Five and a bit years after I released my first app, WeighMe, I’ve just deleted it and Pin Your Pics from the App Store. Here were the total downloads:

Total App Downloads

The reason I’ve zapped them is simple: it doesn’t make sense to continue to invest serious amounts of time in Objective C, in [for Pin Your Pics in particular] what developed into pretty large and complicated codebases. Apple made an announcement quite recently that support for iPhone X screen dimensions is about to become a mandatory requirement, which was going to be quite a bit of work for me.

But the more immediate death knell for Pin Your Pics came a few weeks ago when Google announced a change to their Maps API. Up until this month you could get an API key, and it would just stop working above a fairly generous threshold. Now you have to sign up with your card details. While my app usage is unlikely to trouble the new limit, it’s a chance I’m not prepared to take.

I am a bit gutted that, when Google cut over the API, the app is going to break quite unceremoniously, which is a bit rubbish for people using it. But I hadn’t updated it in ages and it was starting to get fairly unstable anyway.

I still code up the odd utility in Objective C but I’m not going to renew my developer subscription when it expires this year: I really can’t see myself publishing any more apps.

Some interesting numbers buried in the 5k download total. More than half were in China. I have no idea why. Also, that spike last September was weird: 1.9k downloads that month alone. I did absolutely no marketing for either of the apps. Finally, to my lone ‘customers’ in each of Uzbekistan and Kazakstan, thank you for using my apps, whoever you are :).

I’ve decided to let my Apple Developer subscription lapse in a couple of weeks. I wavered over the decision when I realised that my apps would be disappearing off the App Store. Before they go, I did a little digging on iTunes Connect to see how they’ve done. Badly: a combined total of 2.15k downloads since I released WeighMe in December 2012.

Despite the paltry totals – oh, and let’s not forget my $24 in sales! – I was impressed to see that the apps have been downloaded in a total of 77 countries. So, for my solitary users in Armenia, Ghana, Paraguay and Uzbekistan: thanks for the downloads, folks!

I want to learn Java so my next handset, when I upgrade some time around the end of the year, will be running Android. If the iPhone 7 is released without an audio jack [as is heavily rumoured], I’d jump ship regardless. I have enough chargers and whacky adapters to last me a lifetime without adding more for headphones.

All of which is a lovely story, but when I tried Android about three years ago, I hated it. And if Apple do buck the trend with the audio jacks, the rest of the manufacturers will probably follow suit. So I may quietly return to the fold and pretend that I’ve never been away :).