At last year’s WWDC, Apple introduced privacy manifests. They recently sent out a reminder that the deadline for complying with these new requirements is May 1. Privacy manifests expand on the previously introduced privacy “nutrition labels” that are self-reported by developers and displayed on the App Store. Developers must start including a privacy manifest in their apps by the aforementioned deadline, but what’s more interesting is that Apple is, for the first time, imposing these new privacy rules on third-party SDKs as well. Even more interesting is the list of SDKs that Apple has published, which, upon inspection is quite bizarre.

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I recently setup fastlane for one of my indie apps, Taxatio, to automate uploading builds and metadata to the App Store — by far, one of the most tedious tasks of app development. While I had used fastlane extensively before when working on teams at companies, I had never actually set it up from scratch. In this post, I want to share how to do that, as well as a lightweight configuration that I think works well for solo indie developers — folks on a team of one!

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Providing screenshots for the App Store has always been a tedious and time-consuming process. But as the number of differently-sized iOS devices has grown and changed over the years, it has become more difficult to manage. (This is why the developer community built tools like fastlane snapshot.) The screenshot requirements for the App Store have increasingly become a burden for developers, especially indies. With the Mac App Store, there are fewer hurdles and less strict requirements. However, if you are now targeting only the latest OS releases and latest hardware, the screenshot requirements for both App Stores are not only burdensome but they no longer makes any sense!

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I’m happy to share that I released an update to Taxatio today, but unfortunately it was not without a lot of friction and hassle with the App Store approval process.

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Today Apple announced at their media event that the final public release of iOS 14 ships tomorrow, which came as quite a shock to all third-party developers.

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I’m excited to share that my good friend and talented artist, Lisa Sy, and I have released a new sticker pack for iMessage! It is based on her excellent web comic, plurals and noun — a comic about queer and weird things that happen. It’s free and you can download it here.

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