327: Ready for Distribution

Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development. I'm Marco Arment. And I'm David Smith. Under the Radar is usually not longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started. We made it to the other side. This summer has been... A journey. So looking at – if you're a longtime listener of Under the Radar, A, thank you, and B,

You may have noticed we've gone through some stuff. If you look at the titles of the episodes of the show over the summer, we have The Aftermath, The Title Wave, Design Despair, and then Upswing. It's been a journey, but here we are, and it's the middle of September. iOS 26 submissions have opened, and I think I am delighted to report that both of us...

have submitted apps, have had our apps approved. We made it. We did it. He's like, good job us. Yeah, we did it. It was, as you said, it was a struggle, honestly, working with the new design language. I mean... Whenever Apple does a big – you know, visual design update, you know, whether it's a new system theme or the year they added dark mode, it creates a lot of work for every app developer, including Apple itself, because you have to, you know.

go through your app and go through every screen and make sure that the metrics still work and then consider redesigns or different tweaks to it and trying to do that while also maintaining backwards compatibility with the old OS if you need to. It's a huge undertaking. It's a ton of work. And I do think this summer was made especially difficult because liquid glass is complicated and I think not fully baked yet. And it's not – like it isn't –

You can't just leave it alone and hope for the best. Like you do have to really do a lot of consideration around it. Some of the new design language does not work well in certain circumstances or certain surroundings. So you have to like make different design choices to try to minimize its. And so it's been a journey. It really has. It's been quite a lot to go through. I personally, I've reached a point now where I am generally satisfied. It did take a lot.

I did have to – I needed to get used to some of liquid glass, some of the parts that aren't necessarily bad. They're just different. And there's a lot about it that I actually do like more than the old system. As I've been doing final release testing for Overcast, I've been using a lot of iOS 18, testing that old version or testing the version on the old OS rather.

And it's interesting. When you go back to iOS 18 after using 26 for a while, it does look old. You do feel like you're going back in time. Also, everything's really fast. But it does look old. And so that does kind of make me appreciate the new design more once I see the old one again. So I've gone through this journey.

And with Overcast, I decided to just put it up there. I submitted it to the App Store once you get the GM, and I submitted it with automatic release, and Apple approved it the next morning, and it's released. So it's out there. It's been out there for about a day and a half now.

And so far, the reaction has been very positive. I was, as you heard me on this show, I was terrified of the reaction. I think one thing that I mentioned on ATP, regular people largely like the new design, like the liquid glass, iOS 26 design. Most of the criticism of it is coming from... Old Mac nerds like us and UI designers like us sort of. And so it's valuable feedback and I think it's important feedback. And I think the practice of UI design.

has gotten lost in the practice of graphic design. I think those things have become conflated where they really should not have been. They really should be two things that work together. And right now, UI design seems to not exist anymore. And now it's only graphic design. But at the end of the day, the customers don't...

care nearly as much as we do. They don't see nearly as many problems as we do. They don't see nearly as many poor UI design or poor usability or poor accessibility choices as we see. Because it's our job to spot those things and avoid those things and design things to be usable and accessible and universally applicable. And that's our jobs. We're good at that. Most people aren't seeing that. Most people, they get the new theme on their phone and they're like, oh, it looks cool.

Yeah, everything's clear and glassy. They like it. They like things that look cool. It looks fresh and new. And so we have to, I think, I've reached the point where I accept that... You know, we're going to have some usability sacrifices for a little while as this is the current in-fashion theme. It will change over time.

Over the next two or three years, I'm sure they will tweak the design to like send off some rough edges or improve some things that maybe don't work as well in practice as they expected or something like that. You know, that happens with every big system redesign. But in the meantime, I'm embracing it because most other people will.

Everyone else out there, all my customers, my existing customers and my potential future customers, they're all going to embrace it. They're all fine with it. They all like it even, or at least most of them like it. My opinion as – I consider myself a pretty good UI or usability designer. My opinions as that role almost don't matter when it comes to deciding what to do for my business. What my business needs to worry about is what's everyone else going to use and how is my app going to look?

in the store? How's my app going to look on everyone's phones? How's it going to look against my top competitors, number one of which is Apple's own podcast app? So I have to consider all of that. I think I've reached a point now where I accept Liquid Glass. For all of its flaws. I accept that this is what we have. This is what is shipping. And I've tried my best to embrace what's good about it, to avoid what's bad about it, and to ship something that I think is pretty good. Yeah.

And remarkably, my customers are agreeing with me. Like I don't think I've ever been as nervous to ship an app update as I have with this one. I think I let myself believe. that the criticism of iOS 26 was more universal than it is. And that's because I follow mostly other nerds like me. My main social network is Mastodon. My main...

friend groups around Apple are like other Apple nerds and other programmers who are more skeptical of this design or have more problems with it. So I thought that the hate of 26's design was going to be a real risk for my app adopting the design. If I adopt the design and everyone hates it, that's going to blow up in my face. But so far, it seems like...

That's not the case. And in fact, I've gotten a more positive reaction to this redesign than I've ever gotten about any other change I've ever done to Overcast's UI. That's great. It's shocking to me. And I'm incredibly relieved. I'm a little suspicious, to be honest. I'm having a hard time believing it so far. And we'll see. The general public doesn't have it yet. They don't have iOS 26 yet until next week. But it's...

a lot of people using it already, and the reaction has been incredibly positive. I've got a couple small things to fix, but it's nothing major. I'm incredibly relieved and really surprised.

Which is great to hear from my perspective, because my app updates are currently pending developer release. I'm expecting to release them on Monday alongside iOS 26. And so I'm still in the...

terror, fear, bracing for the blow kind of side of this feeling. And it is very encouraging to hear that your initial actual real world, not just... test flight not just narrow like out actually in the world world um response has been positive which is just good to hear because it's like yeah it was one of these things like it's just the the inevitability of the summer was a really challenging, complicated thing. And six episodes of us wringing our hands and going back and forth on it.

It's not straightforward if you aren't totally excited about all the aspects of something to be excited to go forward with it. But at the same time, it was coming. And, you know, we, you know, at the beginning, in June, when they announced it, like. The timeline has been exactly what I expected it to be, that I needed to be ready to submit beginning of this week. And that's what it was.

That was coming regardless of whether my feelings about it were positive, negative, or indifferent. That was going to happen. And so that was – I think we – I'm glad we were able to work our way along and get to a place that we're just like, yeah, no, this is coming. And I think there's an element of just doing – it's like sometimes the best we can do is just the best we can do.

And I think I'm really happy with my designs. I think having had the same experience as you this last week where I've been doing a lot of iOS 18, iOS 17 usage of the app to make sure things are working there. And it's like, yeah, I prefer the new app. to the old app. That I can say definitively and straightforwardly. I prefer using the iOS 26 design. I think it is a better design.

That doesn't mean that I don't have complaints or problems or things that I wish were slightly different in iOS 26, but it is an improvement. And I think that has taken some work and some effort and some thoughtful...

aspects of the way that i've done this and there's you know it's there's a lot of working around rough edges rather than being able to smooth them off which is you know never feels great when you're in that situation but it's like we got there and i think that that's an accomplishment and a cool thing and i Yeah, I think it's just going to be a fascinating next...

Realistically, it's probably another two months before the majority of our customers are running iOS 26. And so this next couple of months is just going to be very interesting to get a sense of... You know, where the trends are, where people are going. Like, I think something that I've been fascinated by is I've, you know, I've been very public about my iOS redesigns. You know, I have a whole, like...

Series of design posts on my website talking through the evolution. I have a video where I'm doing like before and after. It's like I've been very public about it. I haven't seen that many other people's iOS 26 designs. I've seen Apple's, the ones that they've shipped with their apps. I've seen Overcast. I've seen a few other apps. But a lot of them haven't. And so it's going to be a fascinating thing where it's like we get to probably next Monday and we all sort of like...

Here we go. Here's our things. And I'm sure there's going to be some things where I see and I'm like, oh, yeah, that's better. And, you know, there'll be some quick reshuffling of things in my apps or things that I do, or maybe some, you know, like stuff that I'm doing that people will...

Be like, yep, no, actually, that was better than what I was doing. There's this interesting period where we're going to have, before it really goes wide, for us to kind of run around shuffling things around, being like, yep, no, that's a better pattern for that. That works better here. Oh, I wonder how they did that. And then we can share best practices or things we've learned or some of the weird stuff that we have to do there.

It's been an interesting process in that way of like you just – I don't know. It's like we got here and it was coming inevitably and I'm really happy with it. And it's super psyched that you're happy with Overcast. And you should be. I've been using it and it's –

It's a slightly funny situation over the summer because when I first put iOS 26 on my main carry phone, one of the things that I said at the time was that I need to go full liquid glass everything. I didn't want to use any apps that weren't Liquid Glass. And so at the time, that meant that the only podcast app that was available to me was Apple Podcast. And so I switched to using that for like a month. With tremendous reluctance, I did this. Don't feel bad. It's okay. I absolve you of your sins.

I'm immediately back in Overcast and everything's better. But there's a period where I was really wanting to be immersed. So like all the apps I used were, you know, liquid glass apps. And it was interesting then to go back to now Overcast with. liquid glass and it's like oh this is nicer I like like I like the way that you've you've done it I think it works it works really well it's a like we talked about before it's a light touch you know it's native but not

extremely native, not going over – not leaning so far into liquid glass that you start really hitting some of the rough edges. It's a really – thoughtful, clean design. And it's like, I think there's going to be a lot of that, that we see a lot of people who are native, but are just in a comfortable way, not, you know, like, and then somebody for my apps, it's like widget Smith. I think it's redesign is more like what you did.

where it's, it's a, it feels natural, but isn't really pushing it. And I think Pedometer++ is a much more, like, it's very liquid glass and lots of, you know, lots of transparency, lots of shiny things, you know, lots of... concentricity, you know, everything's concentric. And that's just, you know, it's like, I really, even between those two apps, really curious to see kind of what we, what people respond to more and less and what I, you know, what changes I'm going to have to make because.

I think I remember this from last year when you and I were talking about our iOS 18 releases and how the mental picture I have for... software development that I think has been very helpful is that of like a farmer's carry. So like in fitness where you pick up something heavy and you carry it as long as you possibly can and you put it down and then pick it up and carry it again. And it's like...

We've released these updates. They're out. In this case, I've submitted mine and they'll be out on Monday. But they're not done. All that hard work, all that hard graft over the summer to get to this point. And then now it's like, well... Now we've got to pick things back up and keep going for the 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4. So we have a lot of work ahead of us. So in some ways, great, we've reached the starting line, which is exciting, I suppose. Yeah, I mean, that's like...

I have not even touched any of the new iOS feature APIs. I haven't touched any of the foundation models. They finally gave us... on-device llms that we can use for free and we can do all sorts of stuff with them and i have not even started i have not even tried because i didn't have time like you know this took up

All the time I had was just getting the design refresh out the door. And there's a lot of features that I kind of have laid the groundwork for but haven't had time to finish and fully implement. And I would love to get back to those now too. I'm looking forward to this period now, the design obligations. are pretty much taken care of you know again i got a couple of minor bug fixes with it but it's not you know it's not going to take me more than a week um i don't think knock on wood um

So I'm looking forward to just being able to get back to feature work now and to dive into a lot of the other stuff that we can now do with the new APIs, with the new capabilities. And just stuff that doesn't require new APIs. It just required time. One of the most common... Request for Overcast is per episode artwork, which used to be something no podcasts ever used and now is something that lots of podcasts use. And so...

Yeah, that's on my list. Like I had to build some support here and there. I got to do a little more work to make it happen in a privacy sensitive way. But otherwise, like, yeah, that's coming. But I haven't had time to do it all summer. Stuff like that. I'm finally starting to record season tags on podcasts. And so I can display things by season once I build in that UI. There's just so much stuff like that that I have been wanting to do.

And the big design work blocked that. But now I feel like I'm free. I haven't been in a place like this where right at this moment, I don't feel like I am behind.

Right at this moment, I submitted my iOS 26 build for day one, actually got it approved on day negative four or whatever. So I'm actually ahead of the game on that. I have not been... on time or ahead of the game for an os release in years and that was entirely fixed now thanks to the hell i went through for the last couple of years doing the rewrite

Really, the rewrite is what enabled me to have this speed again. And then as soon as I had set all the fires out, or put all the fires out from the rewrite... Then we get this system redesign. So that kept me busy for the last few months. But now I feel like I'm on fire. Now I'm like, I have so much potential now. I can do so much now because the big stuff is done. The rewrite.

I know I have a couple of areas of bugs that people keep hitting. I'm rewriting the downloader. There's a couple of things like that. But I'm mostly freed up to do feature work now, which I haven't been freed to do in a while. And I cannot wait. to really get in there. Yeah, I think there's lots of knock-on effects and benefits to the summer we've had. But before I go talking to those, I want to just take a minute to...

It's not an ad. I guess it's more of a message. So in lieu of our usual advertising spot that we would have at this point in the episode... This is September, so it's iPhone month, it's iOS month, but it's also Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. And so here on Relay, where we host our podcast, it's really... All the shows get together and we try and raise money for St. Jude, which is an organization that tries to keep...

and help children who have cancer to not have it anymore, to be healthy, to have long lives ahead of them. And they do tremendous work. And it's something that Relay has been working with them since 2019. raised over $4 million for it. This is another year and another time for us to just come together as a community of people who listen to the relay shows and to support St. Jude. There's lots of things that they have in the main messaging to talk about, all the wonderful things they do.

and if you listen to other relay shows which I imagine you do you'll have heard many of those messages of the work they do overseas the work they do in research the work they do just in terms of providing this care to families and no cost to the families and so that they can just focus on getting healthy and getting well. And my style is not to get into the details and more just to say that...

If you're listening to this show, if it's something that you have the means and the ability to support, it's something that we would encourage you to do so. And so if you go to stju.org slash relay, you'll have the ability to contribute to this campaign. work at a company that does matching and things like that. There's information about how to help and support there. But overall, I think it's just one of those, it's a time of the year where, you know, it's...

It's helpful to think about other people and the ways in which we can help them. And, you know, sometimes this summer has been very focused on how I can help my customers. And this is a different aspect where, but I also, I do have the means. I do have the ability to change and to impact and to help people.

I encourage you, if you are in a similar situation, to go to stjude.org slash relay and support right there. So the other benefit that I think I wanted to talk about, and I think you've alluded to this a little bit of this redesign, is something that I...

I kind of guessed might it be the case, but I wasn't sure how the degree to which this would be is how helpful it has been. to pay down a lot of tech debt in terms of the UI, the structure, just the overall workings of my apps, having to go through this. I'm not sure I would have chosen to spend... three months in, you know, in the case of pedometrics plus, essentially re re

doing the entire UI layer. Very few parts of it are reused from the iOS 18 version. But the net result of that... now having done that work, you know, having sort of survived that process, is my SwiftUI is now nice, modern, like, performant, good SwiftUI that... The first version of it definitely wasn't. I adopted SwiftUI essentially from the beginning.

As a result, a lot of my SwiftUI code, like as I've been looking through the iOS 18 and comparing it to the iOS 26, was just bad. Like there's all kinds of issues and, you know, semantics and idiomatic things that I'm doing. that I'm like, oh, that's bad. But I was never going to just whole cloth delete it and restart again.

until I was forced to. And so what's been really interesting, and it's like I see, you know, you mentioned the similar kind of thing, like your overcast is in such a better place in terms of its ability to move forward and your inertia and your... Or maybe even just inertia, like the lack of friction that you come into being able to apply modern...

best practices to your application is just really cool. Like it's something that I've been noticing even in the work that I've done since I submitted on Tuesday night that it's, I'm noticing that it's, you know, when I'm doing work on something that's an iOS 26 view.

In the app, it's like, oh, this is great. It's nice and clean. It's very well factored, like all the good things. And if I go look in the iOS 18, I'm like, ooh, what was Dave of five years ago or four years ago, whatever it was, thinking? just weird stuff that I'm doing that I now know better and now know the kind of bugs or kind of weird behaviors or maintenance headaches or things that those are going to cause. And so that's sort of an additional side effect and a side benefit.

Of all the summer of work, it's like I feel really good going into this fall feeling like the apps are in good places. Like they have this really nice, clean baseline that... I wouldn't have chosen necessarily, but can certainly benefit from now. And I think it's, I hear the same thing. I imagine it's a similar thing with overcast where you're in this place of like, yeah, this isn't necessarily the.

path and journey and timeline that I would have chosen to have done a top to bottom like spick and span refresh and reevaluation of everything. But having now been forced to do that, there's some upside as well. Oh, yeah. I mean... There's never a good time to rewrite stuff that already works. A good time will never come around because that is historically in software development considered a huge...

A huge cost and usually a huge strategic mistake. But sometimes it is forced upon you. In my case with my app, my old app before the rewrite was also – It was all Objective-C. It was all UIKit. And it was – it had a 10-year-old – it had 10 years of tech debt basically. And so I adopted a whole bunch of modern stuff at once. I went with …

Swift, Swift concurrency, and Swift UI all at the same time. It leapfrogged me ahead of where I was, mostly because of how far behind I was. I had a long way to leapfrog. But that dramatically changed. I was able to do all these modern things much more quickly once it was done. But it was a heck of a process to get there, and it's not something I would recommend to anyone.

Except that the alternative, if I hadn't done the rewrite, the alternative would have been the end of Overcast. Especially now with the big UI redesign, I don't know if I could have done this redesign with the old code base. in the time and with the energy that I had.

Because oftentimes this summer, this was demotivating because when I just couldn't get a design that I liked or I couldn't get the design components to work or I would run into bugs or limitations. What you said earlier, though, I think really helped, which is like...

A lot of the limitations or bugs with liquid glass, we actually have no way to work around. We have very little customization over a lot of the behaviors. There are certain system APIs that just still don't work right. There are animation glitches and bugs that are shipping as iOS 26.0. And we can't work around a lot of them.

And in a way, I mean, that's very frustrating. And some of that's going to become our problem when our users complain to us about it. But in a way, it's kind of freeing. Like, oh, yeah, this component, you kind of can't use it yet. Like, okay, then I won't. Great.

Okay, I'll do something else. Instead of there being – okay, well, you can do these ridiculous workarounds that are really complicated and time-consuming and will be a maintenance nightmare. No, you can't. So in a way, it's actually – kind of freeing to be like okay these are the three options i have i have no other options so pick one and move on and that's what i had to do a lot of the time and and it it has

In a lot of those times, it kind of was a painful pill to swallow at the moment. But the result is my app is done on time. And there are certain decisions that were out of my hands, but that also means they were off my plate. That helped a lot during this, honestly. At the end of the day, I'm actually glad that there was less customization I could do. I had fewer options, and I was left to just use a lot of stock stuff. And now...

I have less code. The more stock components I used unmodified, the less code I actually have. And that'll help with maintenance and feature development over time. Yeah, no, and exactly that experience was mine. It's like I was just so many places. What I found the best pattern this summer was just to use stock stuff as simple and basic as it can be. relying on the fact that often when you would do that, if you do that in iOS 18,

it would feel old and kind of basic. Whereas the advantage we have now is that if you use the stock stuff, the stock stuff is totally new. And so it feels fresh and interesting. And rather than trying to go, you know, end up with this situation where you're trying to create your own thing that fits well with iOS 26. It's way simpler and way better to just use the basic stuff.

sort of just lean into it and understand it's not going to be perfect for whatever definition of perfect in this case would be. It's going to just be... fine and it will get better. And I'm sure it will. Like, I don't think that there is a scenario where like, this is the best, you know, in many ways, this is the worst shipping version of iOS 26 that we will ever have.

I hope so. On Monday when it comes out to the public, like that will – I expect to be the worst version that's ever going to be and it will get better and it will change and all the bugs we filed over the summer that have gone unfixed or unchanged and things like that are just –

They will gradually get better. Like I think that's – history would teach us that. And I think both of us had some points in this summer where it was just good to remind ourselves of that kind of thing. In this case, the – focusing on trying to have the perfect and the best was not going to be productive, was not going to get us to the place that we are now, where we have our apps, we're ready, we can do it, and they're as good as we can make them, not as good as we could imagine them being.

And that is a difference and it's a subtle difference. But in this case, that's what we have. And it's cool. And I think, you know, as we it's nice, I think, to regardless of. what the end result is. I think both of us, I don't know. It's funny to say, but I'm proud of you for the summer you had. And hopefully I have reason to be proud of my own work as well. But like,

We got there, you know, and that is doing difficult things has made us better developers, made us better designers, made us more thoughtful, you know, communicators or understanders of things. Like that's what this summer has done. whether this design work...

is ultimately going to be something that in history was looked at whether iOS 26 was a positive thing or a negative thing. I know I've become a better developer having gone through this process, and so I can take that with me. And whatever iOS 27... iOS 28, iOS 29, whatever the future is going to hold, I can go into that being a better developer, which is ultimately something that I value even more so. Thank you. Yeah, and me too.

Good luck out there, everybody, with all of your iOS 26 updates hitting the store and getting into your customers' hands. I hope it goes well for you as it has so far for me and Dave. Best of luck. Hey, we got through it. Let's celebrate. Thanks for listening everybody. We'll talk to you in two weeks. Bye.