Helm 2024: The Past, Present & Future
Introduction
It’s the last week of the year and we thought it would be nice to introduce a fun yearly tradition where we look at the past, present and future of Helm. This allows us to reflect on what we’ve achieved, and communicate where we are heading.
The Past
This has been a monumental year for us because we started developing this app on the 4th of February, and after a wildly successful beta and a very long review process, we finally officially launched it on June 11, 2024.
Since then, we have shipped over 45 updates (all with Helm of course!) and launched big new features like Screenshots, App Nominations, Customer Reviews, and TestFlight.
On top of that we shipped a lot of smaller refinements and quality-of-life features and introduced a nice contingent pricing with our friends at RocketSim.
We both truly believe all the smaller details are what make Helm feel different, and we always block time to keep improving it while we work on bigger features.
The Present
Currently, we are happy to announce that Helm is being used by nearly 6000(!!) app developers. This number is wild to us as we only launched in June earlier this year, we never expected that Helm would be loved by so many of you so fast.
Between the holidays, we are focusing on having fun and re-charge for the new year. That’s why the next few updates will mainly have fixes and smaller new features that we think add value to Helm.
Of course, we are also still working on In-App Purchases & Subscriptions, which takes a bit longer than anticipated as we want to be sure it works right and is actually an improvement on what’s currently available in App Store Connect.
Please bear with us, it is coming early next year.
The Future
While this has been an exciting start for Helm, we are nowhere near finished and we’d love to give you a little glimpse into our plans for 2025.
Obviously one of our core focusses still is to get as close to feature parity with the App Store Connect website as possible and we’ll do what we can to get there in 2025.
But that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t block time for some features unique to Helm and we wanted to talk about three of them, just to make you excited.
Helm for iOS Expected: Q2 of 2025
We have been teasing this for a bit already but yes, Helm will come to iOS, iPadOS, and even watchOS (we have a fun idea for this) in 2025.
The goal is to have this ready before WWDC 2025 and we are slowly making progress. Every new feature is already built with iOS in mind as well.
We can’t wait to help you ship your updates on the go with Helm for iOS, and it will be gorgeous.
Analytics Expected: Q3 of 2025
It has been a menu item since day one, just to collect as much feedback on this as possible, but 2025 will be the year we will be able to finally provide you with beautiful, customizable analytics.
Our goal here is to make it as flexible as possible with analytics that matter. You will be in control of what you will see, and we’ll try to build them in a way we can easily add new analytics over time.
Make sure to let us know which Analytics you would want to see first here.
History TrackingExpected: Q3 of 2025
Sooo this is one of our personal favourites and funny enough, in the background there is already something in place for this.
History tracking… We will give you a beautiful way to see the lifeline of your app and can even tell you when you’ve changed keywords or any other ASO-related information.
This in combination with Analytics will become a super powerful tool for you to see what works and what doesn’t.
Do you want to be the first to try any of these? Whenever we do a beta of some of our bigger features we will always launch them via our mailing list which you can subscribe to here.
RevenueCat
We are delighted to announce that both Pol & Hidde are joining RevenueCat in January 2025 to start a new Developer Experience team where we will be focusing on optimizing the developer experience within RevenueCat as much as possible.
What does this mean for Helm?
Nothing really. We both keep full ownership of the app and will continue to work on it in our personal time. We are still very much passionate about making Helm the ultimate companion to help you ship perfect app updates and getting your apps in the hands of the right people.
RevenueCat became a big fan of Helm and therefore reached out to see if we were interested in helping them craft better experiences. After a successful project last month, both sides decided it is a really good fit and we both are really excited to bring our experience to the RevenueCat team.
Thank you
Without all of your support we wouldn’t be where we are today, so thank you, thank you, thank you! From the bottom of our hearts and we can’t wait to improve Helm even further in the new year. See you soon!
Hidde & Pol
