The Developers Union is no longer being worked on. Brent, Jake, Loren, and Roger want to say thanks for your support. With your help, we feel that we were able to bring attention and change to the issue of trials in apps on the App Store, but between having babies, getting married, and being busy with work, none of us have the time to dedicate to it anymore. We've deleted all user data. Thanks again, you're the best. ❤️

Dear Apple,

We believe that people who create great software should be able to make a living doing it. So we created The Developers Union to advocate for sustainability in the App Store.

In May 2018, together we asked Apple to publicly commit — by the tenth anniversary of the App Store this July — to allowing free trials for all apps in the App Stores before July 2019. After that, we planned on starting to advocate for a more reasonable revenue cut and other community-driven, developer-friendly changes.

The Developers Union got a lot of attention in our little community, including: Wired, The Verge, 9to5Mac, iMore, and more.

Brought to you by...

Brent Simmons
Brent has been writing apps for Apple computers for almost 40 years, since his first Apple II Plus in 1980. His professional apprenticeship was at UserLand Software where he worked on Frontier and on Manila, an early blog platform. Later he created apps such as NetNewsWire, TapLynx, Glassboard, MarsEdit, and Vesper. Brent lives in Seattle with his wife Sheila. He’s been blogging since 1999 at inessential.com.
Jake Schumacher
Jake is an independent artist living in Boise, Idaho with his wife and two daughters. Filling most of his time as a filmmaker and commercial director, Jake claims he is no longer bitter about the Mac Pro and looks forward to returning to editing on the Mac in 2019. His debut feature documentary, App: The Human Story, chronicled the meteoric explosion of the “app” as a cultural phenomenon, along with the corresponding struggle of many developers dealing with the limitations of the App Store model.
Loren Morris
Loren is a product designer from Boise, Idaho. He has designed software for healthcare, e-commerce, real estate, time tracking, and a Y Combinator startup. In his free time he works on side projects like this and Built in Boise, a website profiling local entrepreneurs. He dislikes summarizing himself in paragraph long bios.
Roger Ogden

Roger is a software developer who writes mainly for iOS for his day job. He got his first Mac in 2007: a white polycarbonate MacBook. Since then, he’s closely followed the Apple indie developer scene, which inspired him to become a programmer. He enjoys obsessively following theme park news and reconfiguring his terminal dot files for the 37th time this year. He lives in Boise with his wife Sidney and his two dogs Annabelle and Oliver, and occasionally blogs at The Relativity Transit.