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Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?

#101

Post by zmj »

davnicwil wrote: post #99
freehunter wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, very few applications need to scale to the point where it matters. If the options are "ship something now and refactor later" versus "ship something in six months that's perfect but too late", most people here would benefit from cross platform solutions. Very few companies have ever failed because their tech stack didn't scale well.

> Very few companies have ever failed because their tech stack didn't scale well Just out of interest, are there any clear examples where this happened, ever? Can anyone name any? What I mean specifically is - a company with a well known product that was growing in popularity but then hit a ceiling because of technical scale issues and couldn't support any more customers, growth halted, and they couldn't fix it in ti…

It happens all the time. When it does, though, the narrative is usually "scrappy upstart takes over" and not "segment leader fossilizes".

Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?

#102

Post by conductr »

The whole damn thing. I’m self taught web developer, server management, backend stuff. I love a Rest over HTTP API. X Code and all the sims do not jive with my brain. Swift helped a bit. But only ever able to build a bouncing ball game. The process of launching on an app store alone seems insane. I started by FTP and Perl then PHP. I pay people to write code these days.

Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?

#103

Post by ronyfadel »

smallstepforman wrote: post #82

If you built it, they wont come. Without marketing, the odds of your customers discovering the app (amongst a sea of garbage) are insanely low. I tried a Tennis app in 2009 and even back then it was competing with hundreds of other apps, now its mist likely 10’s of thousands. Heart breaking.

Sometimes if you build it, they will come. I launched a music app in 2012 (student project), and over its lifetime (6 years), I had 95k downloads and 7 million sessions on the app.

Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?

#104

Post by mantap »

smallstepforman wrote: post #82

If you built it, they wont come. Without marketing, the odds of your customers discovering the app (amongst a sea of garbage) are insanely low. I tried a Tennis app in 2009 and even back then it was competing with hundreds of other apps, now its mist likely 10’s of thousands. Heart breaking.

Word of mouth marketing can be strong. For example I have purchased many apps because of a recommendation IRL, mostly music-focused (musicians love to talk about their kit). The point is to make something truly excellent, and if possible, conspicuous.

Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?

#105

Post by jamil7 »

To get into mobile sooner. I was tired of the web and burned out needed something different. I’m getting way more work and enjoying myself a lot more. I hope to have a long career programming so maybe I’ll change platforms again one day.

Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?

#106

Post by otachack »

cschep wrote: post #97
aquabeagle wrote: post #58

I wish I would have not fought the tools so much. I started Android programming from the command line using make/ant and testing on a device because I didn't like Android Studio. This ended up wasting a lot of time and energy over the years as I had to integrate more 3rd party libraries (including Google's own crap). Same thing for iOS. I didn't like building GUIs in Interface Builder so I did everything in code. Ove…

I've been doing iOS for a while and I also fought AutoLayout for too long. I found doing it in code better than trying to get IB right, especially when working on a team.

What do you think about SwiftUI? I never liked coding layouts by hand but it seems a great compromise for SwiftUI, so I'm pretty happy to use it later on when more devices have moved on (which should be soon)

Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?

#107

Post by jmull »

applecrazy wrote: post #61
McDev wrote: post #24

I'm a self taught programmer and started developing for Android in 2012. It took me a while before I realised that you needed third party libraries to do absolutely anything useful as the platform APIs were so poor and undocumented. There were gaps everywhere and you needed to write tons of boilerplate code to do things properly. Image loading was often a huge source of crashes due to out-of-memory errors and doing i…

Personally I think that Flutter is the future for cross-platform UI toolkits. As a React dev (in my spare time, I’m still a student), using RN was a pain due to the need to install native extensions for almost everything. The batteries-included approach of Flutter and just the polish around the dev workflow made it more attractive to a beginner mobile dev.

Flutter is DOA for anything but short-term projects.

For one thing, it’s tied to a custom language. That means there’s significant overhead for developers which shows itself directly as a learning curve, or indirectly in terms of hiring or retention of developers.

At least as significantly, they chose to implement custom controls (rather than wrap native controls). With that approach there’s really no way for them to implement native expectations for controls in the first place, much less keep up with native functionality across platforms.

Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?

#108

Post by vlozko »

K0SM0S wrote: post #95
freehunter wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I didn't use the correct terminology and I appreciate the correction. On the other hand, using information from Facebook themselves (creators of React Native), the cross-platform solution seems to be able to scale pretty darn well [1]. Facebook, Instagram, Bloomberg, Skype, Walmart, Uber... these are some pretty big names with some pretty big audiences. If React Native can get your company from a startu…

I think you'd indeed have to look at more demanding applications, more "bleeding edge" stuff computationally: 3D gaming is probably as good a candidate as ever, maybe some in-app AI workflows, idk. Truth is, I know how to bring a desktop/server to its knees because there are valid use-cases for that, but on mobile I struggle to find many examples indeed. I guess any heavy data crunching app might fit the bill, but wh…

The issues you tend to run into with mobile is that you have to either create so many shim layers to use native app features or resort to 3rd party solutions. And there are loads of examples (speaking for iOS here):

1. JSON parsing

2. Network calls

3. Background downloading

4. Notifications

5. Camera access

6. Password/contact/code auto fill

7. VoiceOver

8. Web Views

9. JavaScript bridging

10. Encryption

11. And many more

Almost every app needs some combination of those and in some of these cases you’re forced to use a native solution. What ends up happening is that a significant amount of developer resources gets wasted bridging many of these things with massive bug logs to go with them. It’s why at this point I refuse to do anything but native in my career.

Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?

#110

Post by [deleted] »

ta32627888 wrote: post #100
rowathray wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/09/05/developer-salaries-in-... Well, ok, I guess it's not that grim. Still, it's a pretty crappy job.

> The specific technologies that developers use also impact salary. This year, the technologies most associated with high salary include Go, Scala, Redis, and React. Surprised me seeing Scala in there, thought it was basically dead now. My last experience with seeing it in a codebase and using (or trying to use) SBT, I was kind of hoping it was.

[deleted]
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