I attended WWDC for the first time this week. To attend, you need to get selected via lottery and then you get to pay $1600 for your ticket. Sounds a bit crazy, but it’s pretty cool how excited developers and designers and others — the people who build apps — are to participate. I heard that the first person in line for the keynote posted up at 9pm the evening before the 10am keynote. Wild!
For me, the best part was being able to meet directly with Apple engineers, designers, and App Store curators. For example, I chatted with engineers who build the CoreLocation framework about how best to implement location tracking into Recent Contacts. I got incredible design ideas and feedback on three different apps from Apple designers.
On top of that, I met with people on the App Store team. People whose job is to decide what apps go on the Today tab and what games to feature, and write the Editors Notes that go on an app’s App Store listing.
Needless to say, I tried to take full advantage of this. I feel like have a clearer picture of what it takes to get featured. And more importantly, I feel inspired to take my apps to another level. I already pride myself on creating intuitive software with minimal bugs, but I do believe I can up things a notch or two, and really make every interaction more enjoyable. This comes at a time when I have had increasing doubts on whether I should continue as an independent app developer.
Here’s to the next year of apps — I think it’ll be a good one.