101–110 of 150 posts
Then you aren't even half done. You still have to undergo the memorable experience of code sign and app store review.
First wrote iOS apps in 2010. Loathed it then, loathed it now.
I shun these devices for which I can't write my own software without permission.
The author will learn the hard way that their proposed, fair pricing model won’t even pay a solo dev. Making reasonable money on iOS is hard, like, really hard, and just having a good product is definitely not enough. Sorry to sound so pessimistic; I just want to emphasise that monetisation and marketing is at least as important on iOS as product development.
It’s also difficult to be a solo dev on Android, Linux, macOS, Windows, the web, etc…
The safest way is to work as a developer for a company that will pay you to do it.
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I had an idea years ago for an app but came to the same conclusion after some market research and a risk assessment so didn’t bother. I do not regret that decision for a moment. I either have to put enough time into the idea to do it full time or do a shitty job. I can’t win either way without incurring massive risks so I will continue to part time two jobs and invest the earnings from those wisely instead.
Did the idea really require being an app? Could it have been a website/webapp instead?
> haven't paid for the Apple Developer Program yet Then you aren't even half done. You still have to undergo the memorable experience of code sign and app store review. First wrote iOS apps in 2010. Loathed it then, loathed it now. I shun these devices for which I can't write my own software without permission.
If you have access to a mobile device management system, it's trivial to push "apps" to the Home Screen of each device using this technique.
For B2C, I don't have any good alternative. You're going to need to be in the App Store.
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I am sympathetic to the argument/feeling that somethings last a long time therefore all things should last a long time. > What is so special about phones where we allow them to be considered obsolete so quickly? The phone / computer works exactly as it did when you bought it. What changed is everything around it. That's not true of those other things. New video codex, new services, new sites, new apps. Let's pick Cha…
But apple explicitly tries to make the environment around the old phone obsolete. They have an incentive to do so. Your old TV still works even with an adaptor - but there's no such a method for the phone. I want my phone to work until the hardware fails, not when apple decides they want to push people to buy a new one next quarter.
As of December 31, 2022, U.S. telcos* decommed the 3G tech phones of the mid-2000s used.
As long as your iPhone can still use the telco network, it still does the functions it shipped with just fine.
A phone's environment depends on a lot more than its hardware maker.
(FWIW, thanks to its different incentives than other handset makers, Apple continues to offer the longest average OS support of the hardware and OS giants. Google's Pixel 8 is the first to bump Google's 3 years to match Apple's 7, and Samsung's S24 also finally matches 7 years. So on current devices, they stepped up, but on devices before 2023, Apple's support is more than double theirs. Arguably, these two finally stepping up were in response to the "environment" of Apple's incentives and EU regs.)
* Verizon was the last. AT&T turned off its 3G network on February 22, 2022. T-Mobile dismantled Sprint's 3G CDMA network on March 31, 2022, and its own 3G UMTS network on July 1, 2022.
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I am sympathetic to the argument/feeling that somethings last a long time therefore all things should last a long time. > What is so special about phones where we allow them to be considered obsolete so quickly? The phone / computer works exactly as it did when you bought it. What changed is everything around it. That's not true of those other things. New video codex, new services, new sites, new apps. Let's pick Cha…
But apple explicitly tries to make the environment around the old phone obsolete. They have an incentive to do so. Your old TV still works even with an adaptor - but there's no such a method for the phone. I want my phone to work until the hardware fails, not when apple decides they want to push people to buy a new one next quarter.
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> My TV is 18 years old … they all continue to work as well as they worked on the day I bought them. This is unlikely to be true. The process is slow so you may not have noticed it, but the tv is probably much dimmer than when it was brand new. You may have a reasonable point about device longevity, but comparing full blown, internet connected, general purpose computing devices to an A/V receiver is obviously intenti…
It's a Hitachi 42 inch plasma and it still looks absolutely beautiful. Not a single problem with it in almost two decades. Want to know what failed first? The goddamn Mac Mini I have attached to it as a HTPC, where, after "upgrading" to Big Sur or Monterrey, suddenly Apple just up and decided to drop 1080i resolution support (the TV only supports 1080i, not 1080p). The weakest link, in terms of longevity, is always t…
The TV works and had not been upgraded. The mac mini works if you did not upgrade it.
The weakest link is doing an upgrade, it does not matter which hardware.
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Did the idea really require being an app? Could it have been a website/webapp instead?
Do you think it’s easier to make a living creating web apps?
So yeah, there’s an easier way of avoiding the Apple specific pain points. If you think that I felt it would be easier to program the actual app, then you’re clearly just trying to be a hostile commenter and insinuating something about me.
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Made even worse by the fact that the apple developer membership costs 99 USD per year...
So Apple gets $99/year PLUS 30% app revenue share? So at a $2.99 "fair" price point as mentioned in the post, how many copies does he have to sell to break even (assuming 4 days of development priced at $2,500/day contractor rate)? (1 * .99) * .70 - (4 * 2500 + 99) The answer is => 14,574 downloads would give him $0.78 profit, before taxes. (In that time, he would have earned more than $13,000 for Apple.)