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Comment by RistrettoMike | Hacker News Reader

This website, the app's visual design, and that old plastic-chromed iPhone all harken back to a simpler time when there were funny one-off apps just for the hell of it.

The time of $1.99 quantum splitters, $0.99 iBeer, and $1.99 Lightsaber apps is long gone. Most of those apps didn't really do anything all that amazing, but looking back on it I think I miss when app stores were flush with "we could use the hardware to do this" rather than "we could get in-app purchases and subscriptions like this"

Not that there wasn't monetization as a goal back then, but just that there was a lot of weird paradigms being experimented on where we now have a solidly 10-year norm instead.

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I don't even enjoy surfing the app stores nowadays. Anything resembling fun feels like a trap. Either an app with a hidden agenda, or an attempt to rope you into a subscription. Or some otherwise ad filled jank. Just not fun anymore. That goes for most anything with a CPU, really.

Browse F-Droid. It's still often janky but at least you don't get traps, hidden agendas, or ads.

The same goes for Linux distro repositories, except there's less jank. I think there's something about Android that's hostile to creating quality software, maybe that it's so hard to make Android software at all that making it quality is just too much effort.

100% with you on this. The number of games that end up being bejeweled clones (now with ads, yes we know you paid, but not the subscription!) is soul-crushing.

I bought this App when was mentioned by Sean Carroll in one of his talks/podcast about quantum computing. And because of that, I really thought that they did something that was founded in quantum physics. Not that it was really important, but it was cool to say "see, now it's contacting LHC to shot another photon The only think that I'm sorry about is that with every change of iPhone I've lost the track of what Universe I am!

Clearly, you are in the universe where a new iPhone was released.

That there-was-a-time was the-brief-moment-when the iPhone app store was a folk art medium.

Popular folk art is dangerous.

So a bureaucracy was built.

Deliberate or not, the proprietors of commercial computing platforms do display a disturbingly consistent tendency to segregate their customers into "users" and "developers", to the harm of all.

Program or be programmed!

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