Three Years of Opener

Today is Opener’s third birthday! 🎂 Inspired by a recent post from the developers of Halide and as a follow up to last year’s post, I thought I’d write up a little year in review.

Launches

Opener’s steadily grown and developed over the past year. Some of the things I’m most proud of shipping in that time are:

• iPad drag & drop and keyboard support.
• iPhone X and iOS 11 support.
• A shiny new icon.
• Support for opening .webloc, .url, and vCard files as well as addresses embedded in text.
• Localizing the app in 7 new languages (thanks to the folks at Wordcrafts).
• Support for the dynamic type and smart inverted colors accessibility settings.

Changes to popular apps

Many of the most popular apps that Opener supports haven’t changed since last year with the exception of three.

• Apollo is a stunning Reddit client that came out October 2017. Before Apollo’s launch, folks within its active subreddit community reached out to me and encouraged me to support it. Because of this I got to chat with Apollo’s developer, Christian Selig, and build out the integration. Opener supported Apollo from the day it launched, and it very quickly grew to one of the top apps that Opener supports.
• ProTube, which has historically been one of the most popular apps that Opener supports, was unfortunately removed from the App Store due to a dispute with YouTube. Despite its removal it continues to be one of the most popular apps that Opener supports for those who still have it installed.
• AppZapp, a third party App Store community app that’s consistently been in the top 10 apps that Opener supports, was discontinued last week due to GDPR.

Stats

Opener currently supports 214 apps and 37 browsers, up from 188 apps and 24 browsers on June 1st of last year. At launch, Opener only supported 38 apps and no browsers 😆.

As I started looking at how Opener’s usage has changed in the last year, I noticed a pattern: the stats around Opener’s installs and usage in its third year approximately match or exceed the numbers for its first two years combined. Here are the details.

• In its first two years Opener was used to open 350,454 links, in its third year it opened 463,252 links. That’s 30% more opens in a single year than in the prior two!
• In its first two years Opener’s x-callback-url integration was used 20,281 times, and in its third it was used 22,843 times. That’s 13% more usage than in the first two years.
• Opener was downloaded 9,728 times in its first two years, and 7,110 times in its third year. While this doesn’t exceed the prior combined years, it does come awfully close.

New devices

Apple launched two devices with new screen sizes in the last year, the iPhone X and the iPad Pro 10.5". Opener supported both of these new sizes when they launched, and Opener’s user base adopted them very quickly. The iPhone X has accounted for 28.6% of Opener’s use across all iPhones since it launched, and the iPad Pro 10.5" accounted for 29% of Opener’s use on iPad since its launch.

Not bad for two new premium-priced devices.

Coverage

A few people decided to write and make videos about Opener in the past year, which I’m always very grateful for 😊

• iMore wrote an article about using Opener to open Apple Maps links in Google Maps.
• MacStories wrote about Opener’s adoption of drag & drop and included it in its must-have apps of 2017.
• Finer Tech included Opener in its list of favorite behind-the-scenes iOS utilities.
• A Japanese blog named reliphone wrote about Opener being translated into Japanese and about an enhancement to Opener’s support for nPlayer.
• Christopher Lawley put up a review of Opener on his YouTube channel, and included it in his iOS apps of the year.

It’s been a fun ride, and to this day I still really enjoy working on Opener. I believe it smooths the edges off of inter-app communication on iOS, and I love hearing from folks who’ve found it useful.

Opener is on sale for $0.99 today to celebrate its birthday. If you’ve decided to give it a try I hope you enjoy using it!