James' Audiolog: Indie.am

About James' Audiolog: Indie.am

Hey, I'm James, and welcome to my personal Audiolog. I mostly use this to share personal updates, via Indie.am. DM me for an invite!

Publisher

Indie.am

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

25 Jan 2021

Latest episode

27 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

96 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   27 Aug 2026

   App Store Review Times

   App Store Review Times are getting longer, probably because a lot of people have clawed code subscriptions and they're pushing Swift apps to the App Store and record numbers. Apple used to have a very small ecosystem of individuals who learned their programming languages and frameworks well enough to pass an app review and submit apps. But now this is likely 100x in a matter of months. I think clawed opus 4.6 was the first model I used that actually seemed to produce decent Swift code, outputs, could handle Swift UI with a little bit of guidance. That was February. We're about six months past that date. The last published report was at Apple had 500 App Store reviewers and before the introduction of AI code they would service about 100,000 submissions a month. Can you imagine how those numbers have probably changed in the last six months. But I wouldn't worry about this at all. These are the exact kind of scaling problems in the real world Apple solves on a regular basis. Their entire business, their red and butter is supply chain issues, bottlenecks scaling, overcoming issues like this. So eventually they'll figure something out. But for now it seems like we're all just going to have to wait a little bit longer for our apps to get reviewed. [BLANK_AUDIO]

2. 

   20 Aug 2026

   Personal App Developer Accounts

   Just a small realization that Claude can write swift, Claude can reason about swift UI. Claude can write some passable Kotlin, if you yell at it enough, it can produce a fairly usable interface for an Android app. Maybe it's not perfect today, but Codex Claude, they're basically on the same level. Couple years from now, and source models will probably be able to take a stab out of it as well. Just thinking about it. Someone can sign up for a free cloudflare account, connect their domain, Claude helps them set it up, they can publish static sites and workers, they get all the primitives, databases, things like that. They can publish and share what they make without signing up for a service like love a bowl or something like that. But for native apps, I'm just thinking about how in the not too distant future we're probably going to need to create something analogous to internal enterprise apps that you can sign and publish and share with friends, family, colleagues, something a little bit better than signing up for a $100 a year developer account and only publishing things to test flight manually, adding and inviting your friends and family. That workflow, full complicated, it might be too complicated for people who are just like asking Claude how to write an app, not saying they're stupid, just saying, it's not designed for, you know, maybe I want to build a photo sharing app and share it with three friends and some family members and I guess test flight works for that, the entire process of signing up for a developer account, Xcode, nothing's really tailored to amateur app developers who just want to sharing app with a few close friends, you still need an app review to do a public test flight, which that probably wouldn't go away, but still, it's an interesting thought experiment if I had a couple friends on Android and iOS devices and that's one to share an app with them, I have a developer account, so it's pretty easy, test flight, Google Play, but near future, not so distant future, I could see a definite need for a personal app store, developer account of some kind.

3. 

   25 Apr 2026

   Waitlist SaaS: Good Idea, or Bad?

   Today's question is it a good idea to launch a Waitlist Saas? But first, what is a Waitlist Saas? The proposed Saas would be a web app that makes it easier for founders to add a waitlist sign up to their launch process. Sounds great, right? But is it a good idea? I would say no, and here's why. A bit of background. RobinHood and Clubhouse both popularize the strategy, although they were not the first. You create hype around a product, delay gratification, sign up as impossible yet, only a waitlist. Maybe you can invite a few friends or share the post on social media to move up the waitlist. Waitlist became popular as a Saas launch strategy following these products and earlier products and playing similar strategies. In fact, Saas products, at a waitlist, to your own Saas is not a new idea, it's been tried several times in the past, and I don't know these companies or if they're still around . But what if I told you waitlist wasn't what made Clubhouse or Robin Hood successful launches? Their real launch strategy wasn't the waitlist. It was FOMO and hype. It was over promising on a product that couldn't possibly be as good as you imagined, substantively. The waitlist only worked because FOMO was so high, the hype train was moving so fast, they could actually get you to share the product with more of your friends to move up the waitlist. They traded a little bit more friction in the sign up process. For more shares, more like, more hype. So actually, the waitlist added friction to the sign up process works against conversion rates. Because thought experiment, 100% of visitors who would sign up for a waitlist would have been willing to sign up for the product immediately if it were available. And whatever your conversion rates are, your waitlist conversion rates. Week later, a month later, two months later can't exceed 100%. But would that have slowed down the hype train and FOMO driving the marketing campaign forward? Possibly. So in short, I would say no, this isn't a good sass idea in 2026, especially for a solo founder or small team. A sass that makes it easier for founders to add a waitlist sign up process to their app is a bad idea. In most cases, these founders need to launch faster. Not, so hype and FOMO can be a valid launch strategy. But they require a level of execution found in more experienced teams. This is unlikely to be a mass market strategy and an experienced or solo founder or small team can play successfully. These are probably the least difficult parts of a more complex marketing strategy, a better marketing team might play.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 1 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

2

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

0

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