331–340 of 648 posts
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What even is the idea, what would be the value in weeding out niche apps, if they did it consistently? To reduce the work involved in keeping everything in the garden lovely?
I think its just to mitigate spam apps. The window's app store is kinda garbage. Apple doesn't want to spend their QA resources on apps that only 10 people can use.
Tapping phones seems very limiting. I don’t see most of my friends in person that often, different cities etc. I think a better alternative would be a phone number. You only give your number to friends, which aligns with the brand and product concept. Allows more of your friends to join via your address book, good for the app growth. Might also mean indirectly you can’t follow a non-personal page which also aligns to…
* Tapping Phones * Confirming Phone Number * Confirming Email * Connected via Other Platforms (Facebook, Twitter, BlueSky, etc)
As far as maintaining a friendship by tapping phones, again, I would make the friendships a constant and graph / rank intimacy by how often you tap phones as well as how connected you are to your friend (phone, email, connections on other networks).
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The main driver for making it into an app and not just a web page was the need to send push notifications. Of course, I just needed it for myself: hey, it's time to stop working and start driving to school to pick up the kid – "notify me 30 minutes before the last period ends" given that the schedule is different every day; then I just shared it with other parents. There is a web version (it's Flutter so it was easy…
If you add a web page (a PWA) to the home screen, it can do push messages on iOS since a couple of years.
I really wish more social networks would have a "fading connections" limit. So many social networks suffer from stale connections and networks, and these connections should expire after a year. Otherwise, it will permanently define a social network's content and editorial direction without algorithmic control. For example, Selena Gomez will always have 400million followers on Instagram, but she's socially irrelevant…
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Not trying to defend App Store policies, but writing this just for those who are struggling with Guideline 4.2 trying to publish an app that is only intended for a small group of users. There is a less well-known option called "unlisted app distribution", similar to unlisted YouTube videos: the app is public and can be downloaded using the direct link, but it cannot be found in App Store search. The "small, or niche,…
> I struggled with Guideline 4.2 when I tried to publish an app showing the bell schedule and other local information for the neighborhood school. Why would you not just make this a webpage, and then the users could add it to home page as if it were an app? no Apple review necessary then. What does it being an app give you besides bureaucratic headaches?
It’s not a PWA because the UX is just always inferior. Even though we’ve come really far in browser UIs, the browser is still very clunky compared to the smoothness of a native app.
And I like nice to use software.
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The main driver for making it into an app and not just a web page was the need to send push notifications. Of course, I just needed it for myself: hey, it's time to stop working and start driving to school to pick up the kid – "notify me 30 minutes before the last period ends" given that the schedule is different every day; then I just shared it with other parents. There is a web version (it's Flutter so it was easy…
If you add a web page (a PWA) to the home screen, it can do push messages on iOS since a couple of years.
Source: consulted for a company that had a PWA and paid me a lot of money to make it a native app because their users didn't know how to use the PWA.
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I've been thinking about this because I'm working on an internal company tool. It's a web app but I was thinking about creating mobile apps. In the age of agentic coding, that's no longer a massive undertaking like it used to be. However, I'm completely blocked by Apple app store review. There's no way an app designed for 30 people would pass. I can't get an internal app onto people's phone. I could release it as a t…
There is Apple enterprise for this reason. Depending on the set of APIs you want to use (which should be limited since you spoke of webapps), it allows you to distribute internal business apps. Don’t know how known this is. But we use it mainly for internal testing.
> The Apple Developer Enterprise Program allows large organizations to develop and deploy proprietary, internal-use apps to their employees
> Your organization must:
> Have 100 or more employees
Again, it's clear that they're providing this out so that organizations with power don't have to start a fight, while small organizations can't do anything.
Even aside from that, it's clearly going to be so much work that we wouldn't be able to do it. I'm the only developer at the company, I cannot get bogged down in Apple review processes.
The 'tapping phones' gimmick strikes me as something that sounds cute but will become an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of. Particularly given various unintended side effects -- I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network. And either way, it's not the core feature that will draw users to the site If you want to differen…
For me, I already know what the handful of people who live in my little town are doing. I see them all the time. An app like this is for keeping up for the rest of my friends who live out of town and I might only see in person every few years.