A happy ending to the Better Blocker saga

TL; DR: Apple have been in touch and offered us a way to migrate to our new not-for-profit without impacting the experience of existing Better Blocker customers.

At the start of this month, Laura and I asked Apple for some help to migrate our Apple Developer account (and Better Blocker) from our previous not-for-profit to our new one, following our move to Ireland. Initially, we weren’t able to reach anyone beyond first-level support and Apple said “no.”

Moving on

Based on Apple’s answer we took the following steps:

• Triaged and fixed all the open bugs we could find in the Better Blocker iOS and macOS apps.

• Released app updates for both the iOS and macOS apps (update version 2020.1).

• Set the price of both apps to free so that people would not be fooled into buying an app that we could not keep updating.

• Notified our customers of the migration.

A turn of events

Towards the end of last week, we were contacted by Apple who told us they could help us avoid this situation. I wrote back and accepted their offer.

Based on this:

• I submitted another update for both apps this morning (version 2020.2) to update our existing customers about this latest development and remove the previous notice.

• Now that we know we can keep updating the apps, we’ve reverted the apps from free to paid. Going forward, both apps will be priced at Tier 2 ($1.99/₤1.99/€2.29). You can get both for less than the price of a beer.

  All funds go to Small Technology Foundation, our tiny two-person not-for-profit working to create tools to safeguard and promote human rights and democracy in the digital network age.

What this means for you

• Everything will continue as before, you don’t need to do anything.

• The app will continue to get updates.

• At some point, you will see our organisation name change from Ind.ie (Article 12) to Small Technology Foundation.

I am also attempting to ensure that not-for-profits in the future that might find themselves in similar circumstances (as niche as it may be) will not have to struggle as we did. Fingers crossed on that one.

What this means for us

I’d like to thank Apple for reaching out to help us with this. Just for the record, here’s a summary of the impact this process has had on our tiny two-person not-for-profit, both the negatives and positives.

The negatives

• January was a write-off for research and development and further work that was planned for Site.js. I look forward to putting this behind us so we can get back to work on building technological infrastructure to protect and promote human rights and democracy.

• We lost over a week of revenue from app sales.

• We had to sign up for a new Developer Account which we now don’t need and have asked to shut down (cost: $99, no refund available).

The positives

• You have all been absolutely lovely. Thank you all for your lovely words of support and encouragement throughout this ordeal.

• We gained 12 new patrons and our patronage went up from €320/month to €508/month.

• We received ~€1,400 in donations.

• We got the opportunity to improve both apps.

Here’s to happy endings

I don’t know exactly when our account migration from Ind.ie (Article 12) to Small Technology Foundation will be complete but, barring any further complications, you should not have to know or care about it. You really shouldn’t have had to to begin with.

On behalf of Laura and myself, thank you again for being so lovely about it all and for your support during this difficult process. I’m glad it looks like the story will have a happy ending.