Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that's weird because i had experienced almost exactly the same feeling 3 days ago. 10 years app developer as well, worked on an app (huge update) for 2 years, with the last 7 months full time , which means a big financial risk. And saw the update rejected for what looked like something Apple didn't like in my business model (that hasn't changed in the last four years since the first release of app has been out).

In my case, it ended well, because after explaining there must have been a misunderstanding, they finally accepted the update, but something changed at that precise moment i saw the reason they rejected the app.

I am now extremely worried about things i knew before but didn't really care about. That is:

- Apple has a monopoly on app distribution to my customer's devices.

- Apple doesn't care at all if my app is distributed on the store or not.

- They'd rather have every developer work for free and give their time for free, and work only for iOS. That would be the ideal situation for them if that was sustainable. We have different interest.

And so the natural conclusion was that I, as a developer, can not responsibly develop only for apple-owned platform.

And so tomorrow (or actually monday), i'm starting my next application project, and it's going to run either on flutter or react native. Because at the minimum i'll be able to provide an option to my customers should apple not like what i'm doing on their store, for some obscure reason.

If you're currently doing native iOS development, you might want to give native Android a try. It's not /that/ different from iOS development, especially if you're using Swift and you try Kotlin.

I only say this because -- if you haven't tried React Native before -- you're in for a bad time if you think you don't really need to know Android development to make an even modestly complex app. When you run into Reactive Native errors and you don't know what's going on in Android, it can be an infuriating experience.

I'm not saying it's the best bet for you. Just -- if you haven't tried it -- maybe give it a shot [=

I have already developed a few things on android, and i know iOS and android aren't that far away in the concept. However the main issue is that i don't have time to develop two apps. It's as simple as that.

I'm not planning on using react or flutter to avoid knowing about android internals. I'm going to use them to only develop specific code when it's absolutely needed, and not for 100% of the code base.

As an independant software developer (or even for a modest company) i think it's now the only sane choice.

Do you mind telling us what app you are talking about?

Actually Apple explicitly recommends not to give them bad publicity whenever a review doesn't go well. After what i realized, and given that i had a happy ending, forgive me for not taking any chance to piss them off.

It's a business application, doesn't have anything particular, and doesn't rely on fancy technological tricks, api or marketing tricks. I believe the reason they rejected the update was for a particular wording in a description that made them think i was tricking my customers (although i'm still having trouble understanding why).

Which would have been forgivable, if that was my first release. But it was just an update, and the part that got them triggered hasn't changed since day 1. The app makes something like 10k a year of profits, so it's not big, but if it were a scam, it would have been reported before...

> forgive me for not taking any chance to piss them off

This is another example of why monopolies are bad. Same goes for Google with Android. G can ban your account (and correspondingly any future accounts you might try to make), so any work you do for Android is just as much as risk.

Even though the apps aren't as rich on the web, I think most developers should target mobile web except in cases where they really need something special in the hardware. No app stores, and no begging to be allowed to update your own product.

Having been down this road before, I'd recommend Flutter over ReactNative.

ReactNative feels like developing the same app 2.5 times. Once in RN proper, and then covering the same ground for large swaths of the app again for each iOS and Andriod.

Flutter has some pain associated with it (I would highlight the lack of 3rd party and community support compared with RN), but overall I'd say it delivers more on the "write once, run everywhere" promise of RN.

Thanks for the help. I had reached the same conclusion as you from my very brief exploration of the two technologies so far. Flutter seems more self-contained and coherent, at the cost of taking the risk to not integrate well with the native OS (which TBH is the least of my concerns at the moment as long as flutter is able to provide me with something close to iOS 7 feature set support).

What are these large swaths? Other than build stuff we're like 95% shared.

This is part of why the concept of PWAs is so enthralling and the continued development of web APIs is so promising. On the web you host your own app. Sure, for a big and popular app it could be more expensive than paying $99 a year, but a lot of apps use backed services already anyway.

The web is slowly getting better as an application development platform and a few great ideas have actually started on the web and made its way to native development (React's declarative UI building is a good example). I don't think it's inevitable all apps will become web apps, but I'm very curious to see what happens in this space given the different forces at play.

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