Helm 2025: The Past, Present & Future

Dec 31, 2025

Crazy how 2025 has already ended, which means it’s time for the second edition of The Past, Present & Future. Last year was our first time doing this, and it’s been really fun to look back and ahead and share the joy with you all. It’s incredible how quickly the year went by.

We have a lot to share, so let’s get started!

The Past

Although we both joined RevenueCat a year ago, we kept up the momentum. Here are the main things we shipped in 2025:

MenuBar App
In-App Events
App Clips
New Feedback flow
App Store Nominations fully supported instead of opening ASC
Helm for iOS with Helm Passport
Liquid Glass redesign
Accessibility Labels
App Preview Videos
TestFlight Feedback and Crashes

A list of incredible app developers already using Helm to ship their updates

Unfortunately, we didn’t ship some things this year like Analytics, In-App Purchases, and History tracking. This was mainly due to an unplanned redesign of Liquid Glass and personal reasons. Plus, having less time for Helm because of other roles at RevenueCat didn’t help.

The Present

We’re happy to announce that our final update for 2025 is Helm 2.1 and it’s available now! It has many improvements for TestFlight, Customer Reviews, and Nominations. It also adds support for TestFlight Feedback and integrations with GitHub, Linear, Things, and Tasks

Looking back, it’s incredible how much we’ve achieved. Our team now has three members, with Frank Solleveld joining us earlier this year. The number of developers using Helm has doubled from just under 6K to over 12.6K. And we have managed to ship 80 app updates (quite a lot!).

Earlier this year, we also launched our Women in Tech discount, which has already given over $7,500 in discounts to help women publish their great apps.

We’re proud of what we’ve built so far and excited for what’s next. Let’s look to the future!

The Future

Our roadmap will be a bit different from now on. We’ve learned from past mistakes and will keep it simple for the first quarter. Here’s what we plan to launch in Q1 (in no particular order):

Notifications and TestFlight Group Aliases

Originally planned for Helm 2.1, this needed more work. Later in January, we’ll add support for Notifications (with help from our friend Tim Condon) and TestFlight Group Aliases. Notifications will keep you updated on build statuses, changes, and new feedback.

In-App Purchases finally

We know we’ve said this before, but this time it’s for real. Pol is dedicating all his time to shipping In-App Purchases and Subscriptions with Power Pricing Parity. We already have several prototypes, and it will be launched this quarter.

a preview of the In-App Purchases and Subscriptions feature

Yes, this is the same image as last year

Xcode Strings and New Pricing Models

We’ve thought about expanding translation features to your Xcode Strings Catalog. With insights from Alexander Gerrese, creator of Polyglot, we’re making good progress. This will help Helm support all your content and enable AI to craft better release notes and descriptions with more context.

To do this, we’ll need to raise our prices a bit. Helm Pro will become Helm for Indies, and we’ll introduce a new tier called Helm for Teams with many team features. More details coming later.

This is the current version of Polyglot, and shows a glimpse of what you can expect inside Helm

Game Center

Yes, Game Center support might seem small, but currently, using Helm with enabled Game Center is hard. This feature will make it easier to translate and create achievement images, making your Game Center integrations better.

More in store for 2026

There are a few more things we’d like to highlight for 2026

Starting in 2026, we’ll share more behind-the-scenes content and work-in-progress updates on Twitter and BlueSky. We’ll also launch a newsletter for those who prefer fewer updates.

Our future at RevenueCat

As many of you know, we joined RevenueCat over a year ago to start a new chapter. Starting early January, we’re (in a way) stepping back from RevenueCat to focus more on Helm and our other apps.

RevenueCat is an amazing company (and they’re hiring!), but we want to dedicate more energy to our own projects.

The good news is, we’ll still work with RevenueCat on a part-time basis to help develop tools that help developers make more money.

We’re really grateful to RevenueCat for giving us the freedom to focus on our own work while still supporting their efforts.

That’s not all…With that focus, we (Pol + Hidde) are also starting a new app development studio together. With this studio, we aim to keep building great apps like Helm and NowPlaying, and help others create fantastic software.

We’re excited to start this new chapter of our careers and can’t wait to share more! More details in the new year.

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 & Frank