A lot of users have expressed concerns about the future of Dash after Apple removed it from the App Store. This post is meant to give some insight into how Dash is doing exactly, as well as some interesting tidbits.

Revenue in 2016

All of Dash’s App Store revenue has migrated to direct sales, with a slight increase.

The downhill from Q1 to Q3 is due to saturation of the Dash 3 paid upgrade. I haven’t had any sales or promotions for the entirety of 2016.

Dash for iOS was never a significant part of my revenue and like most iOS apps it was never sustainable. I should have open-sourced it a long time ago, as it now brings in more revenue by promoting Dash for macOS.

Users

Most of the App Store users of Dash 3 have migrated their license to the direct version. I was able to use the in-app notification mechanism I had to let them know about what’s going on so that they don’t get cut off from the app they paid for.

Unfortunately I have no data on what happened to the App Store users of Dash 2 and I have no way of notifying them.

Interesting Tidbits

Dash for iOS returned to the App Store just a few days after I open-sourced it, thanks to He Tiancong and Jie Wang. This is despite the fact that I specifically chose a license that’s incompatible with the App Store. I highly recommend avoiding Dash on the iOS App Store, as I do not know what modifications they have made to my code. Later Update: Two more developers just released Dash on the iOS App Store as paid apps: Cuilian Su and Zuogen Zhang. Later Later Update: These apps have now been removed from the App Store.

Dash continues to be used by a lot of Apple Engineers and I’ve received great help from them in debugging issues and in supporting the new Xcode 8 documentation format.

It feels great to have full control over my business and to avoid App Store installation/updating/purchasing issues.

Conclusion

I was lucky to have setup a direct way of distributing Dash a while ago and as a result I’ve been mostly unaffected by the removal from the App Store.