gonna be ready. And so they’re like, oh, we could just do a PDF. That’s a guest.
That’s a guest. Or yeah. Or that too. It could’ve been pretty legal.
They’re like Ultimately, it’s your responsibility.
Right. Yeah. Which is which is what I would suggest. Like, I don’t think like, you know, because revenue cats is interesting because it depends what you do with it.
Right? Like, we have some arbitrary fields and stuff like this. If you don’t add anything crazy to revenue cat, it’s pretty clean. Like, we can’t really discern all that much.
We throw away as much as we can on the back end in terms of, like, IPs and things like this. It’s like, we try to keep it privacy, friendly as possible, but we also have user attributes. So if you wanted to put somebody so secure, do not do this. If you wanted to, a developer, could.
Right? Like, you could stuff data into revenue cap. We don’t we can’t, like, go and scrub that. And if you did, there might be good responsible reasons you wanna do that.
Right? And so you need to disclose that. And so I would hate for us to be like, yeah, we can take certain PII, right? But then a developer That gets included in every single developer’s app and app manifest would not be good for revenue cat, which I guess maybe is my primary concern, but then also it can scare your users because it’s, like, you might not be using it in that way.
So that that’s good to hear. I think that is it’s annoying, but that’s probably the right way to do it. Yeah. Exactly.
And to your original question, David, do we have to do something like this?
Sort of I don’t think we do. So the other thing that comes with this is we can now sign our releases so that we can confirm they’re coming from us. And both of these things, the privacy manifest and signing your SDK releases are not required unless Apple’s flagged you as a privacy impacting SDK.
I don’t know how this process works. They kinda glossed over this. Like, there are some SDKs that we’ve labeled as privacy impacting. M and Ps ad network.
I’ve sure there’s yeah. Yeah. There are specific categories that they’re going after who, yeah, do a lot of people here. Told us that that I know of.
At least so.
So yeah. So for those, these are required.
Otherwise, they are highly recommended. Yeah. That’s great. The science is great. Like, this has been a this has been a an injection attack on Android apps. I know, like, people basically hijacking SDKs and and and putting malicious code in them and then just redistributing them on, like, third party sites and things like this.
So that’s awesome. I think if we can support that, like, we will definitely sign our SDKs. That’s something we will we would really be into doing. Also, with the privacy manifest, I I think we’ve started on.
But, yeah, we’ll make sure we have something in there, and we’ll use it to the best of our ability that makes sense. But then, yeah, it’s still at the end of the day. It’s it’s the developer’s responsibility to go through, and it’s a good exercise. Right?
Like, what am I using? What is getting slurped up? And and because it might actually change your decision about what you use, right? Like, I think that’s been the best I actually think the privacy labels were a great addition.
Even though they’re kind of like soft enforcement, I think in a lot of cases it causes folks to be a little more. I mean, same thing with nutrition labels on food. Right? The idea is, like, how to make it form choices.
But but it’s the developers making it form choices. Right? Not necessarily consumer. Right.
I think the idea here is, you know, even the most well intending developers probably did this work initially, and then SDKs changed behind the scenes and they weren’t necessarily paying attention. Oh, yeah. Getting released notes or anything. And so the idea, I think and the reason why you can generate this PDF is that before every release, theoretically, you should run this and see if anything’s changed.
Specifically related to privacy. I don’t I didn’t see, but it would be interesting and I bet tools will crop up to like let you do diffs against previous releases.
Mhmm. Yeah. That would be helpful. Yeah.
And it is interesting from a revenue cat standpoint that, you know, our our privacy manifest will essentially be we don’t collect any PII because we even throw away the IP address. Like, by default, there’s nothing. But then like you said, it’s like, Well, depends. Like, what are you collecting?
What are you storing in revenue cat? Yeah. So revenue cat’s not storing anything, but you better look at You better look at what data your story Which is which is it’s very intentional. Right?
Like, I wanna try to it’s it’s hard to make everybody happy because everybody has, like, a different privacy philosophy, and their customers have a different privacy philosophy, and just like different business needs and whatever. So we try to be, you know, as it that as accommodating as we can to everybody.
You know, that’s not a one size fits all. So Yeah. So we kind of already jumped ahead and started the q and a since the the the privacy manifest was already on our list. So one question down. Let’s move on. So if you have questions, go ahead and throw them in we’re up to the ones that you want asked.
The next highest up voted is where there specific API changes announced at WWE that are gonna impact functionality of revenue cat. This was asked very early on in the conversation. I think we addressed most of those. But off the top of your head, Jacob and Charlie, were there any other changes that we didn’t bring up that will impact Robin to cat?
I mean, we’ll make sure it works on the VisionPRO. We’re gonna do all the backend fixes. And then, you know, there’s some things that maybe make subscriptions easier, and that’s great because it, like, pushes us to push harder. Right?
And so, like, we’ll adapt and and and and take things up and and move up the stack and keep pushing, you know, on behalf of developers. So Yeah. No. I think we kinda touched on everything that I think was relevant to to our SDK.
So Cool.
Next question is how do I stop it’s how do I stop sucking at selling it out of service? All your heart.
Listen to the sub club podcast, but this is out of scope for the current conference I think that’s the that’s the answer. Listen to sub club. I got I got all kinds compliments about sub club when we were in San Francisco last week. So apparently, it’s good.
I am I’m incapable of believing anything I work on good, so people have to tell me. But apparently, there’s some good stuff there. So Yeah. There’s your answer.
Good answer. Listen to Sub Club. Alright. Emmanuel asked, thoughts on the new subscription store view, will it be possible to include lifetime options?
Oh, is it not? Is that an edge case that I missed?
Well, so early studies. The the construction around me has gotten progressively louder through all this. So it’s either loud. So it’s Okay. Good. Good.
Yeah. So like I said, there’s there’s two different Well, there’s actually three different, but two main different Switch UI views for this. And so one of them is the subscription store view. And that seems to be specifically around subscriptions.
Like, you pass a group ID. You can’t have an IAP single usage. Yeah. But then But then the store view, I believe that should support all of those.
And then you don’t get all the, like, fancy subscription specific stuff. Exactly. Right. Awesome.
And then there’s there’s like a lower level one that’s just the product itself and you can kinda construct your own out of these product components.
You’re not getting all the free subscription stuff out of it. So as far as I’m aware, I’ve mostly been going through docs. I haven’t really dug in specifically for this question, so maybe there’s something hidden in there that I haven’t seen. But, yeah, I don’t think that’s possible. Here, Apple, I’ve solved it for you. Don’t fix these views. Just create a subscription product duration that is forever.
Right? Oh. Just goes in a subscription group because this is already a problem we have where people can buy lifetimes, and then because they’re not in the same subscription group, then they have to actually buy another one, and stuff like that. Just allow us to put one in there and set the duration for and then you can people can you can probably have better cancellation rules and logic and things like this around it, so that one’s for free.
You can just take that and do that. So but, yeah, it it’s it’s funny. That is a huge case. Like, everybody who’s most people, not most, but, like, a lot of folks use the lifetime thing as in, like, at an anchoring point in a way to, like, drive revenue.
So but maybe back to David’s point, that’s kinda why you wouldn’t use it. Like, you you’re not if you’re at that point where you’re like, oh, I lifetime is where I’m gonna make money now. You’re probably already too far along for store kid views, and you’re gonna wanna build something yourself.
Now, I mean, in Emmanuel’s case, like, one man shop, kinda, like, you know, kinda thing. Like, maybe he’s evaluating the ROI and being like, hey, if I never have the right paywall again, like, this might be a good trade off. Right?
So But, you know, that’s what you get when you when you’re pushing down into the stack. Right? Like, you’re not gonna always have every little detail, and that’s probably that’s probably what’s gonna graduate people out store kit views. Right?
They’re gonna want to try something on monetization and go like, oh, it’s not supported, and then they’ll have to do an ROI, and and see if they want to copy it. But maybe at that point, if we do have these component views not the heaviest lift in the world. Right? If you just can pull out some of the subviews and things like this.
But Yeah. Yeah. That’s I think that’s what’s cool is there is this decent, like, laddering story from, you know, you get all the configuration stuff set up with this view. And then yeah, whenever you wanna add something new, now you’re really only focused on the the view part of it.
You’re not having to to worry about actually hooking it up to f store connect or revenue cats SDKs or any of that, that can all just be figured out initially with kind of the default behavior. And then you can just swap swap out the views and kinda ladder up to a more custom paywalls.
I wanna this is not a question, but a manual posted this in the chat in, like yeah. He seems to think that that the views, they are gonna be mandated to cut down on on scam apps and the, like, I mean, I don’t know. It could be a special entitlement. You can imagine a world where you have to apply for a special entitlement to have custom paywalls or something like this. I don’t know.
Here’s here’s my take. Apple Apple already has a choke point, and that’s the pay view. It’s it’s where you have to double click. And they’ve actually done a lot of iteration on that over the last few years There used it used to be the scam apps we’re doing this thing where, like, you put your finger on the home button because the finger like, your first page pays and maps or whatever.
Yeah. That Yeah. There’s, like, so many ways that that the actual view that you pay was being hacked, but, like, that’s Apple’s point of leverage, and that’s where they should focus their efforts. I would be shocked if they ever require this.
Because, I mean, it’s not good for them, it’s not good for developers, this is an on ramp for people who want to move more quickly. This is not a I do not see It’s not it’s not insignificant. Right? In terms of, you know, what does keep Tim and that Tim’s Mary, folks, like, you know, going is they gotta show up for quarterly earnings reports.
Right? And so, like, this story this is crazy that we’re having this discussion. Biggest this coming in the world kinda all of their, you know, substantial portion of their revenue runs through. At least a substantial portion of their high margin revenue runs through this little class that we’re talking about.
Right? So they they are, like, they aren’t disincentivized from, like, muddling with it too much, but I don’t know. I mean, there was, like, a while, it felt like reputation of the App Store was really sliding. I think they’ve gotten better.
They’ve cleaned things up. It seems like you don’t see the, like, app store filled with scam apps. Reporting as much, you know, maybe with the exception of that, the Chad GPT piece that went out a few weeks ago. But, like Yeah.
I don’t know. I don’t know. I’d say crazier things have happened, but I don’t think they have. So Us here in subscription land, it looks even more forward in some ways.
Look at look at all the games with, like, a million different, like, GitMs and — Oh, yeah. — and, like, all that kind of stuff. I mean, I was here. Used to have one for that?
I said, I don’t know. I have to go look. I I swear there used to be some stuff for, like, store view way back in the day. I don’t know.
My memory is failing me these days. So Yeah. But, yeah, I I I would be shocked if it ever becomes card. There’s just too too many different ways you can do pay too many different all the things.
Alright. Last question and I’m not sure we’re gonna be able to answer this. I recently got a a patient warning about the use of Storchid two with some stuff about it not being better in practice or something like that. What’s gonna Oh, I think this is talking specifically about the Revenue Cat s c k.
Yeah. We were getting some weird, funny reports on Dorkit two implementations from client we we started to push some Storkit two client side stuff, and we and it’s essentially it should be a non visible change. Like, it should just be an implementation detail. And when we pushed it, there was, like, some issues.
So we’ve actually rolled that back and and and sort of changed how we’re attacking the circuit two migration, I just I wouldn’t worry about it. There’s there’s there Josh is typing in the chest. Maybe I’m maybe I’m off, but I don’t think there’s any any benefit or upside. To using it presently, and you should just use I think the latest version of the SDK.
So the latest version of the SDK actually deprecates the option.
So, yeah, just you can switch it back to s k one. It’s fine. Like, we probably should’ve never rolled that option in the first place, created a bit of a backwards competitive in us, but we’re working through it. So s k two on the back end is more important for us initially because that’s kind of again, to back to that deprecation thing, but but the client side should just, yeah, you should just be safe to ignore that.
Turn it off. So Awesome. Yeah. I know.
And we were still fine. I mean, any of these kinda big migrations and big changes from Apple, like, we’re we’ve filed a love story kit two bugs over the last couple of years since It’s, like, fourteen or fifteen or something that we’re tracking right now. Yeah. It’s kinda awesome, which they did fix some in iOS seventeen, not all of them, there are some fixes in IRS.
Yeah. So things are getting better. And then not all of them are backward are are backported all the way to Iowa fifteen and, like, Yeah. We’ve we’ve seen some really interesting stuff too when you intermix.
Like, sometimes — Right. — things will change once you call the SK two store again. It’s fun. It’s good times.
Fun times. Alright. Well, I think that’s a pretty good overview of what happened at at w w w e c, and thanks for everybody for showing up. Thank you, Charlie, and Jacob for for joining me.
And I’m gonna go ahead and end it here, and thanks again, everyone. Thank you, Ebony Cat Nation. A is for Alligator. See you later.
Bye, Jake.