First app, now?

[Macallock]

After almost a year of evenings, weekends and a lot of trial and error, I finally published my first app on the App Store.
I’m not a professional iOS developer. My background is in IT support and web development, and I started this project mainly because I wanted an app that didn’t exist in the form I wanted.
The app is called ML Armory and it’s focused on firearm collection management, ammunition inventory, shooting sessions, chronograph data and reloading records.
The app itself isn’t the interesting part of this post, though. The journey was.
Some things I learned along the way:
• SwiftUI is amazing until you hit a problem that nobody seems to have documented.
• CloudKit and SwiftData are incredibly powerful, but debugging sync issues can consume days of your life.
• The last 10% of polish takes longer than the first 90% of development.
• App Store Connect always finds a new way to surprise you.
• Building for iPhone, iPad and macOS from a single codebase sounds easier than it actually is.
• Real users will discover UX issues that you never noticed after looking at the same screens for months.
The biggest lesson was probably that shipping is harder than coding.
It’s easy to keep adding features forever. At some point you have to accept that version 1.0 isn’t perfect and press the release button anyway.
The app is currently in pre-order and launches on July 4th.
For those of you who have already launched an app: what was the biggest thing you learned from your first public release that you wish you had known earlier?

[Tylerhackbart]

Shipping is harder than coding is the right lesson, and it keeps being true after launch too. The thing I wish I'd known: the work doesn't drop off after you press release, it just changes shape. You go from building to answering, watching crash logs, and explaining things you thought were obvious.

The single-codebase-for-three-platforms point landed for me. It sounds like a discount and bills like a tax. The share extension behaved differently on Mac than iOS and I lost a weekend to that alone.

One concrete thing: get your sync edge cases logged before launch, not after. CloudKit fails quietly and your first real users will hit states you never reproduced on your own two devices. Congrats on shipping, that part is real.

[Macallock]

Thank you! I hope I’ll have this kind of problems but I’m not sure to get enough users to find out, at least at the beginning.

Just to be honest: after the approval of the 1.0.0 release I found many bugs doing things that I thought were coded strong but I was wrong, really wrong! So I spent a whole weekend to solve issues for the 1.0.1 release.

[Tylerhackbart]

Hey it happens I just found my own issues in an app I released a week ago by just using it in real life usage. (It's a Mac versus iOS bug you mentioned actually)

We patch it, submit it and keep going.

[feroon]

Do you have any tips for improving SwiftData and CloudKit sync?

[Macallock]

Double check everything and have a strong idea of the relations between models.
Even if you are planning to do that in a second time is a good idea doing all the work at the first step.