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I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

debuggerdotbreak.judahgabriel.com

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Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#291

Post by eropple »

orangecat wrote: post #264
eropple wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Neutered" is a weird term. The line is due for a refresh, I think it's got an i7-4578U Haswell in its top-end machine, but that's not "neutered". Yeah, they want you to pay for upgrades themselves and that sucks, but, whatever--my 2012 one has an Ivy Bridge i7 in it and it is still plenty fast for build tasks in my (fairly price-conscious) environment. If I needed a beefier machine, I would be making much more money…

my 2012 one has an Ivy Bridge i7 in it and it is still plenty fast for build tasks in my (fairly price-conscious) environment. That's the point: the current mini is worse than what you could get in 2012, due to removing the quad core option and upgradeable memory.

OK, so buy one used. It's just not a big deal for a home developer.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#292

Post by Zanni »

judah wrote: post #194
al2o3cr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemme get this straight: you're mad that a company you don't want to pay $99/yr to won't build APIs so you can make money on their platform. So sad, lemme find my tiny violin.

Author here. I'm not making any money on their platform. I'm a non-profit, building a free app; this isn't about money. I mentioned money in the post as a list of all barriers to moving a PWA to app store. $99/year + 33% in-app purchases (plus a $1000+ Mac to build, and probably one or more Mac minis for CI) is a barrier. The bigger concern is Apple is lagging behind on web standards. I suspect the reason for that is…

Just a note on style--your post reads as a complaint, whether you intended it that way or not. The strong editorial slant actually undermines the meat of the article for me, which is, as you mentioned, documenting the hurdles in publishing a PWA. You could make this a better resource by stripping out the overt anti-Apple editorializing. Let the facts speak for themselves--for those who agree with you. Which I don't. Apple is choosing a deliberate strategy here that privileges users over developers. You prefer that they privilege developers over users, but that's hardly a universal position.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#293

Post by JumpCrisscross »

saagarjha wrote: post #225
judah wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. I'm not making any money on their platform. I'm a non-profit, building a free app; this isn't about money. I mentioned money in the post as a list of all barriers to moving a PWA to app store. $99/year + 33% in-app purchases (plus a $1000+ Mac to build, and probably one or more Mac minis for CI) is a barrier. The bigger concern is Apple is lagging behind on web standards. I suspect the reason for that is…

> I'm a non-profit So the only thing that applies to you is the price to have access to a Mac. Since you're a nonprofit, Apple will waive your developer fee, and you wouldn't need in-app purchases anyways. Also, IIRC the cut Apple takes is 30%, not 33%, in line with the rest of their App Store policies.

> Since you're a nonprofit, Apple will waive your developer fee

I thought you meant charities, not non-profits, but TechCrunch reports the latter:

"Apple in early 2018 will waive the $99 developer fee for all government and nonprofits starting in the U.S. to make this transition easier."

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-revises-its-controve...

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#294

Post by [deleted] »

judah wrote: post #207
hamiltonkibbe wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you install $ANYTHING as a PWA. It's now on your homescreen, you launch it. You do $THING. now you switch to twitter. Now the PWA -- in the background -- loads some ad with an autoplaying video and now theres ad audio coming from ... well, you're not sure where, but it doesn't seem like it's coming from twitter. now you have to go find it and stop it. Meanwhile bitcoinminer.js is burning through your battery…

Stepping back a moment, it's worth noting that this was Steve Jobs' original vision for the iPhone: “The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps.” Here we a…

[deleted]

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#295

Post by hesarenu »

saagarjha wrote: post #244
hesarenu wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to learn native iOS and Android app design been a mainly reactnative developer. Android was very easy to start. I learnt kotlin as I was writing the code. Java I remembered some from college days decade ago. The UI builder was very easy to use. I even went far as using the dagger Di. iOS I was kind of frustrated. I had gone over swift Lang some time back. But I found its syntax estoric. UI builder had it…

So, you found iOS development hard because you had very little experience with the tools?

I found android development easier when I had little experience with it.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#296

Post by slig »

diego_moita wrote: post #172

> Don’t make me pay you to make my app available to your users. My app enriches your platform. In the 90's Microsoft won market over Apple by, among other things, being a more developer-friendly company. It seems Apple didn't learn any lesson from it: crappy tools (XCode), disregard for standards (Safari), creating barriers...

iOS users spend more money and are more affluent. Developers won't migrate away because there're lots of money on that platform.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#297

Post by platinumrad »

saagarjha wrote: post #286
platinumrad wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So the only thing that applies to you is the price to have access to a Mac. "So the only thing that applies to you is not wanting to pay upwards of a thousand US dollars for yet another development machine."

As the article mentioned, they went with a $25 online Mac solution instead.

That's what I get for reading the comments before reading the piece, sorry.

I'm still uncomfortable with the extent to which Apple's walled garden is walled though. 25 USD/month does add up, even if you unsubscribe during months where you aren't using the service.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#298

Post by [deleted] »

rolha-capoeira wrote: post #47

> From minor things like “iOS Safari won’t let you play audio without first interacting with the page” to major, show-stopping things like, “iOS Safari won’t let you play the next song if your app is in the background or if your screen is off.” I disagree that these things are purely because Apple wants your $99/year. Maybe that's part of the story, but not all. I am glad that websites cannot play audio without the u…

[deleted]

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#299

Post by waddlesworth »

rolha-capoeira wrote: post #49
judah wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controls: It doesn't force me to use native controls. :-) My web app today is still using the free and opened web, and all the goodness that comes with that, for UI and code. Requiring a Mac: Now you've met one. I built a halfway decent iOS app, and I don't want to spend $7000 on a Mac and its crappy dev tools and frameworks. I've poured nearly 7 years of work into user experience. I don't need to redo all that for A…

$7000? Your bias is showing. You can buy a Mac for <$1000 and it's perfectly capable of developing most apps.

While possible, it's far from ideal. I had this experience, using an old MacBook to build an iPhone app. It repeatedly crashed because I had Atom and XCode open at the same time.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#300

Post by khedoros1 »

kazinator wrote: post #267
khedoros1 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5. If Linux users didn't have web apps, they'd have no apps at all. Well, I mean, besides the 10s of thousands in the software repos, sure. The amount of time I spend in web apps on Linux is minuscule.

Also, all Android apps are Linux apps (when we want to avoocate Linux as having lots of apps) and none of them are really Linux apps (when we want to advocate freedom).

Android apps aren't inherently closed; I use a handful from F-Droid, for example. I'd love it if a more open collection of apps could make the Android/Linux experience on my phone as good as GNU/Linux on my PCs (but tailored to the workload that I use my phone for, of course).
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