Tales from the app development team at Steamclock.

Over the years, Steamclock has hired pretty infrequently. Our growth has been slow and steady, and our team members tend to stick around!

In February, we wrote about Apple’s coming restrictions on SDKs that send data to companies who track users across websites, and the potential App Store rejections that may begin when those rules come into effect. We advised then then that all iOS apps that were using Google Analytics, Google’s Firebase, Flurry, or Facebook SDKs to prepare for potentially migrating off, in case neither Apple nor the trackers backed down.

This story has moved a lot since it was published – our update from March 3 tells the latest.

A few months back we heard from a very cool digital commerce company called Ora Organic. They ticked all our boxes:

Back in 2013, Peer 1 Hosting challenged us to build a cross-platform, 3D interactive map of the internet in 3 months. After being featured on CNN, accumulating over 100,000 downloads, and receiving an average rating of almost 5 stars, the Map of the Internet was one of the first apps to prove our mettle as cross-platform app developers.

One year ago, Royal Pixel Service – our sibling company – launched a mobile game called Two Spies. Despite its humble ambitions, the game has achieved over half a million downloads, a 4.7 star rating, and has been featured by Apple’s App Store editorial team as Game of the Day. Not a bad start!

At Steamclock, we’re firm believers in the power of microcopy: the tiny phrases that lead customers through your app. Product design is all about communication, and an extremely cost-effective way to make your app communicate better – and thus retain, convert, and delight better – is to refine your microcopy.

We’re super proud of WealthBar’s work building a great fintech product here in Canada, and our team’s work shipping over 40 versions of their native apps over the years.

At Steamclock, we often build mobile apps for web-savvy tech companies. Luckily for us, these kinds of clients often already have solid APIs available for us to build on top of, letting us hit the ground running.

All the way back in 2014, Steamclock’s Allen Pike had the itch to prototype a game, and a desire to learn Swift – Apple’s latest programming language. Inspired by boardgame-like turn-based games like Letterpress, a coding-intense weekend resulted in a prototype spy strategy game. After some highly scientific playtesting at Vancouver’s Alibi Room, the conclusion was swift: it was fun!