A few days ago I was looking through the history of the Twitter account for my first app Storm Spotter. I found this Tweet by Patrick Marsh telling me he bought it on the first day it went on sale¹.

Today marks 2,500 days since Storm Spotter first went on sale. I didn’t realize it then, but that day was a turning point in my career. I went from being a meteorologist to an app developer.

Unfortunately, Storm Spotter is no longer available on the store. It has been unsupported since I started working at WDT 4 years ago. It had small compatibility updates for iOS 6 and 7, but that is it.

The app itself still runs fine on iOS 10, but the server that it points to for radar data was retired by NOAA this month. At this point, modernizing the code enough to get it set for another release to change the radar server would take too much time. I was really surprised by the number of people who were still using it (based on support emails after the server went down).

Looking back at the app, I am embarrassed about some of my UI decisions in the app². However, I am proud that the code runs just fine on iOS 10 even though the last OS it was actively developed for was iOS 5.

I hope the next 2,500 days of being an iOS developer are as fun and rewarding as the first.