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 :).