iOS indie app development looks like
safespace.is
safespace.is
2. A lot of people live in a more prudish/religious society than you may
I file those under "never worth it to take the picture in the first place since it will eventually be exposed to the internet no matter how careful one is".
Apple is known to like to exercise control and to keep their ecosystem closed (recall that Jobs was initially AGAINST the AppStore concept entirely, which was invented by someone else and now makes a ton of money for Apple).
Open systems with little control lead to a bazar like the various Linux distros with inconsistent-looking and buggy apps mixed with great apps - anything goes.
Imagine you are Apple and you want your AppStore to convey a professional and safe look and feel, you probably don't want 60,000 converter or image viewer app but a variety of tools, maybe 5-10 per category max, or it will be hard for users to navigate and tiring to explore.
Jobs was initially against allowing third-party native apps on the iPhone, but not App Store as a distribution mechanism. Once he relented on inviting ISVs to the profit party, the iTunes Store model was never in question.
Algorithmic complexity is such a large part of a fancy university education that I just don’t understand how they could come up with swifts feature set if they knew it would come back and royally bite them.
What an I missing? What is the backstory?
The post Next Apple is entirely dependent on llvm. The hardware is tuned to its outputs. The devX is based on generating it.
Apple 15 years ago was getting worried people are not learning C in school anymore. They were learning python and ruby and js.
Swift exists as a way to market llvm as a tool chain to that market of programmers.
My views are informed by years of talking to Apple and build-for-Apple engineers.
> The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time; try breaking up the expression into distinct sub-expressions
a lot. And it’s impossible to debug.
In my cases I encountered this error in different scenarios in offset modifier, Strings, Colors.
Ps. I do like SwiftUI, just not the implementation.
To Apple, I'm not giving you $100 per year for four people to play my hobbyist games. Not to mention getting my account approved in the first place was such a horrible process. They can and will deny your app for random reasons. I don't know how any independent developer really wants to base their entire income around such madness .
What they want is multi-billion companies publishing content consumption apps, and occasionally some slightly smaller multi-million dollar companies might get some sales.
Google used to be cool, but now you need to have 20 or something people download the app to test it first. Which is easy to game if you have enough money ( or I guess you just go out and buy 20 devices yourself, a cheap Android device is going to run you $50 or so).
At least with Android I can point you to my git repository, feel free to download my free APK.
Look at the source code, the build process, install it if you'd like.
However, there's always light. WebGL is at the point where I can publish small games directly onto a web page. No one needs to download anything, and no one needs to worry about me doing something bad.
Some of the friction you mention is if anything a competitive advantage to those able to deliver quality work despite the challenges. I agree it's hostile to hobbyist development and early career learning.
I don't consider myself a huge "project guy" either but I do tinker, and I absolutely CRUSH $100 per MONTH in terms of buying shit to fiddle with, from Raspberry Pi's to 3D printer parts, to new PC peripherals I wanna try, etc. etc. I struggle to conceive of someone in this space to whom $99/year for an Apple dev account is just this unbearable outlay.
To prevent apple from just taking it down I have to pay $100 per year, meaning even if I don't actively develop apps anymore, I'm just wasting money.
Now if I wanted to play the Apple dance every 6 months and hope they let me actually publish my games, I got a lot of pushback with my first project, then I guess it would be worth it.
How much would you pay for hosting at this point? The cheapest Droplet on DigitalOcean will cost you $60 per year. Maybe you planned to have your game downloaded from Google Drive, but I’m with Apple on this one, a small fee prevents many bad actors.
Especially when 95% of iOS developers are comfortably in the top 10% of US salaries, and top 1% worldwide.
I'd be okay with it, if it was $100 per year while you're actively publishing new content. But just to keep old stuff up there is kind of steep
I'm not forcing anyone to download my game. But Apple refuses to allow any other market place ( in most of the world) , so unless I pay 100$ a year no one gets to play it on an iPhone.
It's not just the fee, it's the idea that Apple is the final decider of what anyone with an iPhone is allowed to run on devices they own.
I sorta understand this argument with game consoles, since the vast vast majority of console homebrew is just enabling piracy.
But that's not the case with a phone. I can't build a small app to learn and share it with my friends or teachers. I have to build something worthy of Apple, pay a 100$ annual fee and pray the Apple review team feels like being nice.
I don’t like their behavior either but I’m trying to help you make sense of it. They have a profit motive which corrupts
My broader point is 1) it's not unmaintained until Apple says so and 2) it's only unprofitable once the App Store deems it is. Both of those are arbitrary decisions that justify nothing, even with profits as the context, which is why you are being downvoted.
What Apple "doesn't want" is people coming up with justifications against their arbitrary fees, case closed. No need to blame the developers and implicate yourself as a victim, that's an embarrassing dog-and-pony show that hasn't been fresh (let alone acknowledged by Apple) since like 2012.
Yes, it's unmaintained, because you are not maintaining it. Should you maintain it? Your decision to make. However if they are not maintained then they are indeed unmaintained and will probably run into problems on newer versions of the aforementioned operating systems.
I personally like that Apple trims the fat and keeps things ship-shape. Yes, the cost to that is older apps don't work on newer Macs and phones. The benefit to that is MacOS and iOS are not saddled with god knows how much legacy code and features to make sure everything that ran on, for example, Windows 95 will also work on Windows 11 (with caveats). Both of these are fine design ethos to go with: Apple went one way, Microsoft another, and both directions have pros and cons accordingly.
> What Apple "doesn't want" is people coming up with justifications against their arbitrary fees, case closed.
Your personification of a corporation is bizarre too. Apple doesn't give a shit if you maintain your software or not. If you maintain it, it remains available. If you don't, it doesn't. This situation is fixed, and you know both outcomes.
Like I dunno, maybe it's just me, this logic doesn't hold up. It's akin to calling an engine needing oil changes arbitrary. Like, I guess? But you also knew that when you bought the thing.
Let me tie things up a bit for you then. To repeat myself; I'm not complaining! I don't pay Apple a dime anymore, not for services nor hardware. I had a brief, happy stint as an iOS dev in my nascent, foolish years as a programmer and moved on. I find it hilarious that Apple can't do the bare minimum to support my software after I wrote it and paid them to publish it. It's part of the reason I refuse to build apps that aren't for the web anymore; native dev is for chumps. It is a literal waste of time.
> I personally like that Apple trims the fat and keeps things ship-shape.
Out of every commercial OS, Apple ships the most complex kernel and largest install size (on iOS and MacOS). If you think it's for "[trimming] the fat" then I struggle to see what fat they're cutting off. Most of the time, we're getting things depreciated like OpenCl and 32-bit libraries that users actually depended on to a certain degree, with no replacement besides proprietary alternatives. Seems like they're cutting off lean to me.
For chrissake, we're talking about a company that ships a mandatory 7gb AI model with every iOS install. Apple's "smart defaults" direction is just a load of cons, and I say that as someone that thinks Microsoft's model is imperfect too. But Microsoft doesn't get half the flak Apple does because they commit to third-party cooperation instead of treating it like an existential threat. They cooperate with Nvidia when Apple refuses to talk to them, they work with Khronos when Apple refuses to answer their letters, Microsoft seems to actually want their OS to compete. Clearly Apple wants to shelter theirs from competition.
> Your personification of a corporation is bizarre too.
I don't believe I characterized them at all. I said Apple's real excuse is not that they don't want depreciated or unprofitable apps (they can change that at-will by supporting old runtimes and allowing sideloading) but really that their defacto control over the iPhone is threatened. Unless you think copying over old dylibs and enabling sideloading is fundamentally impossible, I don't see how I've cast them in any particular light.
Nobody in this thread is foolish enough to say Apple has some outstanding commitment to queer values, quality apps or protecting user privacy. We've all watched that roof collapse over the past decade, we know money is king. My point in the last comment is that Apple's lack of transparency over which charges are necessary and which are arbitrary will be the end of them. It's a charade, and several countries (including the US) launched investigations to remediate it. Apple cannot persist with their current direction, and they refuse to admit they're wrong.
No, you're not. You're paying to have your game accessed by people. Do you also refuse to pay for web hosting on principle? Or some other WAN-addressable download location?
This is such a bizarrely specific entitlement.
Why do you feel you need to make it back? I can't think of many pastimes that cost that little.
If it wasn’t then $100 is trivial for a business.
Do you think the OP is not doing this as a pastime? There is nothing in their statement to indicate anything but.
>2) If $100 was actually trivial for a business then Apple wouldn't demand it.
I'm not sure how you can make that leap.
I also know a huge number of professional developers that started off as teenagers tinkering with Linux. They started with Linux because the hurdle was so low. No accounts, no fees. Download an ISO and burn it.
These platforms are hurting themselves long term by increasing the barrier to entry.
I'm not going to spend a second on the Apple/Android platform if I need to fork out money/account to try it out (even if I can afford it).
I’m not really convinced that by just changing those you can suddenly get a lot of downloads.
The Swift language itself is bloated? Compared to what? Golang?
I'm an iOS dev full-time now (bootstrapped) and SwiftUI is definitely not production ready if it means that it can be used without needing UIKit introspection hacks. I like it and ship all my work with it, but it is painfully broken and will take years more to mature
At least you have the option in all cases.
But as of iOS 15+ SwiftUI is very production ready. I’ve migrated two production applications from UIKit to SwiftUI. These have active users and are available on the App Store.
Bloated? The last migration resulted in 79k new lines of code written and 181k deletions after rewriting 80% of the application.
Photos album works out of the box. If you mean camera then there are some issues depending on your use case. Beauty of SwiftUI is we can wrap UIKit views and interop allowing it to play nicely with other frameworks.
If you’re supporting applications that target the last few iOS versions it’s time to learn the new paradigm. Do yourself a favor but most of all anyone who might inherit your codebase.
Off the top of my head, I’d consider the approach. Is it a ScrollView? A LazyVStack? What do your view redraws look like?
Anyone working with Swift Strings back in Swift 1+2 was in for some shockingly bad performance. We adopt, we adapt, and the framework matures.
Apple’s own documentation discusses this in detail and for large data sets recommends the Lazy approach. If you’re using List you’re in for some issues.
This is also why LazyVGrid/LazyHGrid are unusable as replacements for UICollectionView
Yes you can replace SwiftUI with UIKit + AppKit - replace the navigation, the text rendering, the text editing, the collection views, etc.
edit: Your link is all about how to use List
https://fatbobman.com/en/posts/tips-and-considerations-for-u...
Also... Funny that I'm getting downvoted for correctly pointing out that LazyVStack doesn't reuse or unload views. It's so obvious that they should, that no one can believe they don't.
Plenty of companies/people use it. It's open source with commercial backing. It's free for commercial use. It existed well before flutter. Uses a language people actually use (Java) as opposed to Dart.
Why would people use flutter which is constantly in danger of being spring cleaned by Google since it makes absolutely no commercial sense. Without Google's support it becomes an unsustainable over engineered brick of code.
It also came out way after PhoneGap and wasn't backed by a huge company with a huge marketing budget.