Brief history

SongSheet has, up until recently, been a side project for me. It was tough balancing family, full-time work, and developing and supporting SongSheet.

Up until mid-2020, SongSheet was a paid-up-front application. This was common in the App Store in the early days (SongSheet launched 11 years ago in November, 2012!). Over the years, the market changed, and it became more and more difficult to sell SongSheet this way. It also became clear that if I ever wanted to turn this into a full-time business, the amount I was charging for the app was not sustainable. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back came in 2020 with the pandemic: sales dropped dramatically when musicians could no longer perform. So I made the decision to re-think the whole pricing structure, introducing a (short) free trial with subscriptions, while maintaining a lifetime purchase option at a more realistic price.

Making the above change turned out to be the right move. For the last three years the SongSheet “business” has steadily grown again, to the point where, in June this year, I had the confidence (and savings!) to be able to quit my full-time job in order to work full-time on this instead. Although at this stage we are still relying to a certain extent on our savings buffer, I am feeling pretty good about SongSheet’s future. Having time (and brain space!) to work on it has made a huge difference.

2023

In the first half of the year I was only able to release a single (small) update. In the second half of the year I released 14 updates! (The current version at the time of writing this blog post is 2023.15.)

Besides the usual fixes, etc, to keep SongSheet running well on modern iPads and iPhones, SongSheet has seen quite a few other changes:

  • The minimum supported version of iPadOS/iOS was raised to 12. While this was forced by Apple themselves, being able to (finally!) drop support for iOS 9, 10, and 11 has given me a lot of opportunities to simplify SongSheet’s code.
  • The sharing/export of data from SongSheet was completely reworked to seemlessly fit in with the latest OS patterns.
  • I (finally!) implemented multiple file selection in the import browser.
  • The code for driving the connection between SongSheet and the Remote app was completely rebuilt to improve reliability.
  • Support was added for opening SongSheet in multiple independent windows on iPads that are able to run iPadOS 13 or later.

You can see a full list of user-visible changes for the year in the 2023 Release Notes.

What’s coming early in 2024

That’s not all I’ve been working on, though. I have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to get SongSheet ready for two highly requested things:

  1. Cloud-based sync. This means that if you use multiple devices you will be able to have the same song library on all of them without having to manually send songs and set lists between them. I already have this working in a basic sense. However there are a few things yet to complete before it’s ready for public release. (e.g. being able to turn sync on/off, how duplicates are handled between devices, etc). I’m optimistic that I’ll release this sometime in the first quarter of 2024.
  2. A version for macOS. Again, this is mostly working already, and I hope to release it at the same time (or shortly after) cloud-based sync is available.

I’m really looking forward to being able to show off what I’ve been working on there!

Looking further

There are lots of other things coming down the pipeline - one thing I’m really keen to do is add more formatting options for songs. Annotations. Paging mode. Song collections. There’s so much for me to do! (You should see my todo list… I’ve only scratched the surface here!)

Let me know what you think!

As always, I’m always keen to hear what you think of SongSheet - what’s good, what’s bad, suggestions for a new feature or improvement? Drop me a line!

– Gabriel
Developer of SongSheet Pro