Category: Apple Developer News

iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, the world’s most advanced mobile operating systems, will soon be available to customers worldwide. Improve your app’s performance by refactoring your code to take advantage of asynchronous functions in Swift. Use SwiftUI to enhance your apps with new features, such as improved list views, better search experiences, and support for control focus areas. Take advantage of new notification APIs, offer Safari Web Extensions, and much more.

Build your apps using Xcode 13 Release Candidate, test them on devices running iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 Release Candidates, and submit them for review. Starting April 2022, all iOS and iPadOS apps submitted to the App Store must be built with Xcode 13 and the iOS 15 SDK.

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Deliver even more powerful and personal apps for Apple Watch with the new capabilities of watchOS 8. With the Always-On Retina Display, your apps are always available at a quick glance. Gather HealthKit data and connect to Bluetooth peripherals in the background, delivering up-to-date information to your complications. AssistiveTouch makes your apps more accessible than ever. And the powerful new SwiftUI Canvas API lets you take advantage of the GPU in Apple Watch for rich programmatic drawing.

Build your apps using Xcode 13 Release Candidate, test them on devices running watchOS 8 Release Candidate and submit them for review. Starting April 2022, all watchOS apps submitted to the App Store must be built with Xcode 13 and the watchOS 8 SDK.

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With the tvOS 15 SDK, you can let people sign in to your app and authorize purchases using Face ID or Touch ID on their iPhone or iPad. A redesigned playback UI provides users with convenient access to relevant controls and information while always focusing on the content. MusicKit makes it easy to integrate Apple Music into your tvOS apps using Swift. And the App Attest API helps validate the integrity of your app before your server provides access to sensitive data.

Build your apps using Xcode 13 Release Candidate, test them on Apple TV running tvOS 15 Release Candidate, and submit them for review.

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It wasn’t long after Prêt-à-Template founder and CEO Roberta Weiand launched her app in 2014 that it became a darling among fashion designers around the world.

With its library of templates, textures, and patterns, the app lets anyone sketch their dream outfit. Start with the outline of a model (there are dozens of body types to choose from). Add an article of clothing—whether a cropped jacket or an A-line dress. Then let your imagination run wild by using true-to-life brushes, textile patterns, and more to bring the details of your vision to life.

We spoke to Weiand about her inspiration and how users are finding their creativity in the app.

What inspired you to create Prêt-à-Template?
I went to university for fashion design, and after graduation I taught at a university in my hometown. But I always had a problem: I didn’t know how to design on a big scale on the big whiteboards. I started to download many design apps, but I couldn’t find any related to fashion. So I thought, why not create one?

What has the response been like? Many people don’t take fashion courses because they don’t know how to draw, but they tell us that the app makes it much easier to develop an idea. It streamlines the prototyping process as well.

How has the app evolved since launch? We have many body templates. We heard from a student who was passionate about dwarfism and she asked us why we didn’t have those templates in the app. We started to research, and with her help we created them.

What’s next for Prêt-à-Template?
We’re working to make it feel more alive. We also develop Prêt-à-Makeup, and in that app we have a lot of realism in the brushes; if you turn the iPad, you can see the light changing. We’re going to borrow the realism we started in that app for Prêt-à-Template’s textures.

What advice do you have for aspiring developers?
Look for something that has meaning in your life, that solves a problem. Form a good team that believes in the same things as you. Always be open and listen to your users — nothing is more valuable than what they have to contribute.

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August 26, 2021

Enrollment is now open for the News Partner Program, designed for subscription news publications that provide their content to Apple News in Apple News Format. Publishers that work with Apple News may qualify for a commission rate of 15% on qualifying in-app purchase subscriptions from day one. The program is available to Apple Developer Program members globally.

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If Loki the sheepdog hadn’t been so smart — or if his owners had a backyard — the dog-training app Puppr might not exist.

Developers Michael Gao and Alice Mongkongllite got their first dog when they were newlyweds living in a Los Angeles apartment. “A good way to keep him engaged was to teach him tricks,” Gao says. “Loki’s supersmart and would pick up things quickly.”

But training Loki to behave in their pet-friendly offices was more challenging. They didn’t want to have to lug around a book or a clicker, explains Gao. “We thought we could solve our own problem by making something with videos, a community, and the ability to track our progress.”

Puppr’s lessons, created with celebrity dog trainer Sara Carson, range from basics to circus tricks. There are community photo challenges (because who doesn’t like to share dog pics?), and subscribers can turn to Carson for answers and advice.

We spoke to Gao and Mongkongllite about the power of cold-calling and taking things one step at a time.

How much experience with apps did you have before Puppr?
Gao: Alice and I met in college at UCLA, where I majored in computer science and she studied design and media arts. We’d published two games when we were traveling around China for a few years after college. We would spend half the day working out of coffee shops and the rest of the day exploring the city.

How did you connect with celebrity dog trainer Sara Carson?
Mongkongllite: When I searched for tags like “dog training” and “dog tricks,” Sara’s videos came up. The things her dogs could do blew my mind. So we DMed her.

Gao: She said, “I’m actually headed up to L.A. this weekend.” Later we found out she was there to audition for America’s Got Talent. The deadline for Puppr’s release ended up being defined by the airdate for her episode.

What was your biggest challenge in building Puppr? Mongkongllite: The photography and the editing took a lot of time. We bought this really cheap green screen, and I ended up having to take the green out of Sara’s hair. And the fur—the fur!

What’s your biggest challenge today? Mongkongllite: Balancing mom life and work life. Time management is difficult.

If you could go back in time, what advice would you give to your younger selves?
Gao: Build momentum. One of my early goals was to work on Puppr every single day, even if it was just writing one line of code. Without that, I think we wouldn’t have been able to ship when we did.

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Due to changes in local regulations, the bank account holder’s address is now required if you have bank account information in App Store Connect. Account Holders, Admins, and Finance roles can now provide a valid address in the Agreements, Tax, and Banking section. Please provide this information by October 22, 2021, in order to avoid a potential interruption of your payments.

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Sarah Smith, an avid camper and cofounder of The Dyrt, was frustrated by how hard it was to find details on a campsite before you booked. She wanted to know that, say, site 2 was next to a busy road, while site 7 was along a river.

She wondered why nobody seemed to be solving the problem. Then she had a thought that changed everything: “Why can’t I do it?” she says.

Four years later she launched The Dyrt to help nature lovers find and review campsites all over the country. Last year members planned more than 55 million miles of trips.

We caught up with Smith to chat about transitioning from education to technology, the importance of starting slow, and why it pays to learn on the fly.

Before creating The Dyrt, did you have any tech background? None whatsoever! I was in education. My cofounder and husband has a background in tech and apps, but he didn’t come on board until I had already built something.

Were any of your skills from your career in education transferable? I did have one skill from my 10 years of living abroad and helping students study abroad: adaptability. When I think of every job I’ve done for The Dyrt — from scribbling out wireframes to figuring out a payroll system to creating more strategic partnerships — it’s always about being flexible while keeping the end goal in mind.

How long did it take to bring The Dyrt into the world? We did it pretty slowly at the beginning. I built a rudimentary beta version of the website in WordPress in 2014, and a better beta the next year. In 2015, we started raising money and hiring people. But our first app didn’t come out until March 2017. It took years for something I thought would take not that long.

What was the trickiest part? It’s not hard to create a directory of campgrounds, but it is hard to create a platform that people want to contribute to. We did it by incentivizing people through contests: We choose the top reviewer from each region and work with brands to give prizes. But getting brands involved was challenging at first; we started talking to them before we had a website launched, so they had to believe in the dream.

What advice would you give to other aspiring developers? Start small and iterate. I can’t say I knew that when I started — I couldn’t afford to do it any other way at the time. But I did have a hunch that I shouldn’t put my life savings into this until I had an idea that other people wanted this problem solved too.

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SharePlay has been disabled for use in the developer beta 6 versions of iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and tvOS 15, and will be disabled in the upcoming beta 6 release of macOS Monterey. SharePlay will also be disabled for use in their initial releases this fall. SharePlay will be enabled for use again in future developer beta releases and will launch to the public in software updates later this fall.

We’re thrilled with the high level of enthusiasm we’ve seen from the developer community for SharePlay, and we can’t wait to bring it to users so that they can experience your apps with their friends and family in a whole new way.

We appreciate how many teams have been hard at work building SharePlay experiences and to ensure there is no interruption in your development, we have provided a SharePlay Development Profile which will enable successful creation and reception of GroupSessions via the Group Activities API.

If your team plans to submit an update to your app for the initial release of these platforms, please remove the GroupActivities entitlement. We will provide guidance when SharePlay is re-enabled in a future developer beta, at which point we encourage you to include the GroupActivities entitlement in your code.

Download the SharePlay Development Profile

In five years, Revry has gone from an idea among friends to the biggest LGBTQ+ streaming service on the App Store, with a huge library of original movies, shows, music, and podcasts — and it’s growing by the day.

Founded in 2016 by Damian Pelliccione, Alia Daniels, LaShawn McGhee, and Christopher Rodriguez, Revry began as a bare-bones operation but is expanding quickly. In the past 18 months alone, the team has doubled in size to 30 employees.

We caught up with Pelliccione on the set of House of Pride, the app’s new variety show, to talk about the power of street marketing and what true representation looks like.

Revry is now an industry leader in LGBTQ+ media, but in the early days, how did you get the word out? Before we launched, we hit the streets in San Francisco the Saturday before Pride; we had printed T-shirts and obnoxious giant flyers, and we were going around demoing the app. We weren’t the best at it, but people would ask us, “Are you in street marketing?” and I’d say, “No, I’m the CEO, that’s the CBO, that’s our CFO.” By the end of the weekend we had done interviews with Macworld and Oakland TV.

How do you find new talent and content to grow Revry’s library? We’ve traveled to film fests from Brazil to Israel to Mumbai; we scour YouTube for great videos we want to license. Right now I’m walking around the soundstage of our variety show in L.A.; we’ve got 25 influencers and musicians and comedians and drag queens.

Can you tell us about the team behind Revry? We represent so many communities: immigrants, nonbinary people, Hispanic people, African Americans, LGBTQ+, veterans. I’m proud to say that over 65 percent of our staff are people of color, and almost 70 percent are women. In the special I’m working on today, our director is female, and our producer is a trans male. That’s not forced — that’s organic. This is what representation looks like, and it starts with ownership and it starts with leadership.

What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?
Fail fast and learn big. Those failings are your school — that’s life teaching you how to succeed. When you’re ready to receive the world, the world will be there to give itself to you.

What’s been your most inspiring moment?
I still have a letter from a queer kid in Saudi Arabia who wrote to say, “I identify as gay, and I never knew this community existed until I downloaded your app. For the first time in my life, I saw myself represented.” That’s not the last letter we’ve gotten like that, but it was the first. It’s framed and on a coffee table in my office. That’s my inspiration for going to work; it’s like winning an Academy Award over and over and over again.

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