11–20 of 25 posts
I think this is a niche of a niche of a niche, but it’s interesting to see the creative decisions young developers are making to carve out a sustainable career. I hope this path works out for you!
I'm doing the opposite even though been ios dev for a decade and now learning react / react native. Reasons: - golden days of mobile apps are gone, these days less and less people download apps - it is more important to have desktop / mobile web app these days - pwa and mobile apps and tech are slowly getting good enough - if you are native ios or android you are limiting your jobs and business opportunities - native…
There probably are more Javascript/React jobs, but there are also more Javascript/React programmers. In mid-2022, many places had trouble finding good senior Android programmers. In the past few months I saw OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity etc. looking for Android programmers.
In terms of knowing Java and Kotlin well, there are plenty of Java/Kotlin backend jobs around (don't know about that in hot startups, but outside of Microsoft-world, JVM has been the bedrock of backend for almost 30 years). So that's a logical shift out of an Android job if desired.
Also, Android gives analytics to the business that they have more trouble getting on web. On the web companies are at the mercy of Chrome, Safari etc., with Android they're writing their own app to their own specifications (with some Google Play restrictions).
Where I work, Android and iOS sometimes are ready to launch before the web team has finished their work. How does that fit into prototyping and shipping fast?
It's possible the golden days of launching an app like Instagram and getting acquired a year and a half later for a billion dollars is over, but there is plenty of money to be made. Also, even if a company does launch on web first (most, but not all, companies), if they're successful they often look into launching a mobile app. Even if they start with React Native, KMM or the like they often move to native later (although there are exceptions, I believe Discord launched with RN and it works for them - so different platforms work for different scenarios).
I'm doing the opposite even though been ios dev for a decade and now learning react / react native. Reasons: - golden days of mobile apps are gone, these days less and less people download apps - it is more important to have desktop / mobile web app these days - pwa and mobile apps and tech are slowly getting good enough - if you are native ios or android you are limiting your jobs and business opportunities - native…
In a sense, I'm doing the same thing, but what's comfortable and working for me is Flutter. I don't have any Apple devices to develop on (but I do have a work macbook, and can borrow my wife's iPhone), so to target iOS at all, I vastly prefer cross-platform. Apple still makes that artificially difficult in many ways. You can't even upload a build without xcode (mitigated by codemagic.io). My distrubution certificate recently expired and I spent a lot of time on the Apple connect site before realizing there's no way to request a new certificate without using Apple tools that only run on Apple hardware. It should be a button in the same UI that shows the certificate!
Anyway, without cross platform tools like Flutter, I wouldn't target iOS at all. Apple just takes every opportunity to try to leverage you into their ecosystem, and I'm not going to do that.
And now that the WebAssembly target is officially supported, maybe I won't bother anymore.
IMHO SwiftUI is so good, no amount of describing its greatness can do it justice... you have to try it to really understand it
I'm doing the opposite even though been ios dev for a decade and now learning react / react native. Reasons: - golden days of mobile apps are gone, these days less and less people download apps - it is more important to have desktop / mobile web app these days - pwa and mobile apps and tech are slowly getting good enough - if you are native ios or android you are limiting your jobs and business opportunities - native…
On what are you basing this? Every normal person I know picks a native app over a web app.
> - pwa and mobile apps and tech are slowly getting good enough
This has been claimed for well over a decade, yet I can't tell the difference as a consumer.
> - if you are native ios or android you are limiting your jobs and business opportunities - native mobile dev is like niche inside niche these days. Probably half of jobs is typescript/javascript/ python related.
Technically a brain surgeon has fewer job opportunities than a dentist, yet they make way more money.
> - in current market and ai landscape your have to prototype and ship fast to be competitive even at the cost of slighly worse UX
This is quite a generalization. I think that in some markets users will tolerate a worse UX, and in some markets UX is everything. My company has done quite well by not compromising UX.
I think it's a false dichotomy that you can either build fast with a web app or slow with a native app. I can build some things in SwiftUI way faster than if I used web technology.
IMHO SwiftUI is so good, no amount of describing its greatness can do it justice... you have to try it to really understand it
I'm doing the opposite even though been ios dev for a decade and now learning react / react native. Reasons: - golden days of mobile apps are gone, these days less and less people download apps - it is more important to have desktop / mobile web app these days - pwa and mobile apps and tech are slowly getting good enough - if you are native ios or android you are limiting your jobs and business opportunities - native…
> - it is more important to have desktop / mobile web app these days On what are you basing this? Every normal person I know picks a native app over a web app. > - pwa and mobile apps and tech are slowly getting good enough This has been claimed for well over a decade, yet I can't tell the difference as a consumer. > - if you are native ios or android you are limiting your jobs and business opportunities - native mob…
I am challenging myself today, been struggling for many moons with how to word this without being aggressive, and it seems impossible: you have a persistent blind spot about the efficacy of iOS. It's virtually impossible to launch iOS-only today without enough funding that you can ride out the ensuing 1-2 years to also now build out and staff a web app, etc. IIRC you have a distaste for that sort of funding (which I share)
The old Mac indies have brand names and a benefit of a smoother transition since they were there before the App Store. You and your partner were both influencers in the Mac indie community dating back *2 decades* now, and benefited greatly from the visibility of that: didn't Apple have Halide on the Apple Store phones at some point?
It's very, very, very, hard to get to market, get attention, and get to a competitive wage in the US, just on UX and an iOS app, even with a year or two of patience.
IMHO SwiftUI is so good, no amount of describing its greatness can do it justice... you have to try it to really understand it
I could not disagree more, SwiftUI is a black box that is great when it works but is infuriatingly incomplete to this day. I filed dozens of radars in the past year. I’ve worked on app of the year type applications and they use zero SwiftUI for a reason.