The Future of SwiftyLaunch

Hey There!

Long time no see. You may have noticed that SwiftyLaunch hasn’t received any major updates in the last two months. This change of pace is especially noticeable after a streak of larger updates every few weeks. Many of you also follow my Twitter/X account and have noticed that it has been seemingly neglected except for an occasional meme here and there.

Some of you have reached out directly, asking when the updates, especially regarding the release of AdsKit, are going to come out.

I’ve heard you. Let me address some of the concerns and questions you might have, as well as share with you the latest developments of SwiftyLaunch and what is coming in the next few months.

Increasing Complexity & AdsKit

AdsKit was supposed to be a new framework coming to SwiftyLaunch 1.3 on May 1st, enabling monetization of your apps using Google’s AdMob. But it didn’t come out then and still isn’t out yet. Why?

Let me explain what happened in the last three months…

SwiftyLaunch started as a "better boilerplate" targeted at iOS Developers at a time when everyone was getting tired of lazy boilerplates. The goal was to create a unique tool that would help developers transform their ideas into real apps published on the App Store faster than ever. Its unique point compared to other, seemingly identical boilerplates was the ability to choose exactly what you needed for your next project, without additional bloat.

The ability to generate a complete Xcode project on the fly with only the code you needed was a tough challenge to tackle. The rush to ship new updates quickly led to an internal codebase that grew more and more into a fragile, tangled mess that was incredibly difficult to work on.

Every new feature almost certainly led to a new edge-case bug, which would amusingly enough almost always occur after the new update was shipped.

The peak of complexity came with update 1.3 and it showed: the update was a buggy one. Around 15% of the users couldn’t even generate a new project and had to continue using SwiftyLaunch v1.2. The AdsKit integration was also buggy that I had to pull it last minute and simply couldn’t release it in that state.

For the next two weeks after update 1.3 came out, I worked tirelessly and released patch 1.3.1, which resolved over 95% of the generation issues users encountered. However, AdsKit still wasn't in a state to be included in SwiftyLaunch.

New Foundation & Transparency

We plan for SwiftyLaunch to become the go-to tool for every Apple Platforms developer. Following the 1.3.1 update, we concluded that SwiftyLaunch needs a complete reengineering from the inside. Otherwise, it would not be able to handle all the features we have planned for the future. It would also decrease the number of frustrated users due to the buggy generation process.

So this is what we did. For the last two months, we’ve been working heads down on the 1.4 release of SwiftyLaunch, completely reengineered from the ground up.

We admit that we should have been more open about what is going on and what we are working on. We should have been more open and transparent with you.

Starting with today, we are making our Feature Roadmap for SwiftyLaunch public. We are going to update it every couple of weeks and will share the development process through tweets and blog posts. You can find it on the blog page.

In addition to that, in the upcoming version of SwiftyLaunch, users will have the ability to submit features they want to see in SwiftyLaunch and upvote suggestions from other SwiftyLaunch users.

These are just the first steps that we're taking to be increase the transparency with our users, and we are committed to continuously improving our communication.

Now, let's address some of the exciting news that we got for you today!

PostHog Partnership

Many of you have probably seen my Tweets that we’ve partnered up with PostHog (which powers AnalyticsKit) to offer all SwiftyLaunch users $55,000 in PostHog credits to build out their dream iOS App!

To unlock this generous bonus from PostHog, simply look for the gift icon within the SwiftyLaunch app during project generation.

We are committed to forging more partnerships to bring you exciting offers. We’ll let you know once we have more news to share!

Looking Ahead

Thank you for your patience and continued support for SwiftyLaunch. We are focused on preparing for the release of SwiftyLaunch 1.4, scheduled for mid-August. Stay tuned for more updates!

Cheers,

Vladislav