iOS 13
An engineering manager's perspective on a yearly announcement.
The build up
Apple are a massive PR engine. There is always hype surrounding a new OS release. They create a buzz and get people talking. Very good.
Months before, people are looking on the internet, searching twitter, browsing popular sites for hints, tips and insider comments and thoughts about what is coming.
Developers get excited! What new APIs will be made available, what else will we be able to make our app do that we couldn't before?
It's fair to say that product get excited - all the speculation is turned into guarantees of product enhancements and whizz bang features. Although, there's always a little bit of fear of the unknown, and whether what we have out there in the wild is going to carry on working!
The announcement
Given the pressure applied by Apple on the Gaming world this year, we had someone attending WWDC. This ensured that we kept our finger on the pulse and were able to react to announcements quickly and get the latest develop builds.
Back in the UK, we watched expectantly from the sofas eating pizza.
Various keynotes came and went and the cheers and celebrations from the venue could clearly be heard. Groans and sarcastic "reallys" followed for the stuff that we'd already predicted (dark mode anyone?!).....but then....
SwiftUI - stunned SILENCE.
The celebrations
Fair to say that iOS13 is a big deal. Lots of focus on security and privacy. I'm sure lots of launch parties took place; lots of hype corrected; lots of talks curated; books being written; re-written; blog posts being written etc etc
WWDC generated a lot of new conference material - developers exploring new APIs and trying to work out how to use the new stuff. We've already had talks at Mobile Monthly exploring some of the new APIs (MetricKit anyone?)
And last but not least...our main app works under iOS13 - cue big sigh of relief.
The reality
The timeline as we know it so far:
- June 3: iOS 13 beta 1 and first look at WWDC 2019
- June 17: iOS 13 beta 2 launched for developers
- June 24: iOS 13 public beta release date for adventurous testers
- July 3: iOS 13 developer beta 3 launch with some new features
- July 8: iOS 13 public beta 2 release date
- July 17: iOS 13 beta 4 launched for developers with security bug fix
- July 29: iOS 13 beta 5 came with a series of bug fixes
- August 7: iOS 13 beta 6 arrived with tweaks to the UI
- August 15: iOS 13 beta 7 landed
- Early September 2019: iOS 13 Golden Master (final dev beta)
- Mid-September 2019: iOS 13 likely to launch with new 2019 iPhones
During this period, developers will be downloading and installing the massive updates to their OS, Xcode and various phones. And that's great. But... big but, we have production apps that are built to run on iOS11 & 12. We need to keep these working too.
We have test teams with lots of test devices to manage - how do we cover all permutations of live devices & OS permutations? How do we keep ensuring that our apps work on the betas as they are released?
Then there's the realisation that we probably won't actually get to use the really cool stuff for a while yet...Swift UI needs iOS 13...we need to support now legacy phones and OS combinations. We've also got a large code base that isn't going to be changed overnight.
We've been watching with interest the adoption of iOS13 using various monitoring tools that we have. It's interesting to watch how many people upgrade their phones. Bearing in mind we have ~2M users, we currently have only 8000 on iOS13 betas. (that's less than 0.5%!)
Developers trying to keep pace and use the new APIs are finding that they are subject to rapid change (even now). Learning them is going to be difficult at this point.
The future
Well, take your pick: https://www.apple.com/uk/ios/ios-13-preview/features/
There's 100% going to be something there that will make your app better. We're promised a better developer environment; quicker application start up and a range of new devices.
What's for certain, is that apps will need updating, new features adding and customers provided with better experiences.
oh....and it all happens again in less than a year!
What have been your experiences? Get in touch!
These are my own personal views and not those of 'The Stars Group'.
Well, it surely could've been a bit more polished release but I am happy to see that Apple is enforcing the same attention to performance and optimization that put into iOS 12 last year. This translates in more rigid guidelines for us as developers, but I'm happy to see the benefits of some of those decisions at the end of the journey. The only thing I really don't like is how they're moving from 3D Touch to haptic feedback because it is jeopardizing the user experience with some unnatural procedures (like "why change the way we delete an app after 12 years?!").