Another thing to do would be to generally focus on quality over quantity when it comes to collectibles. There is a lot to choose from already, we really don’t need the flood of additions to continue at its current pace. I get that it’s fun to think of and mock up certain ideas and sets, but they all seem to make it through, and if we’re all forced to house these things, especially the icons, which is insane storage-wise as you lay it out, it’s better to be selective and not just throw them all in because they exist. Even if storage weren’t an issue, I feel more and more each day that the store is just mostly full of litter.
Like the clever, artsy, high-effort icons are great (Flower Patch, Zen Garden), but then you have the spammy ones (Google, Instagram, etc.) Same with themes and fonts. I know the point is to make money, but I can’t imagine who is buying like DHL and Potato, lol.
Just my two cents. Would do some bigtime culling and quality refocusing if it were me.
Definitely thinking on this. Editing will be some major theme in Clear’s roadmap in general. Like sometimes we will make some mistakes, and while other apps would feel pressure to never remove things or really change flawed designs, I feel we have some unique support to do the right thing long term vs. short term and at times, make some kind of painful pivots or cuts.
If we cull the matching theme app icons to address the binary size issue we will be able to more seasonally rotate and have rare retired ones that you can no longer collect etc.
DHL and Fedex etc. line were in part with list personalization in mind (like you might keep a list for post office errands or packages on the way).
The way we work is we tend to get obsessed/inspired by a new theme, and I do remember for a couple weeks it was like food items/groceries, and then a couple weeks it was more riffs on favorite corporations/brands while working on the Apple weekend event collectibles. So I guess I would expect the collection to round out over time but be more uneven early on like this. (But also that you know, we kind of got it out of our system and sucked the bone marrow out / have moved on with these two categories.)
It might end up being polarizing, but: is there maybe an avenue where you launch new themes/icons/etc as a test first, watch the sales and then retract them if the sales are slow? Obviously refunding those who purchased them.
Would be a way to keep app size down if there’s nothing you can do with icons. I don’t know the statistics, but I’m guessing there are some things in the shop that are bought a lot and a good amount that hardly sell at all?
I think we just need to figure out the icons, the themes separate from them do not add to the download size. Obviously we’re ready to make refunds when we need to from a mistake or if we pivot like that, but I also would not want to set a path where there are regular refunds just as a matter of business! That to me would be a symptom that the model is kind of broken and we need to fix it or find better.
Great to see the latest update bring the app way down in size! Personally this update puts the app well within the range I’d expect and this update took seconds vs around a minute for prior updates. Thank you for putting time into making this improvement!
I’ll post a quick thread for the 2.2.2 but yeah, was very satisfying to squeeze this down! And I’m sure it will help with new people trying out Clear too. Might be able to get a few more MB too converting onboarding images to HEIC format, will see for next update.
Hmm I think we might actually have some optimizing to do there after looking into it! But I will note the graphic themes so far (the background graphics vs. icons) total just like 52 megabytes, so it shouldn’t be too bad as a worst case current install footprint scenario. We’ll get to this.
