by Jason Snell
Panic ceases development of Transmit for iOS
Transmit iOS made about $35k in revenue in the last year, representing a minuscule fraction of our overall 2017 app revenue. That’s not enough to cover even a half-time developer working on the app. And the app needs full-time work — we’d love to be adding all of the new protocols we added in Transmit 5, as well as some dream features, but the low revenue would render that effort a guaranteed money-loser. Also, paid upgrades are still a matter of great debate and discomfort in the iOS universe, so the normally logical idea of a paid “Transmit 2 for iOS” would be unlikely to help. Finally, the new Files app in iOS 10 overlaps a lot of file-management functionality Transmit provides, and feels like a more natural place for that functionality. It all leads to one hecka murky situation.
This is a real bummer for me personally, because Transmit is a huge part of my iOS workflow. Whether it’s editing HTML files on my web server, uploading images to reference in Six Colors articles, or uploading podcasts to a content-delivery network, Transmit (and its integration with Workflow) is a tool I rely on. It’s also frustrating to see a professional-level tool fail to catch hold on iOS.