I think different use cases will call for different solutions. My use case is a relatively tiny number of users and any manual work they would generate for account deletion would be nil, or very close to it.
It's not necessarily about recovering users who want to leave but rather minimizing the effort required to implement a more complex deletion flow that has a high probability of never being used by real users (in my case).
The press release sounds more flexible than the actual guidelines:
Press release (emphasis mine):
"all apps that allow for account creation must also allow users to _initiate_ deletion of their account from within the app."
Guidelines:
"If your app supports account creation, you must also offer account deletion within the app."
Has anyone seen any clarification on what options might be acceptable? e.g. I'm wondering about something simple, like opening an email composer with the app support email address and a pre-filled message body requesting account deletion which would be performed async.
Dr. Bill / RBC Ventures | Vancouver / Toronto, Canada | REMOTE (Canada)
Founded in 2014, Dr. Bill is on a mission to make medical billing easy for physicians all over Canada. Thousands of physicians already use Dr. Bill to get paid every month and we’re now in growth mode looking for great people to help us scale up. We’re currently a team of 40+, and we’re hiring a number of roles across all departments. Come join us so we can build the best medical billing solution in Canada.
"The Very Hungry Caterpillar" will always have a special place in my heart. I can't begin to describe how fond my memories are of my two year old son reciting the words on the Saturday page for the first time:
“On Saturday, he ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake, and one slice of watermelon.
That night he had a stomach ache.”
Such a precious memory for me. Thank you Eric Carle. RIP.
Yes, I totally agree. I think there are a constellation of factors that influence the upgrade decisions of users, but I have found it surprising how much the software has been under-discussed following Apple's miss.
If someone was happy enough with their iPhone 5s, 6, or 6s running iOS 11 when the X was released (Fall 2017) then I suspect they didn't feel much more pressure to upgrade when they were running iOS 12 and the Xs was released (Fall 2018).
This is a really great analysis of the situation but I think Ben, and Tim Cook in his public statements, are missing one important point: iOS 12 made the older devices (iPhone 5s, 6) run _much_ better than they were running on iOS 11 [1, 2, 3]. They improved the software so much on this iteration of iOS that they probably relieved a lot of the hardware upgrade pressure users were beginning to feel in the first half of 2018.
It will be very interesting to see if Apple even supports the iPhone 6 generation of hardware on the next version of iOS. If not, or if the software performance regresses significantly, I would expect the hardware upgrade pressure to really ratchet up again in the fall.
Congratulations to the buddybuild team. I've used buddybuild since 2015 and it has streamlined a lot of problems with building, signing, and distributing dozens of iOS apps I've worked on over that time.
It will be interesting to see how (and when) Apple integrates this into Xcode, iTunes Connect, TestFlight, and the rest of their development portal. I don't really see Apple running a hosted continuous integration system, but maybe they plan on investing more effort in Xcode Server[1] to sell some new Mac Pros, whenever they're ready.
Thanks for the feedback! Calendar integration is definitely on the roadmap, as are swipes between detail screens. Categorizing items is probably a bit lower on the list of things to do but I will definitely keep it in mind.
Wow this is really surprising, especially after reading Craig Newmark's answer on Quora just the other day to the question "Why hasn't anyone built any products on top of Craigslist data?". His response:
"Actually, we take issue with only services which consume a lot of bandwidth, it's that simple."
It's not necessarily about recovering users who want to leave but rather minimizing the effort required to implement a more complex deletion flow that has a high probability of never being used by real users (in my case).