njhaveri

On the Mac App Store, there isn't a practical way to charge for updates. You could release entirely new apps, but then upgrading is a pain for users, and you lose your ranking and reviews -- and it's difficult to charge an upgrade fee. You can gate-keep features with In-App-Purchases the way Agenda does, but then you're giving away bug fixes and polish on the app for free forever, and that's probably 80% of your development time. Plus, I would imagine the upgrade rate on that model is pretty low, since most users won't care about fringe features being added.

If you really want to offer perpetual licenses with paid updates, since you're a desktop app, you can roll your own licensing system and use FastSpring/Paddle/etc. It's a fair model, but it's a lot of work. It may be worth it depending on your audience - e.g. developers tend to care a lot about this stuff.

Selling this as a subscription is probably the best path if you can stomach the initial ire of users that don't like that model. Depending on your price point, you could consider a 4x-5x multiplier for a lifetime option if you want to try and keep some of them. Yes, you will lose some users that might have paid for a major version, but you'll probably make that up with the recurring revenue from less price-sensitive users.

Best of luck. I know this can be agonizing and there's no easy answer here.

Wow, I had no idea about this one! Thanks so much for this tip!

After the end of legacy G Suite was announced, I tried using iCloud+ to forward my personal domain to Gmail. However, because iCloud does not seem to support ARC for forwarding, Gmail was sending too much to Spam.

I tried many other mainstream forwarding options and settled on Pobox as the best overall option, and moved my personal domain over. It's working pretty well, flowing to my regular Gmail account and having aliases set up in Gmail.

Agreed, I think they'll just never increase the free storage again. Eventually, people will get tired of quarterly inbox cleanups and just pay for the extra storage, which is a win-win for them and avoids a serious PR crisis.

If you really want to host your own server for incoming mail, SES would probably be fine for SMTP and very cheap. With things set up correctly (SPF, DKIM), my personal experience with deliverability has been problem-free. However, I've seen others say they've still had issues because of the SES IPs. For double-checking the quality of your setup, mail-tester.com is handy.

If you want to migrate to a free consumer service (like a personal Gmail account and using aliases), a forwarding service that also provides SMTP is an option. I've been testing Pobox.com and it looks great ($20/yr for up to 20 addresses). I first tried using my registrar's forwarding service, and sending from aliased addresses via the Gmail SMTP Server, and had lots of trouble with deliverability, so I wouldn't recommend that.

I think there may be some confusion here. Reading the original tweets from @featherless, I don't see any intent to actually change the end-user design. For example:

> This evolution of how we approach design for Apple platforms has enabled us to marry the best of UIKit with the highlights of Google's design language.

I'm reading this to say that custom UI components will be replaced with UIKit components that will be customized to have Google's design language. But at a high level, the apps will continue to look the same as they currently do.

This is surprisingly sophisticated and loaded with features for a 1.0, congratulations on the release! I totally know what it's like to work on a productivity app for a long time before it feels like it meets the minimum bar for release, serious props for making it over the line. The smart summaries feature in particular looks really interesting.

While I confess that I'd also like the option to purchase a 1.0 license and then pay to upgrade to 2.0 later, I fully recognize that the App Store makes that sort of arrangement extremely awkward and difficult to achieve, and think you priced it more than fairly anyways.

Neat idea! Do you plan to notarize the binary?

From personal experience, notarization hasn't really caused any friction in my dev process for Mimestream. The upload + server response usually only takes about a minute. Yeah, it's another thing to learn, but the process is pretty well-integrated into Xcode, and if you're building via script then it seems well-supported?

On the other hand, code signing is perennially confusing, and I wish the documentation was better.

Haha, having worked on email clients, this gave me a good laugh. People use them in all sorts of different ways – part of what makes them tricky to build. Very clever customization though!

I get the general point of the article, but if I just lost the source code to the app I've worked on for years… It would take me a very, very long time to re-write everything. Sometimes, getting relatively straightforward code to actually work is hard and time consuming.

Finally!

Hopefully it will be based on the prefers-color-scheme media feature, instead of it being a setting to toggle…

I also really dislike that WWDC videos are now the de-facto documentation. It must be a lot of work to put them together – I wish they'd just write a doc instead. Would be way faster to read, search, etc. and could probably go into much greater depth.

As a developer of a native Mac email client, I sincerely hope that this is true. At least in the Apple ecosystem, there are new technologies like SwiftUI and Mac Catalyst that should make this easier, particularly for the army of iOS developers looking to bring apps to the Mac.

Before starting my app, I did briefly consider going the cross-platform route, and I realize that it's possible to build a decent app that way. But personally, I could always tell when I used one. Little things like swipe gestures and drag and drop didn't quite work right. The extra polish, consistency, and speed of going native is so nice for things you use all day every day. With the shift to remote work, people might notice this extra 5-10% of polish more than they did a year ago.