I certainly have to agree with the comment about the external keyboard. Right now I’m working in MS Word for iOS with an external keyboard. I find myself hitting the TE abbreviation and guess what? Nothing happens except I get to see the letters I typed. It just doesn’t seem like this would be a major hurdle and is definitely a necessity as people move to iOS with an external keyboard as their primary work device.
I really hope Smile sees this.
They might not care 
They, nor most developers it would seem. For my part, I am done submitting feature requests that devs add TE. They give you the old “thumbs up”, a “like”, or shine you on by saying it’s on their list of future features (Hi Spark), then it never materalizes. Nobody is adding TextExpander to their apps. Quite the opposite actually. The most irritating part is if they answer your feature request with an email, the email has all the telltale signs of being written with TextExpander snippets. So they know exactly how useful it is.
I asked for this feature several years ago and got a snarky response. That said, I don’t find it that big of a deal to bring up the onscreen keyboard to use TE.
I’m not renewing my subscription when it is due.Got a good discount so far, but value on iOS is 0 and KM does all of my macOS expansion easily.
Not all of that is Smile’s fault, Apple should just allow the same functionality for 3rd partiers as their own keyboards. But hey…
From their advertising and behavior TextExpander seems to be going after the teams/business market. I can’t say as I blame them.
In that case, logic would dictate that a great way to grow the userbase of your product is make it free for personal use and reap your revenue from the business subscriptions.
I’m using my iPad Pro more than my Mac these days, and I don’t always start my workflow in Drafts, so I start typing a snippet, and nothing happens. My subscription runs through April, but I already set a cancellation reminder so I can evaluate my purchase if things don’t improve.
it’s interesting that macstories.net has not even mentioned TextExpander since 2016, the article about the subscription. Prior to 2016 it was an application that was written about at least once a year, sometimes twice. 
I stopped upgrading TextExpander when they went to the subscription model.