With Amore №2

Hi friends,

This is the second issue of »With Amore«, which I plan to use to keep you in the loop about significant project milestones and product updates.

Since the first issue 4 weeks ago, I have been working closely with several developers to make Amore easier to use and to support more use cases. Almost every feature now has a dedicated help page on amore.computer which you can find right inside the app.

WhyFi

Last weekend my friend James Potter shared his weekend project WhyFi in a tweet, which shortly after went viral. All the attention encouraged him to package it up for distribution and start selling it for $10.

On the same day, he reached out to me asking if he could have early access. A few hours later he had hundreds of happy customers and confidently published WhyFi with Amore.

Through Amore, he already shipped half a dozen of over-the-air updates to improve WhyFi.

His success accomplishes my initial vision for this project, which was to help my friends and fellow developers to focus on what they are doing best: building great products instead of wrangling with tedious distribution flows.

Public Beta

After onboarding new developers to the self-managed S3 bucket feature and having the first viral app distributed via Amore, it's time to leave the early access phase and open the project for everyone who's interested to self-publish their Mac apps.

You can get started today by downloading Amore from here.

I recommend you use the Get Started with Amore guide, which includes a short video (3:35) that walks you through the steps of self-publishing your first app with Amore.

The option to get a personal onboarding still exists. Please reply to this email if you are interested or need help setting things up.

Amore+

For the time being Amore will be free to use for everyone who wants to get started publishing their Mac apps. To keep this project sustainable, the latest version of the app includes Amore+, which currently is a monthly/yearly subscription of $9.99/99.

The subscription currently unlocks:

  • Unlimited app and releases
  • Custom domains (when hosting on Amore)
  • The option to remove the »Built with amore.computer« watermark in the DMG image

Built with Amore

I want to use this opportunity to thank the early supporters of this project that taught me so much and helped shape Amore into the tool it is today. Their apps are all built with Amore in more ways than one.

What's Next?

A common theme with developers in onboarding calls has been confusion around some of Amore's features, like DMG creation, which felt a bit too magical. I am currently working on demystifying and better communicating what Amore is doing and exposing previously implicit behavior as explicit settings in the UI and documenting it.

After this work has been done, I want to focus on developer feedback and look into 2 areas more deeply. The first area is payments and licensing for apps, so developers can use Amore to earn money. The second one is to build pretty download pages for apps hosted on Amore and possibly have an index of apps to help developers get more attention for their projects.

xoxo
Lucas