_posts/2018-01-08-panic-will-suspend-sales-of-transmit-for-ios.markdown
---
title: Panic Will Suspend Sales of Transmit for iOS
date: 2018-01-08 09:00:00 -06:00
tags:
- Apple
- iOS
- development
author: tjdraper
link_url: https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-transmit-ios/
---
Cabel Sasser on the Panic Blog:
> 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 very discouraging. It's a frustrating and nerve-wracking time to be a professional user of computer-like things from Apple. Despite what Apple wants us as users to do or think, despite Apple's shift away from focusing on the Mac for work (or at all) and focusing on things like the iPad Pro, the iPad as a platform is still not completely viable for getting certain types of work done. The loss of Transmit for iOS is just another straw on the back of the proverbial camel. There are things that I *need* to be able to do, that there is no alternative way of doing, that are not possible to do on a platform like iOS. Even just discounting spreading your work out on multiple displays, putting more than two or 3 windows side-by-side or being able to overlap multiple things you need quick access to, the software to get things done on the iPad just isn't there and so far Apple shows no interest in making that happen.
None of this would bother me too much if Apple was more committed to the Macintosh because I love the Mac. And maybe I should feel like Apple is more committed to the Mac with the iMac Pro having just been released and the revised Mac Pro on the horizon. But Apple's approach to the Mac still feels sloppy. Only time will tell if they're truly turning things around with the Mac. In the mean time, I get discouraged by news like this.