Deprecated Incorporated

It’s every Apple developers worst nightmare. Your app is doing well, business is going fine, then all of a sudden BAM! Something changes in Apple’s world and suddenly everything is at risk. Sometimes it’s as simple as Apple deprecating an API you depend on. Other times it’s a policy matter - a change in rules that has Apple requesting that you change or remove your app from the store. Sometimes it is a bug in the platform which you have to hack a creative workaround for. No matter what the specifics, developers should be prepared to handle that day when Apple pulls the rug out. After more than six years of working on apps in Apple’s land I’ve had more than my fair share of these experiences. In this talk I will go through four different examples from multiple developers covering the most common situations in which changes in Apple land can disrupt your app. Through these stories I will offer best practices for handling these difficult situations from how to interact with Apple to how to deal with the gripping frustration that can come along with these challenges. The goal of this talk is to better prepare attendees for that inevitable day when something goes wrong and in doing so help reduce the ambient anxiety many developers feel about the possibility of such problems.

This talk was recorded at AltConf 2015. Watch all the videos!