Everything we shared in our inaugural Launch Party

Thanks to everyone who managed to attend our inaugural Launch Party! If you couldn’t make it, the recording is up on YouTube.

We had a lot to share with you, and you had some great questions and feedback for us.

In this blog, I’m going to summarize everything that we shared and, where possible, link off to further resources to help you learn more. Plus, I’ll sprinkle in a couple of the audience Q&As related to these features to help answer any questions you might have.

There’s a lot to cover so let’s dive in.

Improvements to our mobile Progressive Web App (PWA) dashboard

Our dashboard has supported PWA features for a while. If you’re not familiar with PWAs, they make your mobile web experience feel and behave more like a native app. To access these on iPhone, in Safari, tap the share button while accessing the RevenueCat dashboard and “Add to Home Screen”.

We’ve made our PWA better:

• On iOS, there’s now a refresh button in the top menu. The menu itself has also been improved, which extends to the regular mobile site as well.
• All of our Charts work on mobile, just like they do on desktop
• Push notifications: You can now subscribe to push notifications, on your phone, for all of our subscription events (you can control which events you want to be notified about). And if you click on one of these notifications, it’ll take you straight to the relevant part of the dashboard. This is not publicly available yet so if you want a sneak peek and share feedback, sign up here!

Audience question: Does this also display for in-app purchases? The answer is yes, it’ll display for all of the subscription events that you might have been getting in our Slack or Discord integrations.

Weekly Performance Summaries

On the same topic of pushing data out of RevenueCat — and helping you to stay informed of what’s going on in your app, without needing to go into the dashboard — we have launched a new feature called Weekly Performance Summaries.

If you turn on this feature you’ll receive an email every Monday morning that covers the key subscription metrics for your app. You’ll be able to see 1) How is that metric looking in the last seven days? 2) How has that metric changed versus the previous seven days? And 3) You’ll be able to click through to any of these metrics and see the overview and Charts to dig in deeper.

Everyone has access to Weekly Performance Summaries in the Labs area of your Account Settings. There, you can choose which Projects you would like to be included in your weekly summary.

Audience question: Can we push these summaries to other destinations, such as Slack? The answer is not yet, but definitely something we’re considering for the future, especially once we’ve had feedback on this initial email iteration.

Improvements to our server-side developer experience

All of these improvements relate to things we’ve shipped that help you if you’re interfacing with RevenueCat from your own server or backend. 

You can create and modify apps through our REST API v2. This makes it easier to control RevenueCat remotely and build automation, without needing to access the RevenueCat dashboards at all.

You can now pull all of the metrics shown on the RevenueCat Overview page via the REST API v2. This includes data such as when the metric was last updated, meaning you have more flexibility to build your own dashboards.

Integrate subscriptions and purchases from third party sources (beta) — While we support payment and subscription tracking on the web via Stripe natively, we do not support all of the many other platforms. And due to how many there are it’s unrealistic for us to ever support them all natively, which is why we’ve built an external purchases API. This means that, for example, if you have subscriptions on PayPal, you can send that information into RevenueCat to grant entitlements and even see that data and revenue in your dashboard and Charts, giving you a holistic view of everything going on across all of your subscription platforms.

This feature is currently in private beta; if you’re interested in trialing it and providing feedback, you can get in touch with us here.

You can now more flexibly utilize webhooks. Webhooks are general purpose notifications that we can send to your backend. We’ve made a bunch of improvements: 1) You can now have up to five webhook URLs per project (up from one), 2) You can filter by app or environment (production or sandbox), 3) You can now filter event types, so if you’re only interested in a particular event like new purchases or renewal, you can do that. And lastly, not directly related to webhooks but important to it: we have a new event type, SUBSCRIPTION_EXTENDED, which we can send whenever a subscription is extended (via the Google and Apple backends, for example).

Apple Offers

On iOS, there are three types of offers that you can set up:

1. Introductory offers
2. Promotional offers
3. Offer codes

We have made some improvements, unlocked by us utilizing StoreKit 2 API endpoints on the backend, to give more accurate pricing for your offers in RevenueCat. 

What this means practically for improving offer analytics in RevenueCat:

1. The customer event page now contains pricing information of an offer, alongside the offer code reference name. This information can be sent downstream to other integrations too, such as via webhooks. 
2. There is a new Scheduled Data Exports template where offer and offer_type fields are now available by default.  
3. Charts now can be filtered or segmented by offer and offer_type. 

All of these improvements make it easier for you to analyze and understand how offers are contributing to your app and business performance. 

To make sure you’re getting this information into RevenueCat, you’ll need to provide us with an in-app purchase key (only if you haven’t already). Not only will this allow the better tracking of offers as discussed, but it’ll unlock the various benefits offered by StoreKit 2.  

Learn more about running holiday sales on iOS in our tutorial >>

StoreKit 2 SDK beta

StoreKit is Apple’s framework for in-app purchases that the RevenueCat SDK uses under the hood on iOS. And now, we’re releasing a new version of our SDK that runs entirely on StoreKit 2. 

Why is this important? 

Apple has been gradually deprecating StoreKit 1 for the past few years, meaning switching to StoreKit 2 is a matter of when, not if. By using the new version of our SDK, you’re future-proofing your app so that you have access to any new features that Apple releases, and protected against any features that Apple deprecates. 

Access the RevenueCat StoreKit 2 beta SDK on Github. 

Improvements to RevenueCat Paywalls

In case you missed it, RevenueCat Paywalls is our feature that lets you build native paywalls using our gallery of templates, configure and customize those paywalls in the dashboard and remotely, and A/B changes to your paywall using RevenueCat Experiments.  

We’ve been working hard to add lots more iterative improvements to Paywalls:

• Two new templates with new layouts and features like a package discount tag to illustrate savings
• Paywalls support landscape mode (particularly useful for games, for example)
• Paywalls now support watchOS
• You can now automatically display a close button

An exciting announcement about something that many of you have been asking for: RevenueCat Paywalls for Flutter and React Native (which are currently in beta) are fully launching early next year. 

Additionally, early next year, we’ll be launching a Kotlin Multiplatform SDK, which RevenueCat Paywalls will support.  

And then, on the more experimental side of things, we’ll be launching an AI-powered tool within RevenueCat Paywalls that will automatically generate a paywall for you and AI-generated automatic translations of your paywall. These features (which we don’t have an ETA for just yet) will make building a paywall even quicker.

RevenueCat Targeting (now with scheduling)

Released just earlier this month, Targeting allows you to target specific Offerings and Paywalls to specific segments of your audience. For example, you might show a particular paywall and package of products to customers in India, and use your default paywall and offerings for the rest of the world. This gives you the ability to fine-tune how you monetize your app based on who the target customer is. 

What is brand-new is the ability to schedule your targeting rules. You might, for instance, want a promotion paywall to show during a particular time period — to help you execute that automatically, you can set up your Targeting rules with a start and end date. 

And that’s not all…

Here are the things that we didn’t have time to demo for you:

• Fresh test results for a whole year after an Experiment ends.
• Automatic alerts if an Experiment is performing poorly — This way, if you’re not sure if an Experiment is going to go the way you hoped, you can rest assured that RevenueCat will let you know.
• A subscription status user attribute has been added to many of our integrations — This will, for example, make it easier to build CRM campaigns off of RevenueCat data.
• Automatic refund detection for Google Play
• Discord integration for push notifications.

And even more stuff that we’ll be sharing with you in the future — in more launch parties (this is now a regular feature!) as well as the usual places, such as social media and the blog.

So, stay tuned, happy holidays, and stay shipping 🚀