News
Apple Drops App Store Commission to 15% for Small Developers
As mentioned above, Apple has reduced App Store fees for developers bringing in less than $1MM in revenue to 15% of sales, down from 30%.
While this is certainly welcome news for truly small, indie devs (myself included), not everyone is thrilled. Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson has even gone so far as accusing Apple of trying to "split the App Store opposition" with this move.
Whatever your stance on Apple's fee change, we likely haven't seen the end of this story, including whether the Google Play Store will do something similar.
Developing with Flutter on Apple Silicon - Update
Things are moving quickly with support for Flutter development on Apple's M1 Macs, and this github link highlights the work still remaining.
Important to note is that although you can deploy Flutter apps to real hardware on iOS and Android, support for the iOS simulator and Android emulator are still works in progress.
There are also IDE considerations:
Some IDEs and editors may not be fully supported on Apple Silicon. Visual Studio Code has experimental support for Apple Silicon, including support for the Flutter and Dart plugins.
I'm sure more news will be coming on this front in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for updates!
Null Safety for Dart & Flutter Now in Beta!
With this news dropping last week, it's pretty clear that if you haven't yet brushed up on what null safety means for your app, you're in danger of being left behind when this gets pushed to the stable channel early next year.
Regardless of your experience level with Dart and Flutter, I'd strongly encourage you to review this post by Michael Thomsen of Google. Importantly, along with a high-level timeline for Google's side of things, Michael also offers a suggested workflow for migrating your own code to null safety.
Also helpful is this:
If you’re an app developer, you may prefer to delay migration until the feature is in our stable channels. We plan on addressing the feedback from beta quickly, fixing any remaining issues. It’s hard to state a concrete timeline for when null safety will be in a stable release, but we’re thinking early next year.
Tutorials
Controlling a Bluetooth-Driven Matrix Display With Flutter
If you're like me and have done just enough tinkering with hardware to be dangerous, you may find this project interesting. In it, FlutterKarma sends commands from the Flutter app on his phone to an ESP32 device via Bluetooth, and the result is pretty cool!
If you want a visual demo, FlutterKarma also shared this YouTube video, which lets you see the device in action.
Tips & Tricks
Tint and Shade Generator
As the sole developer AND designer on my last project, I was often faced with making UI choices which didn't necessary fall into my comfort zone. Choosing color palettes was one of those tasks on which I spent much more time than I'd like to admit.
If you ever find yourself in similar circumstances, you may find this tint and shade generator tool by Michael Edelstone quite handy.
For those focused on the Material Design palettes, you may also want to look into Michael's Material Design Palette Generator.
Nice work, Michael!
// From Mark
Thanks, Apple!
Unless you've been living under a rock this past couple of weeks, you probably noticed that Apple is reducing its App Store fees for small developers to 15%, beginning in January.
As one of those small developers who will benefit from this change, I'm glad to see this move, even though I could make a decent case that 15% is still too high, especially when compared with handling the transactions myself via Stripe or something similar.
Of course, since most of us developing in Flutter are also present on the Google Play Store, it will be interesting to see if Google follow's Apple's lead and reduces its fees as well.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Mark Winters