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Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

danq.me

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191–200 of 571 posts

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#191

Post by cgannett »

kokanee wrote: post #179
Grombobulous wrote: post #53

I recently decided to publish an app on the App Store just so I could say I accomplished that, and maybe even make a little bit of beer money on the side. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage. I don’t expect it to be popular. It’s basically a worse version of stuff that is already available. I expected this to be a learning exercise about the process of getting stuff published. Lo…

Back when I used to freelance, somebody once paid me a scant fee to build a pretty cool online tool for music teachers, basically an interactive piano. I checked in on the website a few years afterwards and found that they had wrapped it into an app and been selling it for $5/install ever since I made it for them. Probably my fault for not licensing the software I wrote for them (I was basically a kid at the time) bu…

Time to make a better version for $4 install and a similar name... out of spite.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#192

Post by verelo »

c0nsumer wrote: post #185
Grombobulous wrote: post #53

I recently decided to publish an app on the App Store just so I could say I accomplished that, and maybe even make a little bit of beer money on the side. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage. I don’t expect it to be popular. It’s basically a worse version of stuff that is already available. I expected this to be a learning exercise about the process of getting stuff published. Lo…

I like making maps, and I wanted to do a certain bend on a very specific kind of online map, filling a gap I noticed in existing maps. The idea of an app really appealed to me (at first), but the more I thought about it the more I didn't want to deal with iOS and then Android and then maintaining parallel functionality on the web and all that mess just for a fairly-local hobby project that I make no money off of. So,…

So i've done similar things in the past - and my justification for 'app' over website has been offline.

Does the PWA state of things resolve that in the modern days? If it did, yeah I'd agree, no need for an app at all. In my case the app was being used in rural Ontario. I cant even make a phone call here without wifi.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#194

Post by wahnfrieden »

Grombobulous wrote: post #161
hbn wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address That's an EU thing. If you don't publish in the EU you don't need to dox yourself.

Why isn’t Apple the business with the contact info? They’re taking 15-30% cut and fully control their software APIs. Unless I’m mistaken, Steam and GOG games aren’t listing the address of the game developers in the EU, but I admit that I might be mistaken.

Because of how the EU law was written

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#196

Post by carlosjobim »

carlosjobim wrote: post #137

The question is: Why would anybody prefer a web-app over a native app in any kind of system or on any kind of device? I think the answer is "only when there is no native app for the system I use", ie Linux. So FOSS people want for apps to become much worse for everybody else, so that they can have the apps also through a web browser. Remembering that everybody else is who pays for the apps and all development, while…

I invite down voters to make a reply explaining why users would prefer web apps to native apps, given the choice.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#197

Post by motoroco »

c0nsumer wrote: post #185
Grombobulous wrote: post #53

I recently decided to publish an app on the App Store just so I could say I accomplished that, and maybe even make a little bit of beer money on the side. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage. I don’t expect it to be popular. It’s basically a worse version of stuff that is already available. I expected this to be a learning exercise about the process of getting stuff published. Lo…

I like making maps, and I wanted to do a certain bend on a very specific kind of online map, filling a gap I noticed in existing maps. The idea of an app really appealed to me (at first), but the more I thought about it the more I didn't want to deal with iOS and then Android and then maintaining parallel functionality on the web and all that mess just for a fairly-local hobby project that I make no money off of. So,…

Hello fellow map maker! I feel like I’m in the same boat. PWAs work great, I wish Apple would treat them as first class apps. I tinkered with launching a TWA for my app on the Play Store and it works pretty well but I haven’t published it yet. Probably a harder market to monetize than iOS but it seems like good advertising just to have the listing up

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#198

Post by isaachinman »

smcg wrote: post #74

The fundamental problem with the internet is that hosting sucks and no one wants to do it. It's thankless and it's expensive to maintain, both time and money. Apps are a way to not worry about that. By the way, the link doesn't load for me, so I used the archive to read it. https://archive.ph/ByFBN

What the hell?

Make your website static and host it on a CDN. There's nothing expensive or thankless about it.

Stop over engineering.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#199

Post by dd8601fn »

afavour wrote: post #121
criddell wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who uses apps, the hoops you have to jump through are one of the reasons I prefer apps. I'm glad Apple knows who you are and have scrutinized (to some degree) your app. I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.

> I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5. That's been the case with native apps for a long time now too.

Not really, no.

Not that it doesn’t occasionally happen, but at that point you’re trying to dodge the police… as compared to there being no police in the first place.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#200

Post by jandrese »

rpdillon wrote: post #164
al_borland wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I periodically try to put something together. I don’t even care about publishing to the app store really, I mostly want to make stuff for myself for macOS. My last attempt, it felt like Apple was no longer interested in the idea of hobbyist developers. The setup just to get the Xcode project setup felt like I needed to have a company and a website. When I selected something about iCloud, because I thought it would be…

This is exactly what I've been observing as well. As soon as the App Store became a cash cow, the incentive to support non-commercial development went away. It's now a place constructed by a giant company, for giant companies.

I am on a formerly fairly active game app forum elsewhere and it's been dead for years. Indie developers are still probably making some releases, but the combination of Apple being unfriendly to small developers and the economics of the whole thing means it's close to dead. There were tons of experimental little $1 or $2 games in the early days but that seems to be gone. Even worse many of the old ones aren't playable anymore because they never made the transition to 64 bits and OS support for them is gone.
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