WWDC ’24 recap on the Sub Club podcast — David Barnard, Jacob Eiting, Charlie Chapman

Another Apple WWDC conference is in the books, and as usual, we’re excited to dig into everything Apple announced — and what it means for iOS developers and RevenueCat users. This year’s announcements covered everything from small quality-of-life enhancements in App Store Connect to the deprecation of some of Apple’s oldest in-app payments code. All of these announcements (big and small) will have an effect on app developers and the future of subscription apps. So this week on the Sub Club podcast, Jacob, David, and Charlie discussed everything we learned. Let’s get into it!

Goodbye to StoreKit 1

After 15 long years, the original StoreKit 1 (now renamed “original API for in-app purchase”) has been deprecated. As of June 2024, Apple is no longer updating the original StoreKit APIs and recommends migrating to StoreKit 2. As Jacob points out, StoreKit 1 was built on Apple’s original iTunes infrastructure, so it was about time for an upgrade. That said, probably around 80% of all revenue in the App Store flows through StoreKit 1, so support for this legacy code is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

AI in the Apple OS

One of the announcements that’s getting the most buzz is the latest in Apple’s AI development, Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence will be integrated into iOS 18, allowing users to take advantage of natural language processing in everyday apps and features. According to Charlie, this could eventually be a paradigm shift for app developers: “I think it’ll create an interesting new funnel… As Apple Intelligence gets better over time, it might not even open your app. Maybe the way it gets into a white noise app is you just say, ‘Hey Siri, calm me down.’ And you have to learn all these new ways of telling the system that you can solve this problem.”

App Store Connect updates

This year’s WWDC announcements included a bevy of small, but significant quality-of-life improvements to App Store Connect, including:

• App featuring nominations
• New tools for generating marketing assets
• Deep links for custom product pages
• An improved TestFlight user experience
• Reduced screenshot requirements

(Check out Charlie’s blog post for more details about these updates.)

A new offer type

App Store Connect includes several features for setting up special offers and pricing for your app: introductory offers, promotional offers, and offer codes. In iOS 18, Apple is introducing a fourth offer type: win-back offers. This new feature lets you provide a discount to lapsed subscribers and has some new, unique functionality. In App Store Connect, you can set which users are eligible to receive a win-back offer, and you can configure it to show a pop-up to eligible users when they open your app. There may be some minor challenges with determining eligibility and showing the offer to the right users, but David thinks this could provide some easy uplift to developers. “The cool thing about this is you just configure a few things in App Store Connect, and it’s done. You spend 10 minutes filling this out, Apple promotes it, it shows up in the App Store when someone is searching, and you pick up a percentage or two.”

The successor to SKAdNetwork

Another major announcement was the new AdAttributionKit, which seems to be a successor to the original SKAdNetwork. AdAttributionKit includes several feature enhancements, like compatibility with third-party app stores and support for re-engagement campaigns. With the original SKAdNetwork, it wasn’t possible to tell whether a user had ever subscribed to the app before — they appeared as a net-new user. But with AdAttibutionKit, advertisers will be able to track which users have actually installed the app before, allowing them to retarget users who had previously subscribed with reengagement ads.

More from WWDC 2024

These are just a few of the announcements we’re excited about from this year’s WWDC. To find out more about these announcements and how you can take advantage of the new App Store capabilities with your iOS app, check out our full discussion on this week’s episode of the Sub Club podcast.