I never expected this to happen again, but Museum Shuffle got another App Store feature.

Background

I love Museum Shuffle. It was my first app and I’ll never forget the thrill of seeing something I wrote show up on the App Store. But at the same time it hasn’t been my focus for quite a while. In fact, it’s been a year since I’ve updated it. There are two things about it that have been bothering me that I finally decided to address.

Pinch To Zoom

With the UIKit version of Museum Shuffle you could pinch to zoom from any part of an image. There doesn’t appear to be a built-in way to do this in SwiftUI (it zooms from the center only). With the help of Stewart Lynch and Ryan Lintott I got it working. Here’s a video of it in action if you’re curious.

Widget

Museum Shuffle has a widget that shows images of your saved favorite artwork. Honestly I got tired of seeing the blank widget for the app reminding me that it isn’t working.

When iOS 16 came out my image widget didn’t work any more. Through discussions with other developers we found this thread, which got us working again.

When iOS 17 came out it stopped working again, but this time we didn’t find a solution. It’s now one month until iOS 18 gets revealed and I came to the realization that not a single user had contacted me about the widget not working. That meant that most likely no one was using the widget. I just wanted to be done with it and removed it.

Ship It!

Honestly I didn’t think anything of it when I released the update into the world. A couple of days later I took at look at my statistics on App Store Connect and did a double take. I thought to myself, “It finally happened! Please Don’t Rain finally got a feature on the App Store!!!” Excitement turned to confusion when I realized, “Wait a minute, this is Museum Shuffle!”

I couldn’t find anything on the USA App Store, but the last time this happened it was only featured overseas. I asked Stefan Blos to look at his German App Store and sure enough, there it was.

The app in the “What’s new in apps” section.

Chart Watching

It’s so interesting (to me) watching your statistics get a turbo charge when this happens. Here’s what my impressions ended up with when the week was over.

25.7K impressions on the first day.

What Did You Do?

I had more than one person ask me if I had filled out the form to alert the App Store editors about changes to my app. Nope, I haven’t done that for Museum Shuffle in years. This was all organic. It just goes to show that you never know when your app will get put into the spotlight. Now if I could just get it to happen for my weather app….

Contact

If this post was helpful to you I’d love to hear about it! I’m @MuseumShuffle@mastodon.social on Mastodon, @mrmuseumshuffle on Threads, @chriswu.com on Bluesky, and my email is museumshuffle at gmail dot com.

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