A week or so ago I got an email from Apple asking me to renew my Developer account for another year, I declined. The renewal cost is non-trivial and right now I cannot justify the cost.

This essentially means as of Jan 27th, 2017 TKVoice will die.

I was a lot more upset about this than I thought I would be. Whilst I’ve not worked on the app in a while and the support side isn’t exactly super fun, hearing that people enjoy the app and like it was great and always made my day.

The renewal fee wasn’t the only reason I have called it a day, I also haven’t really got anything else I wanted to do to the app and couldn’t make myself work on it anymore.

With the removal of the headphone jack on the iPhone 7 the already complex hardware setup become more complex again and added to the support burden. The iPhone is rather fussy about the hardware that will work for the required setup and this meant people often paid out for stuff that just didn’t work.

I originally wrote this to use on an old 5s that was sat in my draw and figured others would do the same. What actually happened was people were using their daily drive phone or buying an old phone specially! This made me feel more obliged to ensure that the system worked for them.

Since I started TKVoice the voice changer landscape has changed a lot. When I started there was Rom-FX or icomm and not much else. Now there’s a competing IOS app TrooperTalk, TRamp has come out with an excellent all in one device¹, and there’s even a DIY kit in TKTalkie! These give several great options for many budgets.

Existing users will be able to continue to use the app until they do an upgrade that kills the app. IOS 10 made the app misbehave, I suspect IOS 11 in September will do the same. I plan on leaving my trooping iPhone running, I think, IOS 9 so it won’t be an issue.

Yes I am gutted it’s over. It was a really fun experiment but I also don’t want to burn money on it. Last year I was lucky enough to have donations cover the cost of the sub, and pay for my Aker speaker. This year, I don’t want to ask, and I wouldn’t accept anything anyway.

Thank you to every one of you that downloaded the app or sent me a nice message. You made it all worth it, even if only for short time.