Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

terminalbytes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 198 posts

Re: My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

#171

Post by weaksauce »

tech234a wrote: post #33
mcpherrinm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the "for longer than a week" bit - Unless you have a paid developer account, you can only sign apps to sideload that last one week. There's some tools to automate "refreshing" the app, but that requires you have some other computer that pushes a new app every week. The "1 week" restriction is usually fine when you're developing (as you typically are continually rebuilding and updating when actively working on an…

If you trust it, SideStore manages to do it on device by using a local VPN to make an on-device server appear to be an external device on the network.

is there a reason to be wary of sidestore? first time i've heard of that but seems like a legit opensource project. doesn't seem like it would be a project that is all that lucrative for bad actors... people that don't want to pay $99/year to load apps on their personal iphones/ipads doesn't seem like a big score.

Re: My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

#172

Post by wobfan »

encom wrote: post #153
irrational wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There can’t be that many iOS developers that the $99 really affects their bottom line. I always assumed it was a barrier to entry to help discourage low effort apps.

>discourage low effort apps Well that obviously didn't work. I got rid of my Iphone, but I remember the app store as being an absolute wasteland of garbage, and discoverability was awful. I don't know if it was a slogan, or an ad campaign once, but there was this thing with "there's an app for that". Yea I guess maybe there is, but good luck finding it, and finding one that isn't riddled with ads and scammy in-app pu…

I mean you're right and you've said it yourself already, but in comparison to try Play Store there apps from the App Store are like double the quality on average. Because most of the extremely low effort bs is kept out. I still hate the fee though, dont get me wrong.

Re: My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

#173

Post by arjie »

This is very cool! I have a similar EcoFlow battery hooked up to a Pixel 4. With Termux this is a very capable tool. I have it on Tailscale (using my own headscale server) and I use it for speech to text and text to speech using the native APIs (which are well supported with Termux's APIs and helper functions). It's a very capable computer. The one thing that I haven't quite figured out is how to run a high-quality wake-word tool.

I initially intended to use it with a ReSpeaker speaker/mic system so that I could use it as a smart home assistant / Q&A bot since Google Home constantly frustrates me with its inability to answer questions that LLMs answer flawlessly but the mic/speaker on the phone is good enough. The only problem is the wake word functionality. I'm going to try Porcupine next and see.

Re: My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

#174

Post by martey »

The_President wrote: post #148

I have an iPhone 8 still in service and compared to an equally old Android device, the Android (some kind of Motorola eX series low end phone) runs circles around the iPhone. Even playing background video or audio streamed from wifi and output over bluetooth with the screen off, the Android will burn 15% in an hour while the iPhone will burn over 60%. Both are the same age but the iPhone feels subjectively obselete w…

This just suggests that the battery in your iPhone 8 is more degraded than your low end Motorola. This could easily occur if you have used the iPhone more over its lifetime and isn't a good measure of relative performance.

Re: My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

#175

Post by notnullorvoid »

latexr wrote: post #124
behnamoh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price. I'm a longtim…

> Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". No, they do not. That is how you are interpreting their actions . It’s obviously not the narrative they are pushing, that would be utterly absurd. The narrative Apple pushes over and over is that it’s your device, and that what you do with it is private and stays with it. Outright saying the device is theirs and they only let yo…

I believe they are talking about Apple's anti-trust legal defense narrative. Not the marketing narrative, which is in direct conflict, and maybe false advertising.

Re: My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

#176

Post by leakycap »

engcoach wrote: post #166
kccqzy wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but the $99 fee doesn't just allow selling apps on the App Store. It is also required for testing the app such as on TestFlight. Apple should long ago make the $99 an App Store fee, not tied to any provisioning certificates or code signing.

Without a fee, people would make new accounts and circumvent distribution restrictions.

The fee could be less and have a similar deterrent on the type of activity you describe. The real question isn't what Apple is gaining from this fee, but what they are losing.

Apple's $99 fee is annoying and feels like a waste of time and one more thing to manage.

The paid ADC program has kept me from sharing projects with other developers who would have otherwise been able to contribute (but they aren't paid devs because they'd rather have a year of Costco hotdogs than pay Apple to help me with my app for a week)

Re: My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

#177

Post by leakycap »

cortesoft wrote: post #162
kccqzy wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's asinine for developers to have to pay $99 in order to test their app, such as on TestFlight. When you have an app idea, when you are far from deciding on monetization, you just want to test out the central features of the app among friends, it's wrong to require payment for that. Remember all apps have once been low effort apps: the first few weeks when you begin working on them. Polish comes later.

You aren’t paying $99 per app, you have to pay that once per year and you can develop as many apps as you want. $99 isn’t a huge amount.

$99 is a show-stopping barrier for more people than you can possibly imagine.

Please, if you are of the mindset $99 is not a life-changing amount for someone else, I implore you to widen your world and at least stay in touch with what the average human experience is like.

The person working McDonald's who has an app idea now needs an iOS device, a Mac, and $99 of available funds. Then, remember that person is richer than many people in other countries.

$99 is a huge amount, especially given that you get nothing except a privilege that has no inherent value.

Re: My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

#178

Post by leakycap »

brailsafe wrote: post #25
tclancy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking. I'm not sure I follow. It feels exceedingly hard to find new uses for old iPads without doing a lot of heavy lifting. Has that changed?

My iPad 3 is only unusable because anything beyond iOS 9 isn't installable, most of the like 5 Apps I did have installed on it didn't survive a "backup", and obvs nobody's going out of their way to support ancient platforms. Otherwise, it still functions as an epub reader as long as iBooks continues functioning, but it's lame that I can't really use it for much else unless I made it a hobby.

To be fair, your iPad 3 is an iPad 2 with a retina screen; I remember buying an iPad 3 and it was glacially slow even at launch on the original iOS.

I would imagine the best use of this device post eReader is a photo stand given the gorgeous screen... or something else that wouldn't need any interaction (it will be too slow to want to have touch interactions with).

I use an iPad 2 as a IPcam monitor. The battery doesn't last long, but I'm able to grab it off the charger and take it around the house if I'm watching something going on. It doesn't support my new AI smart cams, but it still functions.

Re: My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

#179

Post by leakycap »

brailsafe wrote: post #58
tech234a wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterexample, VLC surprisingly still supports iOS 9.0

That's a great counterexample, since built-in video playback capability is awful. It's one of the few I still have installed if memory serves. It think I also have "The Room" and a few Google apps. Hardware-wise I always thought it was pretty solid, the software and general utility not so much, but I look at newer versions hat have come out since 2013 and don't really see how they're fundamentally any more capable th…

I was able to regain access to a lot of ipsw app backups from old Time Machine drives, in case you are wanting apps that are easy to use on your device. Any files from your backups will work, since they'll have your Apple ID in them.

Can you not install apps from the Purchased section in the App Store? I was able to download the new version of an app on my iOS 18 iPhone, then reload the App Store on iOS 9 and download from the "Purchased" section, assuming the app existed back in the iOS 9 days or had a version targeting this old OS.

Re: My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

#180

Post by AnthonyMouse »

cortesoft wrote: post #88
behnamoh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price. I'm a longtim…

> Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something. A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money. A company only lowers prices if they think doing so will generate higher total profits in the long run. Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for…

> There are probably many reasons for that, some of them already mentioned in sibling comments

Those reasons don't really make a lot of sense:

> keeping low effort apps out

"Low effort" apps are critical to establishing demand. Small developers can't justify spending a large amount of resources on something you're not sure anybody wants. If you post the MVP and get a lot of downloads, now you know it's worth your time to make it better. If you can't post the MVP then you don't post it at all and neither the MVP nor the polished version ever exists.

That's the recipe for having an app store full of loot box games and similar trash which is known to be profitable to the developers while losing thousands of apps people might actually want to the uncertainty of not knowing that ahead of time. Which is exactly what we see. How is that in their interest?

> keeping low effort apps out, preventing spammers from constantly buying new accounts to bypass bans, reducing the workload for approvers

These are things that would imply an account creation fee rather than an annual fee, and also have nothing to doing app development where you're only installing the app on your own device.

> generating revenue from the fees

This is the thing people are complaining about. They feel as though a troll has jumped out from under a bridge to demand money without providing anything of value in return. You've already paid for the phone, now it's your phone, what gives them the right to double dip?

> Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.

That's true in a competitive market. If you don't like Apple's prices then go use one of the other app distribution services for your iPhone. Unless there isn't one, right?

Post reply on HN