Sunsetting Bisect
I’m retiring Bisect, my split-screen Markdown editing app for the iPad. Bisect’s sales have been quite underwhelming, and I can’t justify spending time on maintaining and improving the app. My new job as a dad means I’m spending far less time at work, which in turn means that I have to be careful on what I spend that little time on. This has led me to the decision to stop selling Bisect.
Closing down
Bisect will be has been pulled off the App Store on Nov 30, 2016.
If you’re using Bisect, it will continue to work as it does now (including premium features if you’ve unlocked that). The Markdown documents you created in Bisect will remain accessible in your iCloud Drive. If you have not enabled iCloud usage on Bisect, I recommend you do so now, so that your documents remain available on iCloud Drive even when you delete the app on your iPad or move to a different iPad.
Looking back
Thinking about why Bisect has failed, I’d say I believed too vehemently that Apple was a long way away from introducing split-screen features on the iPad, despite some signs to the contrary. Bisect’s business feasibility rode on that belief, which I learned was false (when split-screen multitasking for iPad was announced in WWDC 2015) only after I had pretty much finished development. While I’m happy to have pushed on and shipped Bisect anyway, I realize it never had a chance at being sustainable financially.
Bisect is a project that I’ll always be proud of, not just because it was my first shipping app on the App Store, but also because of it’s unique capabilities (live Markdown preview and in-built tabbed browsing).
Saying goodbye
If you’re a customer of Bisect, thanks for your support in using and purchasing the app, and sorry about ceasing development.
Moving forward, I’ll try my best to plan out my projects to be more sustainable.