161–170 of 535 posts
I doubt this is "Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps", so much as "Apple doesn’t want dev accounts to be an easy backdoor for sideloading apps" and hobby apps are an acceptable casualty.
Downside is that I see bunch of corporate apps that are total trash on app store.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say you are from Egypt (~$1400 median income) or South Africa (~1600). You have already saved for a long time to get a used iPhone for $100. It might be possible with enough effort but you can't say it's not a big barrier.
If you can find any Apple developers from Egypt or South Africa making median wage, I will happily pay for their yearly developer fees. Good luck.
If I want to develop freely on my phone I'll use a OS made for that.
With that said after experiencing "hobby" quality android apps (and worse) I am fine with the higher bar of entry to iPhone. iPhone just works, android can be tinkered with.
Accept them for what they are designed to do and use the one that suits you.
I wrote an Android app for my little programming news aggregator, and published that on the Play Store because it was basically free (IIRC there might be a one-time signup fee). $99/yr is a ridiculous sum for the "privilege" of publishing in Apple's walled garden, and it's just not something I'm willing to do. The arguments for paying for review, distribution, advertising, search, etc feel so disingenuous when the co…
> $99/yr is a ridiculous sum for the "privilege" of publishing in Apple's walled garden It’s a token amount, just enough to prevent spammers from creating thousands of accounts. It’s $99 for your entire organization for a year. Go check what Microsoft charges for a Visual Studio license per seat, per year. $99 doesn’t even buy you 1 hour of a developer’s time. Even if you develop apps a a hobby, this is not a large a…
Obviously the glaring difference is that you can side load apps on Windows without using the app store at all. The day that becomes a serious barrier is definitely a line too far in the history of computing. But Apple has always been a very closed off ecosystem - going back to the nineties they were never very friendly to developers or third party hardware. To me this is just Apple doing Apple - their phone, IMO, is still miles ahead of anything else, though.
> few hobbies are as cheap as this
Quite true.
I’m not defending this, but after 15 years, I don’t see the point in complaining. We complain (rightfully) about the amount of crap in the App Store and Apple's capricious review policies that don’t stop the scammers, but for better or worse, the $99 fee IS a barrier to entry that I would argue has made the iOS ecosystem better than Android. I’ve been paying $99 a year for early access to iOS betas and for my own tes…
I doubt this is "Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps", so much as "Apple doesn’t want dev accounts to be an easy backdoor for sideloading apps" and hobby apps are an acceptable casualty.
Apologist reasoning imo. Developers experiment and there should be a policy that encourages experimentation on the platform. Thanks apple for reminding me why I'll continue with the lesser evil for now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were hardly any free compiler toolchains outside the UNIX world in the 80's. But it's not the 80's anymore, time has moved on.
I remember C compilers costing $1000 in the 90's, before GNU software compiled with GCC came along to disrupt that nonsense.
What bothers me about this -- and it bothered me enough to leave the platform -- is not fees, or "hobby computing," or "it's just for my own use," or trying to figure out why this or that would be in Apple's interest. What bothers me is that it feels like an offense against the entire notion of what a computer is. I am, of course, aware that many (perhaps most) computers in the world are effectively appliances, but a…
Yeah, as others are also saying, welcome to the 21st Century where they're not really computers anymore that they're selling. Your mistake is to still believe that they are.
I view the phone the way perhaps a ham (ham radio operator) viewed the transistor radio. For those of us where a computer is a tool to build with, a thing to tinker with, these new pocket devices are not for us. Too bad.
I've moved completely away from developing for "mobile". It's more of an afterthought for me at this point — "Hmmm, would this also make sense to port to mobile?" My thinking these days defaults to developing for the desktop and the web.
What bothers me about this -- and it bothered me enough to leave the platform -- is not fees, or "hobby computing," or "it's just for my own use," or trying to figure out why this or that would be in Apple's interest. What bothers me is that it feels like an offense against the entire notion of what a computer is. I am, of course, aware that many (perhaps most) computers in the world are effectively appliances, but a…
iOS devices are not "real" computers. They're more comparable to game consoles or TV set top boxes. They're special purpose computing devices that can only run approved software. Apple does sell real computers under the Mac line.
The relationship some developers have with Apple should be a case-study with multiple PhD thesis in psychology. Not even in movies I've seen so many cases of children desperately chasing their emotionally unavailable parent. Apple is a trillion dollar company, it's the "parent" who sells you +$40 dongles for everything. "Hobbies" are only good if they make them money AND doesn't increase their risk or any liability.…