Tip #2 – Don't Offer iPad / Unnecessary Devices / Accessibility / Dark Mode in v1

A big mistake.

The more surface area of development you need to cover, the less quality and time you can invest in the core user experience of an app. The goal is always to distill an idea down to the most basic, simplified version and launch that so you can start collecting feedback.

The more devices you need to support, the slower your engineering and update cycles will be. In the beginning, speed is incredibly important. If you launch the v1 version of your app with Mac, Apple Watch, iPad, and Apple TV support, you’ll be forced to move a lot slower every time you’d like to release an update.

Perhaps your idea really needs a watch app to be effective, that is a different story because then the core implementation of your product requires a watch app. On the other hand, if a watch app is a “nice to have” but not something essential, it’d be a mistake to launch with that.

If speed is your priority, you want to be able to do as little work as possible to update your app. The goal is to figure out exactly the minimum you could do that would create a successful user experience in your product. Do that and nothing more.

All of the following are things I’d hold off on until much further down the road:

• iPad support - this is especially annoying because you can’t unsupport iPad ever so you’ll be stuck updating iPad code for forever

• Dark Mode / Light Mode - pick one

• Watch app - low revenue opportunity

• TV app - just no

• Mac app

• Accessibility

• Localization

Again, the caveat here is if the entire premise of your app is a “beautiful reading experience” for example, then yes accessibility and dark mode support might be a smart idea. But nice-to-have’s should always wait.