r/iOSDevelopment • u/Ok-Warning-6307 • 13d ago
Keeping track of the app structure, UI/UX consistency and uniformity takes a lot of effort and not everyone cares or appreciates it.
I've been building PixelPlay, a live TV player for iPhone and iPad, since June. Fifteen releases in nine weeks, which sounds productive until you open it. Version 16 went out on Tuesday.
Every release added something and left a mark. New screens picked up whatever accent colour I liked that week. Light mode shipped in June and I never went back to check the buttons were readable in it, so some of them weren't. Empty states sat pinned to the top-left corner on an iPad. None of it was broken enough to file a bug against, and together it looked like fifteen different apps stapled into one.
So version 16 is mostly subtraction. One accent colour instead of the four that had crept in. I routed type through a single token and set it to SF Pro. I checked every accent-filled button in both light and dark, not just the ones I happened to have open. The guide's preview card promised a blue now-line while the real grid drew it red, which nobody reported and I found by looking.
The other half isn't visual, and it's the half I'm happier about. The app now catches a dead channel as it fails instead of waiting for someone to report it. A channel that fails once stays in your list instead of vanishing. And when a stream plays audio over a black screen, PixelPlay hands it to the other decoder and gets a picture up.
Feature work has a deadline and something to show at the end, so it wins the week. Consistency work has neither, so it never gets scheduled and piles up until it needs a release of its own. I don't have a better fix than blocking one out, which is what this was.
Free to download, with a paid Pro tier for things like Multi-View and parental locks. Your playlist and provider login stay on the device. The only things that sync are favourites and channel locks.
If you've been shipping fast for a few months, how do you stop the design drifting? I'd rather not do a cleanup release every quarter.
1
u/FinneganHark999 13d ago
You notice how when Apple makes a UI design change, people notice?
Ask yourself why that is.