Retiring Manifest

08 Nov 2023

A few days ago I quietly removed Manifest from sale. It was the last app that I designed and built myself that was still available, which means that for the first time in a long while, I have no apps that are truly mine on the App Store. It’s been a long time coming and while there are a number of good reasons to make the change now, it leaves me in an awkward place as a developer and I have some feelings about it.

Manifest goes all the way back to late 2014, when it began as a little project to really dive into the then-new Swift language. At the time most of my work was still in Objective-C and I thought that the best way to truly understand Swift was to build something with it from the ground up. That turned out to be true! It was a useful learning experience, especially as Swift changed rapidly over the first couple of years. Being forced to live in Swift for every part of an app forced me to get comfortable with its idioms and evolving best practices in a way that has benefited me ever since. In that way, even though Manifest wasn’t a commercial success, it did help me reach the original goal that inspired me to create it in the first place.

Functionally, Manifest was based on my own needs as a freelance developer. As a contractor, I have to keep track of how many hours I spend on each project on a daily basis. (Working hourly is certainly a choice and has a ton of ups and downs, but that’s really a topic for another time.) In particular, I often have commitments to clients for a certain number of hours in a certain period of time. (Think “60 hours per month” or “20 hours per week.”) I designed Manifest to help me stay on track by breaking down the larger goal into daily targets, so I wouldn’t fall behind or zoom too far ahead. For instance, the app might see that I have 45 hours left to do this month and 9 work days remaining, and therefore show that I need to complete 5 hours of work today to stay on track.

That was and, to me, still is a useful tool. However, I made some mistakes along the way that probably limited the app’s success. For one, I decided to make Manifest totally independent of other time tracking software and services, meaning storing, processing, and syncing the data was entirely up to me. I’d been burned in the past by relying on third party services that changed their terms or APIs in ways that broke my apps or made them obsolete, so I wanted to go my own way. That made a certain amount of sense, but it also created some challenges and meant missing some opportunities. Sync wasn’t easy in 2014 and hasn’t gotten a ton easier since then, and at the outset there were some bugs that still embarrass me. Plus it ruled out a whole bunch of users who had data on other services, wanted to work with teams, or just preferred options that I wasn’t prepared to implement, like a web interface.

I am also, candidly, not the best marketer, and I was never quite sure how to promote the app. Truthfully, there wasn’t much about Manifest’s time tracking itself that set it apart from other apps. To my mind the best features were the analysis and, to some extent, the design. Unfortunately from a marketing perspective, the analysis doesn’t really shine until you start tracking time for a while, which created kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. You didn’t get much benefit until you started using the app, but there wasn’t much reason to start using it unless you saw that analysis work. If I’d integrated something like Toggl it might have been more obviously useful from the get-go, but sadly, that’s not what I did. By the time I realized that, the app had been around for a while and providing a migration path to other services just seemed like more of a project than it was really worth undertaking.

A while ago I removed all the paywalls and let people use Manifest for free. I’d started to feel guilty about the fact that it hadn’t gotten enough traction for me to put much time into it. But as time went by, even that started to feel a little awkward. I realized that if I was being honest with myself, I just couldn’t justify ongoing development, and I knew that new versions of iOS, new devices, and changing trends would start to really leave the app behind. So I finally decided to remove it from sale rather than leave something on the App Store that I couldn’t fully stand behind. It should continue to work for existing users, but new folks won’t be able to download it.

So that leaves me in late 2023 in an odd situation: an iOS developer without a proper app on the App Store. I do have work I’ve done for clients, but by and large that’s just development, not design. They’re driving the bus, not me. (That’s ok! Sometimes it’s fun to just build stuff.) But as someone who enjoys the design side of app development, I don’t like the feeling that I don’t have some examples of that part of my work out there. Professionally, it also feels like a miss that I don’t have something current that I can point to and say, “here’s what I can do.”

I do have some ideas in the hopper. In fact, part of what pushed me to discontinue Manifest was to motivate myself to work on them. One is a more focused time analysis app that takes the most useful bits of Manifest and integrates them with popular time tracking services. (I have a very unfinished version I use myself, and maybe one day I’ll get it in a place where I could ship it.) I also have one or two concepts that might have a broader appeal, and I hope tha vacuum that Manifest leaves behind will give me a kick in the pants to move those forward. So, optimistically, stay tuned!