Skip is now free and open source • Hacker News Board

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#171

Post by mrkeen » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 7:02 AM UTC

I've never quite found the right cross-platform phone dev setup before, so this piqued my interest a little.

  Skip requires a macOS 15+ development machine with Xcode 16.4 or later installed.

So not really the cross-platform I was imagining. That one's on me.

  With no additional managed runtime, Skip apps are as efficient as they can possibly be on both platforms.

Bold claim. These guys must really care about every byte.

  At least 32GB of memory is recommended for development with Skip.

(!)

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#172

Post by HexDecOctBin » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 7:22 AM UTC

throw10920 wrote: post #164

HexDecOctBin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. When people bemoan the death of lisp machines and RAD and whatnot, remember that we deserve it. We do not want to invest in good tools and treat "Worse is Better" as some twisted virtue, and then wonder why everything sucks and most developer experience is stuck in 80s-90s technology paradigm. We deserve this.

> We do not want to invest in good tools and treat "Worse is Better" as some twisted virtue, and then wonder why everything sucks and most developer experience is stuck in 80s-90s technology paradigm. We deserve this. Not terribly surprising that one of the most true comments is at the bottom. The Stockholm syndrome by devs desperately wanting to believe that bad tools are good is insane . It's not even hard to see w…

Yeah, the downvotes were expected. Developers do not like being called out for the miserly and self-destructive bunch that we are.

I was building an advance IDE for C and gave up when I realised that no one would buy it because "lol vim is free". Finally, I am gathering the strength to resume working on it, but only for personal use and with no expectation of selling more than 100 copies.

What bothers me the most is the hypocrisy. It's okay to make money by showing predatory ads to unsuspecting populace, but not by selling useful tools. No, that is immoral.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#173

Post by ildon » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 7:25 AM UTC

Reading about how Skip works made me wonder: how long until we can reliability code only for one platform (e.g. iOS, but also even web) and then have AI agents that translate the code to all the other platforms in truly native code and UI (Swift, Kotlin, etc.)?

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#174

Post by agentifysh » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 7:41 AM UTC

realusername wrote: post #110

winrid wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flutter re-generates the entire layout every tick and diffs it (immediate-mode), like a game engine. If your device isn't quite fast enough it'll lag, yep. RN is retained mode (but written in immediate-mode style and the diffing only happens when it has to).

I'd say it's the opposite, on crappy devices, Flutter feels faster than native, not sure how but that's the end result. I've been testing on an old Samsung J3 and it's definitely better than native. That's also maybe why it's so popular in India.

Flutter is essentially a game engine so it bypasses the typical cycles involved with native widgets and there are several different ways why Flutter works well on lower end phones

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#175

Post by agentifysh » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 7:42 AM UTC

well_ackshually wrote: post #49

agentifysh wrote: post #34

This is a welcome addition but why should Flutter devs use this ? Seems like it requires 32gb of ram! Also Flutter is already very mature and can produce not only near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) but can target desktop and even web applications. I do wonder how much of a boost skip offers vs Flutter's mobile apps. Will give skip a try when dram prices normalize.

Flutter is fine if you don't care about performance, accessibility, have no need to access native capabilities or non-fluttered widgets (ex: the Google map integration is awful) and overall just want to make an internal app. The cost of making an excellent flutter app is about the same you'd pay making fully native apps. Except that you're always paying for Skia's costs with Flutter. This recommends 32GB to run _ever…

What?! Flutter is literally a game engine, its faster than native even on older phones and pretty much most of the issues you are talking about is old news lol

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#176

Post by xmprt » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 7:45 AM UTC

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #91

nsm wrote: post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero. People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. Selling software to softwa…

Very true. On immich, I've always wanted a way to do certain operations locally like adding to an album before the photo/video is fully uploaded, but I'm not frustrated that it's not possible because if I cared enough I'd create a pull request. For features that Google Photos is/was missing, I'm not as generous.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#177

Post by xmprt » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 7:50 AM UTC

This is great for Skip users, but I'm curious how they plan on monetizing for long term sustainability. Donations are notoriously not sustainable and if they weren't able to get enough in license fees before, I don't see how they will get more donations in the future. Unless the plan is that by increasing the user base, the product will get significantly better so that even if there's a smaller percentage of donators, they will end up contributing more in total.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#178

Post by csomar » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 7:58 AM UTC

nsm wrote: post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

I can't find a solid source to link to but the few I found shows that IT and Healthcare tops per employee spend on SaaS. The reality is nobody wants to spend for SaaS.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#179

Post by speedgoose » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 8:17 AM UTC

gpm wrote: post #69

speedgoose wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which non sense? The lesser GPL doesn’t mean you have to license your firstborn under the GPL license. I think it’s fair to milk enterprise companies that can’t read a FSF license. Otherwise the LGPL is fine.

As I understand the LGPL - not a lawyer - you have to somehow enable all your users to relink your application against a different version of Skip (4.d.0 since 4.d.1 isn't possible on iOS). This means that your application must do something like include a copy of all the files that went into linking the application and convey that to the users along with your application, with scripts to build the application against…

Alright, that’s a fair point.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#180

Post by wahnfrieden » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 8:25 AM UTC

mrkeen wrote: post #171

I've never quite found the right cross-platform phone dev setup before, so this piqued my interest a little. Skip requires a macOS 15+ development machine with Xcode 16.4 or later installed. So not really the cross-platform I was imagining. That one's on me. With no additional managed runtime, Skip apps are as efficient as they can possibly be on both platforms. Bold claim. These guys must really care about every byt…

You are confused or making bad-faith comparisons.

You're comparing the efficiency of the app that Skip produces, and the development environment (which is Xcode and Android Studio).

And you are comparing the cross-platform capabilities of the apps you can produce with Skip with the cross-platform capabilities of the development environments (which are still just Xcode and Android Studio).