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Comment by needusername | Hacker News Reader

Note that they are on JDK 14.0.2. An old, unsupported version of Java which doesn't get any security patches anymore. Being on a non-LTS version of Java forces them to upgrade to a new major version of Java every six months to get security patches, which they apparently don't do.

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This is a bit of a tangent, but this is emblematic of the fact that, beyond Xcode Cloud, the Apple Developer Tools team seems more excited to work on toys like Swift Playgrounds than make the Apple platform development experience better and more sustainable for users beyond the one-man shop and toy applications.

It’s not surprising that more are preferring to use Electron, React Native, or Flutter to develop apps than to live with the bare metal Xcode toolchain and Apple APIs.

The Java / Kotlin + Gradle and JS development ecosystems are dramatically easier to live, despite the fact that Apple has the resources to do dramatically better.

> It’s not surprising that more are preferring to use Electron, React Native, or Flutter to develop apps than to live with the bare metal Xcode toolchain and Apple APIs.

Funny, because Electron, RN, and Flutter are the toys of mobile app development, serving mostly just one-man shops and toy applications--and even Android developers are going to agree.

And while I'm also of the opinion that Xcode has plenty of areas for improvement, you can't just extend the same commentary to Apple's APIs. Apple APIs are incredibly stable, well-architected, and so highly scalable that it's almost an embarrassment that Google gets all the rep for being an engineering powerhouse when the Android SDK has always been an incoherent hell of a mess since Android came out.

I'm so glad to read this comment. I think one way to learn great software design is read through the Apple APIs. Obviously not all of them are perfect, but even when that is the case it's always interesting to ask yourself why.

GP don't praise Android SDK.

> It’s not surprising that more are preferring to use Electron, React Native, or Flutter

Do you have any data to back that up. As an iOS developer, that is not my experience at all.

Offering these two data points for the Flutter side of things at least.

The first is Google trends results for Flutter vs Swift globally in the last year.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F010sd4y3,%...

Along with StackOverflow’s 2021 report that shows Dart is more popular than Swift.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021

> shows Dart is more popular than Swift.

that... seems obviously wrong.

These things are not comparable.

Flutter and Dart are used on a plethora of platforms, including Android which has a far larger market share than iOS alone, and Windows, which takes the cake on the desktop.

Swift is used only on Apple platforms, and mostly for iOS. The use of Swift on macOS, watchOS or server-side development is negligible.

Despite my dissatisfaction with Apple policies and way of doing things, they offer native, fast, smooth and not battery-draining experience for the users, because of no Java and Electron crap in most of the apps, unlike Android.

That was not the topic of discussion. If you think that outcome is better, why not advocate for less friction towards it?

>Kotlin + Gradle development ecosystems are dramatically easier to live,

I know Xcode is a piece of crap, but truly, nothing approaches the level of mindfuckery that is Gradle.

This is the App Store upload tool, derived from (and maybe the same as) the iTunes Store upload tool. It comes from Eddy Cue’s org that runs the store, not the Developer Tools team.

Honestly I would wager that the Developer Tools team has never been very happy about the size and quality (outdated JRE) of the upload tool

Yes. It is a Java application that originally was written to facilitate the upload of large intermediate video files from post houses to the iTunes Store ingest systems. I know because I was there.

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