Independence Alice Zhao, Curtis Herbert and Daniel “Jelly” Farrelly

Curtis has won an Apple Developer Award, so Alice and Jelly give him the ultimate gift: an Independence reunion. They discuss what it’s like to win such a coveted award, what they’ve been doing in the last couple of years, and whether or not any of them are actually still indies.

Curtis had a topic planned, but Alice and Jelly ruined everything. The three talk about their experiences through out the course of Independence, how things have changed, why it’s ending, and ultimately answer the question of whether they still aim to be independent.

If you’re considering doing an app with subscriptions, there’s some things you may want to consider before you make that move, as it’s not necessarily the best answer for every situation. Curtis and Jelly have been using subscriptions for a while, so Alice quizzes them on how things have been going, in the hopes that it’ll give her an answer on whether she should move to using them herself.

After launching a new thing—or an update to a thing—Jelly likes to stop, look back at the process, and evaluate how things went. For him, it involves considering the answers to some key questions, and he decides that it’s worth forcing Alice and Curtis through this process. Together, they discuss recent launches, how they went, and what they feel could have gone better… or worse.

Running a successful business is hard, and with the myriad of decisions that you make, it’s also difficult to do so in an ethical way. Alice, Curtis, and Jelly look back at the decisions they’ve made in trying to run ethical businesses, how they’ve worked out long term, and whether they’ve been the right choices in the long term.

If there’s one thing that’s important when building a business around software, it’s data, but there are also downsides to collecting the data, both for us as business-owners, and for our customers. Alice, Jelly and Curtis talk about their approaches to data collection, and why it’s best to keep privacy in mind when creating software.