S02E11 – To Be Continued
Good morning 👋
Appy Weather on iOS should have been released last month, if everything went as planned at the start of the year. But when opportunity came knocking in April, those plans were put on hold. That said, I didn’t expect for Android to monopolise my focus for the next three months, but here we are. No regrets though. A native radar, alternative weather providers, new pricing options, and specific financial targets were other goals I had set for the first half of the year, and thanks to the intensive effort of the last few months, I’ve managed to tick each of these off in lightning fashion. I feel quite comfortable now to shift my focus over to iOS, safe in the knowledge that the Android version is not missing anything noteworthy, with the narrative changing to maintenance and refinement (I say that, but my roadmap for it still has 300+ items 😂).
So, about iOS. But first, an interlude!
I built Appy Weather using a cross-platform framework: Xamarin. It lets you build a native app in C#, the programming language I’m most familiar with, and enables you to share the business logic between the platforms you’re targeting. Appy Weather has tons, and so this would be a significant time-saver. When building for iOS, for example, the clear majority of my time would be spent building its UI.
And back. Before the April developments, I had created the fundamental UI building blocks for Appy Weather on iOS, learning as I go but at no point actually enjoying it (I’m not a fan of UIKit, Apple’s established UI framework for building iOS apps). Few months pass, and it’s time for Apple’s annual developer conference WWDC 2020. The thing about being a cross-platform framework developer is I don’t approach these events with excitement but dread, paranoid something will be announced that will somehow jeopardise my work. This didn’t happen exactly, but something was announced that made me question things I never expected to at this stage.
Home-screen widgets were announced for iOS 14. Great! Except you can only build them using SwiftUI, Apple’s new UI framework that isn’t supported in Xamarin 😞 See, I want to create a best-in-class app. Coming from a Windows Phone, I know widgets will fundamentally change (for the better) how people use their iPhones. I cannot ship Appy Weather on iOS without widgets. What do I do? Well, I reached out to Microsoft asking for clarification on how they are going to respond to these developments: will Xamarin support SwiftUI? In the meanwhile, for the first time in 18 months, I re-evaluated my tech stack. Apple once again indirectly dictated my priorities.
One of my principle philosophies is that bad things will happen. At work, in life etc. When this happens, the priority shouldn’t be to simply neutralise its effect, but to somehow turn it into a positive. There’s a limited window of possibility. You are open to new ideas. Be bold so that when you revisit this experience, you will tell yourself: This was the moment. I hope so.
Till next Sunday.
Best,
Bardi