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Apple and the Digital Markets Act in the European Union. 🇪🇺
Earlier this week, Apple announced that they are making some changes to the ecosystem for European Union countries to comply with the Digital Markets Act, a law that aims at controlling and reducing the monopoly or dominance of large corporations on the tech industry.
The most notable changes are that iOS apps will be able to change the way they process payments, browser apps (such as the Google Chrome app) will be able to use different engines, which is one of the changes I am most excited about, and that developers will be able to ship their apps to alternative App Stores.
These changes come with a new set of business terms that, among other things, state that developers who accept them, will need to pay a brand new Core Technology Fee of 0.50€ per annual app install (as long as you have over 1 million yearly app installs) and their in-app purchase fee will reduce to 17% (10% for developers in the Small Business Programme) from the previous 30%.
You must know that these new business terms are optional and only apply to EU countries. Hence, you can choose whether you would like to accept them or stick with the current way of doing business with Apple. So, this raises the following question, what will your decision be?
If you would like to learn more about the topic from people who know a lot more than I do, I would thoroughly recommend reading this amazing Twitter thread that RevenueCat put together and this awesome article by Jon Porter and David Pierce at The Verge.
☁️ Xcode Cloud workshop coming soon
Last week I ran a poll on Twitter to ask you all if you would be interested in me running a workshop on Xcode Cloud and the response I got was amazing: 93% of you were interested!
For this reason, I have decided to start putting together a session that will show you how to configure and run real-world CI/CD workflows using Xcode Cloud and answer any questions you might have about Apple’s CI/CD service. More details will follow soon, so keep an eye on the newsletter and my social media for the announcement 👀.
⬆️ How to upload dSYMs files to Sentry with Xcode Cloud
One of the questions I get asked the most is whether Xcode Cloud can integrate with third-party tools and services easily. A lot of companies use such tools for tasks like dependency management or crash reporting and they need to make sure they can continue using them before making the switch to Xcode Cloud.
As Arnaud Joubay describes in this article, where they upload an app’s dSYMs files to Sentry from an Xcode Cloud workflow, you can make use of ci scripts to extend Xcode Cloud’s functionalities as much as you want and perform any actions your third-party tool requires.
💯 Understanding Swift Package Index’s package scores
When searching the Swift Package Index for a Swift Package, the search engine determines the order in which it shows results using two primary factors: the relevance of the search query in the package name and description and an internal package score based on various metrics.
In this article, the creator of the package score feature Cyndi Chin, goes through how the score is calculated in great detail. I would thoroughly recommend reading this article as the score calculation algorithm and the metrics it takes into consideration can give you numerous tips about becoming a better Swift Package author and maintainer.
📈 Bitrise’s Git insights
Bitrise announced a new feature last week called ‘Git Insights’ that shows metrics such as pull request cycle time and merge frequency in a project’s dashboard.
I have done similar things in the past for my own projects to monitor the impact that changes and decisions have on my productivity, so I am super happy to see it built into a CI/CD service 👏. If you’d like to learn more about the feature and how to start using it, make sure you read this great article by Madré Roothman.