How to get your iOS app featured on the App Store >

Welcome

Recorded March 24th 2020 – watch the full episode on YouTube.

Paul Hudson: Hello folks! I have my friend James Thomson here and he's a very well-known independent developer and a world-class work from home champion. We’re going to chat about Apple platform development, working from home, tips for both, being featured on the App Store and lots more.

I've got tons of questions for James. I'm going to go through them, but hopefully you folks have questions too. So by all means, jump into that chat window, ask away and I will feature the most exciting ones or interesting ones, and grill dreams to make sure he answers them fully.

So, James: you're living the dream, right? You are, you are making enough money from app development on Apple's platforms that it's your job. I mean, was that always the plan for you or a side gig that just grew and grew and grew and grew?

James Thomson: I think none of this was planned. I think I just have been staggering from one success to the next through a combination of luck and stubbornness. I realized that it's 20 years since I started doing this, working independently, almost to the month.

Paul Hudson: Happy anniversary!

James Thomson: Well, thank you. I'm in a great position in that first DragThing, and then PCalc have been supporting me and Dice by PCalc of course, have been supporting me and my wife and we work from home. So, especially in the current situation, we have a pretty good setup. Literally the start of this month, I bought myself a new desk and I set myself up a nice working environment, improved a bunch of things and then all this kicked off.

So, I timed that pretty well. We've had some discussions about this on Twitter. Sales are not great. They've gone down, we've had a bit of a resurgence in the last few days but I can see, for the stuff I sell, some of it might not be as relevant right now, but we've done well enough that I'm in a good position to get through the next few months.

Paul Hudson: So is it fairly steady otherwise? I mean apart from the other current global pandemic, is it fairly steady sales or you see them moving in one direction?

James Thomson: You see, or what I see, is plateaus. Sometimes we'll go up and the level will plateau at another level and sometimes it will come down and it is seasonal. There's a lot more stuff around about the iOS and device releases in the autumn, so we usually see a spike there, especially if we've done something to get featured or some technology adoption of new devices, or something like that.

This transcript was recorded as part of Swiftly Speaking. You can watch the full original episode on YouTube, or subscribe to the audio version on Apple Podcasts.

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How to get your iOS app featured on the App Store >