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Comment by mdhb | Hacker News Reader

Picking up Swift in 2024 seems like a bit of a sucker move if I’m honest.

A language that only runs on a tiny fraction of hardware, has crappy documentation, has poor interoperability, a questionable developer toolchain that only runs on one platform and then to top it off anything you want to release with it basically has to go through an extortion racket where the worlds richest company is going to take 30% of your revenue and has the ability to shut you down at any point, for any reason and provides no meaningful recourse.

Honestly it’s a terrible choice.

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Swift runs on microcontrollers now; you gotta update your knowledge. https://www.swift.org/blog/embedded-swift-examples/

Basically, anything that comes from a swift.org link is cross-platform and will run perfectly well just about anywhere.

If you've got something coming from developer.apple.com it will be specific to the Apple ecosystem. And of course this learning resource is Apple-specific since it is coming from developer.apple.com.

Swift the language is open source and runs on pretty much anything.

Also it’s quite a nice language to work with and developing native iOS apps is an enjoyable hobby.

I wouldn’t want to tie my pay cheque to it though for sure.

Are you suggesting iOS developers should use another language (Flutter? Objective-C?), or that it’s a sucker move to become an iOS developer?

I think they did a pretty good job of explaining that they meant the latter.

I mean, a tiny amount of overall unique hardware but the iPhone alone has been and continues to be the best selling computer of all time.

And users of their hardware tend to be the most dedicated to the platform and willing to pay for software. And they have more money than the overall average "computer user".

Nothing to brush off.

I've built my career on Apple platforms and honestly this is basically what people have said about it since the beginning.

I'll offer a counter and say that if you like the Apple ecosystem, there's never been a better time to get started. SwiftUI is an amazingly great way to build apps – and again, I've been doing this for a very long time so I'm speaking from experience here.

For smaller developers, the revenue share can be as low as 15%.

Also, for anyone weighing the decision keep in mind that while iOS may not represent the largest marketshare in the world, their users are well known to spend more money on the platform compared to other platforms.

“As low as 15%”

Great! That’s so much cheaper than the 0% you can get on other platforms.

This used to be acceptable when Apple was innovating and providing extra value, today it doesn’t fly.

What other platforms provide what Apple provides at 0%?

As a hobbyist I love having international commerce largely papered over and abstracted away. There’s no need to worry about exchange rates, taxes, hosting, or bandwidth. This is well worth the 15% to me.

You’re really delusional if you think you can get 0% on any platform ever…

Let’s do a test. Write a hello world application and make a subscription for it for $1/mo. Publish it in git and offer it on the web, Windows, iOS and Android.

Beyond your time investment, which platforms costs more than $0?

All of them.

I think you’re mistaken in regards to Apple. https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2024/01/17/apples-...

First iOS support 2 platforms since iOS 2: the web and the App Store. You deploy for the web, you deploy for iOS. (Direct quotes from a WWDC.)

Now assuming you’re talking about the App Store I don’t get your point anyway. For all platforms you’re gonna have to pay something at some point so all of them cost more than 0$.

And how many features are unavailable for the web? It’s not apples to apples.

The point is that you don’t need to pay if you’re hosting a github pages pwa. The backend costs are shared.

There’s a reason Apple got into the credit card business, the extra a fee for every transaction model has been their core for a very long time, it was natural.

> I've built my career on Apple platforms and honestly this is basically what people have said about it since the beginning.

Do you have recommendations for learning Objective-C for a front-end web developer?

I'm starting with "Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide" but would appreciate resources recommended by someone who's built a "career on Apple platforms".

My apologies for so open-ended a question.

Is there a reason you want to learn Objective-C instead of Swift?

My advice would be to swim with the current and choose Swift and SwiftUI unless you have a good reason not to.

Some of the newer frameworks don’t support Objective-C and I only see that trend continuing.

Is swiftUI is still quite a flux state? And not can be done by it?

I haven’t had any issues with it or needed to revert to UiKit, but I’m still fairly new to developing for the Apple ecosystem, so your mileage may vary.

> Is there a reason you want to learn Objective-C instead of Swift?

My goal is to write native software for macOS, which I understand to be more amenable to Objective-C.

I am also interested in Swift but want to focus on Objective-C for my first projects.

Hmm, well – Objective-C holds a place in my heart. It's not for everyone, but it's really where I got my start and I think it's a beautiful language and had an incredibly unique community around it that started with all the NeXT folks.

I'd be curious why Objective-C now? Still has its place for some things. It's interoperability with C++ for instance, especially if you're dealing with things like Metal or certain real time audio libraries.

It's also probably a niche in terms of maintaining legacy stuff. Like being a Fortran developer and having your pick of contracts because nobody remembers it anymore and some crucial piece of infra relies on it.

But, Big Nerd Ranch guid is how I learned! And again, by doing projects. Just pick something you want to build with it and see it through to the end. Like writing, it's best to plough through and just get SOMETHING that works end to end, knowing that it'll be your first draft and you'll get it better on the second Tim around.

Good luck!

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