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Give your simulator superpowers

RocketSim: An Essential Developer Tool
as recommended by Apple

Issue 114
May 10, 2022

From Indie Side Project to $1M in ARR.

This week I started listening to SubClub episodes, and one of them inspired me. Curtis Herbert shares the story of his Slopes app, which grew into a pretty serious side-project over the years.

One of the topics in this episode is Curtis's decision to share the statistics of his app with the public. As many of you know, I have several side projects, including this newsletter, my SwiftLee blog, and two subscription-based apps. I decided that it might be inspiring for you to get a quarterly update on the financials for my apps.

Getting a recurring income to become a full-time Indie is challenging, and it might be that you're considering going on this journey. Hopefully, my statistics will give you some inspiration or insight into this journey!

RocketSim contains auto-renewing subscriptions. It currently has 193 active subscriptions and 25 active trials, resulting in a $279 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue).

Stock Analyzer just recently launched. Without any marketing and optimizations, it currently has five active subscriptions and two active trials, resulting in a $15 MRR.

There are many more statistics to share, so I would love to get your input. Do you like me sharing this? Are there any other statistics you would love to see me sharing?

I hope it inspired you! Enjoy this week's SwiftLee Weekly.

THIS WEEK'S BLOG POST
Memory leaks and retain cycles can be a pain to debug. Whenever I'm running into one of these, I'll start by writing a unit test to reproduce the issue. This week's article demonstrates the technique I'm using to verify the deallocation of both view controllers and objects.

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CURATED FROM THE COMMUNITY

SWIFT
Majid Jabrayilov inspired me here! At WeTransfer, we already have several performance traces in place, but we could improve these by adding signposts and Xcode Instruments support.
Ole Begemann demonstrates how little “magic” there is behind the @MainActor by creating a @MyMainActor. I honestly didn’t completely lose the idea of magic since the examples used in this article use unofficial APIs. Though: I did learn a lot about how actors actually work.
In-Out parameters can be helpful in certain situations. I’m not often using them in my code, but it’s good to be aware of their existence and how they work. Let Gabriel Theodoropoulos explain them to you.
A tip picked up from Natalia Panferova’s blog allows you to work with SwiftUI’s focus API intelligently!
This article does not tell you how to use the SF Mono typeface in SwiftUI or UIKit. Instead, Keith Harrison tells us how you can create monospaced digits with any system font instead.

WWDC
WWDC is around the corner, which means parties will start to show up! You can follow Wwdccommunity on Twitter to not miss anything. In case you wonder: I won’t be at WWDC, but I will watch the keynote at CocoaHeadsNL.

MARKETING
Press Kits can help you promote your app to marketers and Apple when submitting a new request to appstore.com/promote. Filip Nemecek shares a few press kit examples for inspiration.

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