Though there’s no real system support for it, having lived through a similar situation this year I feel like my custom Assistive Access mode is too important to not ship in some form. So I'm going to do the next best thing: a temporary custom URL scheme that can toggle Broadcasts in and out of this mode, until real APIs are available. In Assistive Access mode, Broadcasts just shows a list of stations that can be played, and turns off all other features and UI. No accidental deletions, no nothing
Having spent the day working with the actual Assistive Access SPI (
https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/111072449541807169), I decided to replicate as much of it as I could in SwiftUI directly. In doing so, I ported my new watchOS app code to iOS and used it as the basis of my faux-Clarity UI. It's not perfect, but it kinda works! And this one I can ship
For funsies: on macOS, too 😂
I didn't have a whole lot prepared for iOS 17, just a amorphous collection of features I'd been working on for @broadcastsapp in some form or other over the summer, while the core of the app was revamped quite a bit for visionOS. Nonetheless, they've kinda taken form over the past few days into something I can call v3.3.
I've got:
• Assistive Access mode
• A refreshed app for Apple Watch
• Interactive widgets & Stand By support
• SharePlay via AirDrop
On top of that, Broadcasts has a whole visionOS app pretty much ready to go, but I have no intention of shipping this before I have a device to do final iteration & testing with. A lot has gone into the app over the past few months!
I decided to elevate Broadcasts' Assistive Mode from 'hidden feature' to just 'feature’. There's a new panel in the settings tab that allows you switch to Assistive Mode at will. And now there's a close button that lets you exit Assistive Mode, too. I think this is the right thing to do
I’m calling it on Broadcasts v3.3, anything else is a ‘we'll fix it in post’. To App Review!
Just in time for iOS 17 🫡
I would have to be real silly to be crunching to ship @broadcastsapp for the visionOS launch, huh?
…👀
Finally going in and putting together the systems to enable Broadcasts’ switch to a subscription model. Still have a lot of UI to redesign and re-word, but successfully subscribed using my sandbox account so that's a win so far.
As a reminder, existing users won't need to switch to subscription — if you've bought the app, you've bought the app, and that purchase will last for several years to come. New users will be offered subscription pricing
Came across these screenshots from August in my screenshots folder and realized I'd completely forgotten I had a big @broadcastsapp iPad redesign underway before I got distracted with iOS 17 🤦♂️
https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/110899816310922687
I'm going to be streamlining
@broadcastsapp’s license flow a little in the next release, shifting where the library cap is exposed from the Add Station panel to the main UI instead — dimming any stations beyond the cap but letting them stay in your library. Tapping a dimmed station presents the IAP panel. It's a little more upfront, and a whole lot less confusing
Extracting Broadcasts' purchase panel out into its own project for a while, so I can iterate on it and easily resize it. The idea being to make it a flexible shared component I can use across different apps. Need to also bring it up to scratch for the switchover to a subscription model (for new users) and meet all of Apple's guidelines 😪
Fun fact: Broadcasts has received 110-ish updates across four platforms since it launched in 2020. If you add in Pastel, that brings it to 180 or so, or 45 shipping builds a year. Kinda highlights how silly it was to not move to subscriptions much earlier; the longer it gets from launch, the more I’m stretching that original $5 purchase price
iOS 18 Step 1: Dark and Tinted icons
iOS 18 Step 2: tintable widgets
There's an obvious place for Image Playgrounds in
@broadcastsapp, and that's in the station artwork picker. I’m not running the betas yet, so I'll see how appropriate the results actually are, but I've built in the support regardless and can turn it off if it doesn't work
I have a whole year of sales data for @broadcastsapp on visionOS now!
In total, six full copies of the app were purchased on the platform in the past 12 months, and it has about 400 users total there.
This is my best-performing app on Apple Vision Pro, and it took about seven months of work to create 🤡
Apple offered a pat on the head in lieu of a devkit
Verifying that my older
@broadcastsapp alternate UI feature flags still work before the WWDC keynote — always good to build yourself some options before you need them. Next time we see this, I expect it will be with an unhealthy amount of frosted glass
Complete double-take while browsing Apple's Developer site.
"…hey, wait a second, I know that app…"
Yeaaaaahhh now I remember what UI overhaul season feels like…
Threading the needle on targeted if statements that won’t also break the app across older OS designs on Mac, iOS, and visionOS 😂
This may not be the UI layout I ship, but I’m opting in all my custom views into the new stuff to see where that gets me before I start worrying about making decisions
Getting closer to a reasonable starting point for
@broadcastsapp in iPadOS 26 using my existing feature flags, before I start actually writing any new code or doing new layout. Progressive blurs and new glass effects all present and accounted for
I have toned down the glass effect from the default by setting its background color to be 80% white. I expect that somewhere over the beta period Apple is going to do something similar (maybe meet somewhere in the middle). Or maybe the user base will get used to it, and decide they want something more like the glassier version. It will be an easy thing to tweak, if so
I will try to maintain dual-compatibility with iPadOS 26 and earlier versions of the OS as we move through the summer. Maintaining two different design languages, *per platform*, is going to be a struggle, but we'll see how it turns out. I built Broadcasts to be flexible, and it has paid off so far
The new layout does work on the old design language too, so that's something I could consider down the road as features coalesce into a Broadcasts 4
If I were making my living on designing app icons, I would be pretty upset with Icon Composer. Apple has gradually defined whole classes of designers out of existence throughout this era, but this is a K.O.
As a developer, though, this stuff is great!
Had a couple of tiny tweaks to make, but my starting point for Broadcasts on macOS 26 is looking OK. If I manage to build and ship no other features this summer, this is at least how it will look like on the new OS
Alternate Broadcasts layout, should all the bottom toolbar stuff stick on macOS.
When you see it all laid out like this, I'm almost surprised Apple didn't make macOS more like visionOS, and move the sidebar and the bottom bars out of the window chrome like visionOS' ornaments
Adding icons to all my menu items, as per the new HIG. UIKit has made the Liquid Glass transition surprisingly easy — benefit of such a flexible framework that runs on everything from watch to headset — and it still looks and runs like it used to on older OSes at the same time
Side by side, the old and new. I'm not afraid to lean into it, if this is really the way the wind is blowing. The more time you spend on this OS, the more you get used to the new way of doing stuff. It does seem pretty stark, looking in from the outside, but when /all/ your apps look like this, it does feel better to lean in and try more ambitious things
I'm at the 'ripping up all my layouts' stage of transitioning to the modern-tab-bar-with-alt-compact-view-controller stuff and hoping I'll be able to put the pieces back together again before I give up 😅
I have reduced Broadcasts to its platonic ideal on iOS 26 😜
Trying to shoehorn all the new stuff into my existing view controller hierarchy was just overcomplicating things; I'm going to start over from first principles, and I think that means using the modern iPad (/mighty morphin') tab bar structure that I so hated upon its introduction last year. But I think it makes a lot more sense now, now that there's a spectrum across device sizes
I'd be lying if I said I knew what I was doing with these APIs, chat, but we'll get there
Getting somewhere, at least. I am always so glad that I built all my new apps in a composable form, as it has made all these new layouts and platforms over the past years so much easier
If iPadOS only respected the window scene size restrictions maximum size, as well as minimum (which it now does), I could enable more of my expanded featureset on iPad — like my Mini Player window. I think it would be worth doing 🤷♂️
I'm kinda tempted to spawn windows now on iPadOS instead of presenting view controllers like I used to. I feel like now the OS has enough flexibility for me to enable all the workflows that I've kept locked to macOS and visionOS previously, which is fun
@stroughtonsmith Apps can have multiple windows now??
@callin apps can have had multiple windows since iOS 13 😅
Steve Troughton-Smith
Jimmy Callin