Manchester Trams now on iOS

If you read my last post, I mentioned that I was working on launching the Manchester Trams app on the App Store.

Well, just after that post, I spent the entire next day building and testing and finally submitted v1 into review at about 11pm, so here's how it went!

The build process

Firstly, the build process went smoother than I expcted. Under the hood, the app uses Ionic 8 and Vue so I can build it as a web app and then compile to Android or iOS easily peasily, but as this was my first time building for iOS I expected a ton of IDE errors and warnings to iron out first. This was not the case, in fact I loaded the build up in Xcode, tested it on the simulator and huzzah! Worked first time!

There were a few UI changes to make to the app, the big one being the island on iPhones blocking the header bar. This I fixed by simply increasing the padding top value on iOS than on Android.

From there, I googled various things; how to add an App Icon, how to connect to the App Store (this was an issue to begin with but turns out I was using the wrong certificates), what to do if my app goes mega-viral and Im running the api on Vercel etc.

None of these things were particularly difficult, the App Icon editor in Xcode is very similar to Android Studio, the certificates issue was cleared up once I actually read the docs, and I like how Xcode can automatically upload the latest version to App Store Connect unlike the Play Store where Im still manually uploading files like a Caveman.

The Launch

With the app tested on a few physical and virtual devices, I submitted the manchester_trams_v1_final_final.ios app for review on the App Store and went to bed. The next morning, I woke up to it having failed review due to broken Google Admob code, so I quickly fixed that, resubmitted and waited again.

5pm came around and I got the notification that the app was now Ready for Distrubition, this was great news! The app was now slowly rolling out to the app store 😎

The Marketing

Last year when I was looking to grow the Android app, I posted on the local r/Manchester subreddit and the post took off with thousands of impressions and hundreds of downloads. One recurring comment I kept getting from other redditors is that they'd love if the app was on iOS, so once the app had finally appeared fully on the App Store, I returned to the Reddit post and replied to every iOS comment with a link to the app.

After that, I posted a proper thread on the subreddit with a link to both Android and iOS apps. Whilst this post didn't take off like the original Android one did, it still got a few thousand impressions and drove around 80 - 100 downloads in the first day!

The Aftermath

With the downloads slowly growing on iOS after the launch, the last thing I had to do was to get ads working as I'd ditched the broken code in order to launch sooner so I spent several days fixing Google Ads, with the 6th version release since v1 finally showing ads to some users.

However, I found out that iOS users can simply opt out of showing Google Ads which isn't great considering the ads are how I fund running the app. So the iOS venture may not be as profitable as I originally expected, if anyone has any ideas on better Ad networks, etc, please reach out! 😅

Thats all for this article, a small but successful launch, and a round up of what happened!

Happy coding! 🧙‍♂️