The state of TV Show Tracker for Apple Watch
Two months ago, I have been forced to remove the companion watch app from TV Show Tracker. New requirements for Apple App Store submissions took effect on April 1st 2018: watch app submissions must be built with watchOS 2 and above.
Initially, I planned to port the app to watchOS 4 in the following weeks. Moving forward in the port, I’ve realised that it would require large amount of code to be rewritten in order to finalise the port. Taking that into account, I’ve decided to postpone the re-introduction of the watch app until the next major release of TV Show Tracker 4.0 for iOS which is due in the coming months (more about it below).
What is so difficult to port?
The Watch app has been published with the release of the Apple Watch on April 2015. It was developped with watchOS 1.0 SDK which was technologicaly like developing a Notification Center Widget for iOS.
Under watchOS 1, all the code logic was running on iPhone and all the data was stored on iPhone as well. It means that development was a lot easier than developing a brand new app for a new OS for two reasons:
- Most of the code base could be shared with the iOS counterpart as the WatchKit extension was running on iOS.
- Data (i.e. favorite shows list, preferences, cached episodes info) could be easily shared and synced between the Watch and iPhone app because it was stored physically on the same device.
That being said, porting to watchOS 2+ means rewriting a lot of code to be inter-compatible with watchOS/iOS and new code for sharing and syncing data between the iPhone app and watch counterpart.
What about TV Show Tracker 4.0 ?
TV Show Tracker 3.0 was released shortly after iOS 7 and is about to turn 5 years old already. Version 3.0 was a big makeover but not a complete rewrite and shared a lot of code base with version 1.0 released under iOS 3 on November 2009.
This very old code base has become very hard to maintain, evolve and fix when bugs arise. This is the reason why I started working on the biggest release since 1.0: TV Show Tracker 4.0, a complete rewrite of the app 🚀🚀🚀.
This major release will be more stable than ever, integrate latest features of new iPhones and iPads and will allow to keep pace with all new features added to iOS every years.
Thank you so much for your support
I receive countless emails about happy users using TST for almost a decade now and that’s what keep me motivated to keep the app afloat and keep making it better thoughout the years. Again, thank you so much for your support!
I know I’ve had hard times trying to respond and support every users facing issues and crashes with the app and I’m really sorry for that. This is one of the main reason I start from scratch a brand new app now.
Following @tvshowtracker is the best way to get latest news about progress on upcoming releases. Stay tuned!
