Tim, don't kill my vibe
irace.me
irace.me
Nope, screw that. I am trying to avoid paying Apple, considering I already paid them once for the phone.
Web apps > all. It's the one thing that actually meets the "write once, run anywhere" condition.
What I meant in my comment above was that it should be a basic consumer right for all devices that can run code. TVs, cars, game consoles, IoT systems, everything down to the most trivial chip.
Again, the raw materials have been paid for (my time, my hardware). Windows, Android and Linux have managed to keep the lights on without charging a bullshit fee for the privilege of deigning to let me run a lowly app on their exalted platforms.
I will concede that Android does allow you to install apps for free and if that is a feature that is really important to you, you should switch to that platform. iOS has always been this way, there wasn’t a bait and switch, and many people (myself being one of them) consider the higher barrier to entry to be a feature of iOS, not a bug.
Just because iOS has always been this way should not stop people from criticizing these limitations.
If you're building something like Facebook where you want your site on everything from a smart watch to a desktop PC to a car that makes sense to me.
But aside from that, why is making sure your application can run on "everything" a goal?
It kind of reminds me of when someone makes a new physical product, and wants to make sure it's carried at every retailer, and usually when that happens the quality of the product suffers in a race toward the bottom. The best producers of goods tend to not follow this model, however.
Many of the apps I've come across perform best when they're built for the platform they operate on. I can usually (not always) tell when I'm using a web app because the experience kind of sucks.
But even if they're on par, let's say you can run your app everywhere including a smart watch - is that really the goal?
Also, depending on which technologies you choose, your web application will be much more stable (i.e. requiring less updates of dependencies) than most alternatives.
None - I'm suggesting we don't need to write software that runs on every device. Commoditization generally sucks. Why get a nice laptop for work or play when you can just use Gamepass and use a corporate provided Remote Desktop? Web apps are the same.
Only for the thing being commoditized. It's a feature for the one doing the commoditizing. I can see why if you care about the Quality of the application itself more than the user experience, this is a concern, and I suppose it all comes down to who you define as your "users" - the people on the targeted platform vs. a more broad selection of platforms.
This doesn't make sense to me, but maybe I'm misunderstanding what point you are trying to get across? As you commoditize an application the quality and user experience tends to go down. I wouldn't think that if you really care about the quality of an application that it would imply that the user experience would be less favorable - if anything it would be a better experience?
As an example take a look at a game like Civilization. You can see that the product is being commoditized to fit as many platforms as possible, but as the game becomes commoditized what happens is the quality of the game for the original audience (PC users) degrades. It's great for 2k Studios, more money for them, but is it great for users? Probably not. Even if more users now have access to the game, it's a worse experience for the original audience (core users) and the commodity users (Netflix for example...) have a subpar experience too.
Think in a broader sense. My user experience is better if I can use the application on the device that I have than if I can't.
This is part of what commoditization does. We can't have the real thing and so we accept cheap, subpar substitutes. When you look around at things falling apart, the commoditization of those things is precisely why.
Many software firms that made software for Windows had a full-time installer engineer. The story has gotten much better but enterprises still struggle to keep desktop software up to date. Talk about fighting with the app store.
Meanwhile you have to mitm your native app just to see what it’s doing.
Making the web more powerful is also making the more powerful *more powerful*.
The App Store is our one saving grace from the festering nightmare that is literally every other app store in existence. It's one of the primary reasons I stick with iOS. Their curation process, for better or worse, is one of the last remaining good faith pro-consumer efforts I can even think of from a large corp.
[1]: https://atp.fm/628 & https://mastodon.social/@rileytestut/114043540322770608
Comedy gold here!
What if they would trust the users to install whatever they wish (from other sources) and THEN provide this marvellous service in addition?
Their curation is thorough, but somewhat biased. Nobody is perfect.
If the Play store is bad it's because Android is bad, not because the store is bad in and of itself.
I had decent experiences with the app store back in my Salesforce days, as much as that seems a different life.
I wonder if vibe coding is a false economy? I am personally not excited to use tools and products thoughtlessly glopped together.
But any app that a decent number of people would want to download and use probably won’t be ’vibe coded’, any polished app made by a large corporation certainly won’t be.
The author states that developers will flee Apple because of this friction, but developers will go where the customers are, and I’m not sure a meaningful number of customers care about this.
The iOS app store has already been a human made tsunami of trash obscuring actual utility for over a decade. We're well past that point, the idea that the review system was about setting a bar for quality dissipated about three years into the store.
As the author said multiple times, again, this isn't new. That developer pushback hasn't resulted in any meaningful change to the developer experience over the years, speaks volumes of where the company's allegiances lie.
A lot of it's annoying EU regulation legal crap too.