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My first attempt at iOS app development

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Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#111

Post by deadbabe »

TheDong wrote: post #65
deadbabe wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AppStore is not the internet. There is no reason for it to be polluted with everyone’s throwaway side projects.

The $100 isn't just required for the things published to the AppStore. It's required for a sideload app in the EU. It's required to make a testflight app that isn't discoverable on the app store, but people can opt-in to running (though apple still heavily restricts what apps you can publish via testflight, it's not a substitute for sideloading). > There is no reason for it to be polluted with everyone’s throwaway si…

It’s a phone, not a computer. It’s not sold as a platform for developers to tinker around doing whatever they want. It’s primarily a lifestyle device and businesses can produce apps for it. That’s it. You don’t get to put your own software on everything that has a computer in it: cars, consoles, appliances, etc.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#112

Post by loginatnine »

jll29 wrote: post #23
vunderba wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

You calculated based on a 0.99$ purchase price though, at 2.99$ it's 4825 purchases to break even.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#113

Post by aquariusDue »

gofreddygo wrote: post #67
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This sounds like Python development....and React.....and Svelte....and oh, remember Angular 2 to 3? I can open a webpage written in Angular 1, or written in year 1990. I can run a program written for windows 95 on my new PC with windows 11. It’s normal to keep compatibility for compiled/finished ebd user software.

but, can you run npm install on your angular 1 codebase from 1990? or was it bower install ? remember grunt? my 2012 mac hardware works perfectly fine, even the battery is OG, apple stopped supporting it, chrome won't give update on the last supported os. software is fragile. i constrain myself to html and plain vanilla js. if i have to use deps, they are local or hosted .js lib files, minified. d3 is a great example…

I miss gulp, things seemed so much simpler back then in retrospect and the nature of JavaScript fatigue seemed to be the FOMO kind instead of this abstraction over abstraction that abstracts that other abstraction but you still have to the understand what it abstracted away kind we have going on today.

Will TypeScript go the way of CoffeeScript in the future? Who knows.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#114

Post by kalleboo »

TheDong wrote: post #54
deadbabe wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It means you can't sustainably release free apps unless you're willing to just ignore that you're burning $100 a year forever. The fact that this $100 yearly fee has never been adjusted for inflation, in a time when developers are easily shelling out $200 a month to use LLMs, makes this gripe all the more petty. Especially when software developers are still among some of the highest paid jobs on the market.

Back in the days of newgrounds, a bunch of kids learned to program by picking up flash, making games, and sharing them with their friends. That would not have happened if you had to pay even $1/year to publish a .swf file. Now, their friends all have iphones, and if a kid could hack out an app for their friend group and share it around, it would give them great motivation to learn and hack in that ecosystem. It's kid…

> Now, their friends all have iphones, and if a kid could hack out an app for their friend group and share it around, it would give them great motivation to learn and hack in that ecosystem.

You can create apps on the iPad and share the source bundles with friends without a paid account https://developer.apple.com/swift-playground/

edit: To be clear, I'm not defending Apple here, I'm still 200% in favor of "let people run the code they want on the device they own", what I'm trying to say is just if you're a kid who wants to do this, you already can!

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#115

Post by criddell »

dylan604 wrote: post #109
criddell wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think it’s easier to make a living creating web apps?

There’s no code signing process or update review. There’s no $99/year registration fee for the privilege to have your code signed. There’s no up to -30% hit on your fees. 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.

I wasn’t talking about any of that. I was talking about the ease of earning a living as a solo developer on the platform. On iOS, it’s true that there are hoops you have to jump through and you have to share 15% of your fees (if you get to the point where you owe 30%, you are doing well!), but in return you get access to a fairly large audience of people willing to pay for apps and services.

The web is the Wild West and I don’t really have much of a feel for how difficult it is to find an audience that will pay to use the software you build.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#116

Post by bredren »

gumby271 wrote: post #25
bredren wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author mentions code signing as a tricky ecosystem thing. Well, wait until the app has to get new assets to be resubmitted with bug fixes for new versions of iOS. And if they don’t keep updating it, it will stop working and the buy it for life idea commits the dev to maintenance that isn’t paid for either upfront or through subscription. There are folks who make and give away a lot but some learn their lesson qui…

I think a lot of what Apple has added to their App Store in the name of security is really just to get developers to move to recurring revenue models, which in turns makes Apple a lot more money. An old app that hasn't been updated in a couple years isn't inherently dangerous, but if Apple can convince users that it is, then devs will have to rethink how they do business. It's a shame to watch Google copy this move t…

There are changes that can be valuable to users. Like the privacy attestations. I was not publishing at that time but I presume that was part of the mandatory dev march.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#117

Post by x0x0 »

F7F7F7 wrote: post #31
x0x0 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just developing in Apple's crappy ecosystem. eg Apple publishes a new ios rev; debugging on it requires upgrading xcode; and that requires updating your OS. . Good thing you don't mind wasting a full day or more reinstalling every other devtool you may happen to use. Or xcode just doesn't connect to your ios device because reasons. (The reason is apple writes shoddy slapdash software because monopoly.) So now you'…

This sounds like Python development....and React.....and Svelte....and oh, remember Angular 2 to 3? Or people who invest time in Clojure? Were you a fan of the MEAN stack a decade ago? Build something on it? How's that app doing? What you're describing is not unique to Apple. It's a regular occurrence for anyone who's not writing for a enterprise SAAS company with a largely legacy codebase and a dozen DevOps guys mos…

Nonsense. Upgrading python using standard tools does not regularly require OS upgrades. asdf, rbenv or various other tools will happily pull in new releases from their ecosystems.

Go requires macos from 2016 or kernel 3.2 which I think is over a decade old. I can't find any limit for jvm 25, though I'm sure there is one. No competently-built tool requires OS upgrades like xcode.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#118

Post by andrewmcwatters »

The App Store does great business, but its customers aren't the people downloading the apps, their real customers are the developers.

It's incidental that the largest businesses in the world have apps on the Apple App Store, but it's not because the App Store is a great platform.

If no one is selling annual $100/yr apps, but Apple is charging you that much, you're the customer.

There is absolutely no world where polished software that you can own is $2.99, sorry folks. Coffee costs more.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#119

Post by tcoff91 »

cyberax wrote: post #48
tcoff91 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah for sure. Not going to adopt new architecture yet. It’s a little rough of a transition but once we get through I do believe it will be a game changer for react native. Until reanimated v4 is dialed in I’m staying away. Have you tried turning off new arch for now?

Yes, but we found plenty of bugs. Fixed some (e.g. in TrueSheet). It is drastically faster, but I won't call it a "game changer". It's great for us because we have native code modules, and seamless Turbo Modules are nice (you _can_ use them with the old arch, but it requires some jumping through hoops). As for reanimated, I would just stay away from it entirely. Way too many layering violations for my taste.

It’s not so much the performance that has me excited, just the synchronous vs asynchronous communication with the renderer.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#120

Post by jhatemyjob »

ryandrake wrote: post #15

Coming from embedded development, where it's mostly crappy SOC vendors providing a barely-working SDK and toolchain they cobbled together from an ancient version of gcc, moving to iOS development / Xcode was in most aspects a breath of fresh air. It does have its annoyances, though. Code signing, provisioning profiles, entitlements, AppStore wizardry... And the developer program fee is a bummer: It means you can't su…

$100 a year is nothing
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