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Comment by brandonhorst | Hacker News Reader

This is not true, running your code on your phone with Xcode has always been free.

With a free account, it needs to be reinstalled every 7 days because the signature expires. It's hardly convenient for personal use.

even worse - if you need to build some app with entitlements or some features likes push notifications etc then you need non-free account

I would like to mention that although I’m aware of the limitations, I think it is worth designing and advocating for web app standards that could even at some point become a viable competitor to native apps, especially for apps that really don’t need to be native/wrapped apps in the first place since most are CRUDs anyways.

Maybe this will be a catalyst towards further evolution of the web app as Android devs want to carve out some freedom from the world domination corporate shadow government walled gardens.

You're not wrong, but it will always be the case that the web platform lags native. There will always be stuff you can't do without a native client. The proportion of apps that it's viable to run as a PWA will probably increase over time, but the platforms have both the ability and incentive to stay out ahead.

Most apps can be a PWA nowadays. A Hetzner VPS costs roughly the same as the Apple dev membership. Saying this as a native iOS dev since iOS 4. For your average pretty json printer you don’t need to go native.

Offline PWA sites are very limited on iOS. If you force close Safari, look at your phone funny, or don’t visit the site regularly, the cache is cleared and you are stuck at a loading screen until you have internet again.

That’s what forced me to finally bite the bullet and pay Apple yearly so I could develop an app for my friends and I to use. Would have much rather kept it as a PWA.

Yeah they can’t make it too easy to bypass the App Store :( I don’t think that’s a super strong argument though. Native apps have downsides as well.

Even free-er with Expo and React Native. Course then you have to touch JavaScript ;)

This is not true either. At some point you had to pay. But it’s been a long time since they made it free (with caveats).

What an insane song and dance to run software.

>free

You forgot to factor in the cost of a Mac.

You don't need a computer to develop Android apps?

All you need is a phone: https://github.com/atamshkai/Android-Studio-On-Android-Phone

I remember running kali linux once on my phone with (termux+vnc) and a vnc viewer app watching some random youtube videos a few years back

So I feel like, Something like this was/is possible but its immensely hard for something like this being used especially when a desktop os on a phone is so bad ergonomically speaking unless you have a keyboard mouse connected

A better option iirc is to use something like kivy[0] directly with termux, not sure if java might have direct options too or not.

[0]: https://github.com/kivy/python-for-android

You can use _any_ computer to make Android apps. For iOS you strictly need a Mac.

You aren't even limited to android apps. You can install termux and write and compile your own code to run from there or to copy and run anywhere else.

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