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iOS indie app development looks like

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Re: iOS indie app development looks like

#51

Post by Apocryphon »

invalidname wrote: post #48
Apocryphon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always hear about projects like this or even back before Swift, like Codename One which allows iOS apps to be written with Java and my question is- does anyone actually use these? Why do this rather than use React Native, Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, even .NET MAUI or whatever Microsoft is on? One would assume that if these were good solutions more people would be adopting them.

Why is Codename One lesser than Flutter? Plenty of companies/people use it. It's open source with commercial backing. It's free for commercial use. It existed well before flutter. Uses a language people actually use (Java) as opposed to Dart. Why would people use flutter which is constantly in danger of being spring cleaned by Google since it makes absolutely no commercial sense. Without Google's support it becomes a…

Maybe it’s a marketing and perception thing. You’d hear more about PhoneGap or Cordova even than Codename One.

Re: iOS indie app development looks like

#52

Post by invalidname »

Apocryphon wrote: post #51
invalidname wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is Codename One lesser than Flutter? Plenty of companies/people use it. It's open source with commercial backing. It's free for commercial use. It existed well before flutter. Uses a language people actually use (Java) as opposed to Dart. Why would people use flutter which is constantly in danger of being spring cleaned by Google since it makes absolutely no commercial sense. Without Google's support it becomes a…

Maybe it’s a marketing and perception thing. You’d hear more about PhoneGap or Cordova even than Codename One.

It doesn't have the same level of traction for sure. But it's still popular enough and has support unlike PhoneGap which was discontinued. There are advantages to working with smaller companies where you "know" the individual contributors.

It also came out way after PhoneGap and wasn't backed by a huge company with a huge marketing budget.

Re: iOS indie app development looks like

#53

Post by ToucanLoucan »

999900000999 wrote: post #41
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time taking people seriously who make such a huge deal out of the developer account pricing. A hundred bucks per year just isn't much money, I'm sorry, maybe it's my privilege talking, but if you're getting into iOS development you have, at base, one mac and one iDevice, if for NO other reason than development and testing of the app you want to make. The cheapest Mac available new is $600, and the cheap…

All right, I'll give you an example. I made a small game about 4 years ago for iPhones, maybe 30 people downloaded it. It works fine, it's just a small game. To prevent apple from just taking it down I have to pay $100 per year, meaning even if I don't actively develop apps anymore, I'm just wasting money. Now if I wanted to play the Apple dance every 6 months and hope they let me actually publish my games, I got a l…

> I'm just wasting money.

No, you're not. You're paying to have your game accessed by people. Do you also refuse to pay for web hosting on principle? Or some other WAN-addressable download location?

This is such a bizarrely specific entitlement.

Re: iOS indie app development looks like

#54

Post by 999900000999 »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #42
999900000999 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All right, I'll give you an example. I made a small game about 4 years ago for iPhones, maybe 30 people downloaded it. It works fine, it's just a small game. To prevent apple from just taking it down I have to pay $100 per year, meaning even if I don't actively develop apps anymore, I'm just wasting money. Now if I wanted to play the Apple dance every 6 months and hope they let me actually publish my games, I got a l…

Okay; in which case, your little game was probably free. How much would you pay for hosting at this point? The cheapest Droplet on DigitalOcean will cost you $60 per year. Maybe you planned to have your game downloaded from Google Drive, but I’m with Apple on this one, a small fee prevents many bad actors. Especially when 95% of iOS developers are comfortably in the top 10% of US salaries, and top 1% worldwide.

Itch.io is 100% free.

I'd be okay with it, if it was $100 per year while you're actively publishing new content. But just to keep old stuff up there is kind of steep

Re: iOS indie app development looks like

#55

Post by gumby271 »

sylens wrote: post #50
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time taking people seriously who make such a huge deal out of the developer account pricing. A hundred bucks per year just isn't much money, I'm sorry, maybe it's my privilege talking, but if you're getting into iOS development you have, at base, one mac and one iDevice, if for NO other reason than development and testing of the app you want to make. The cheapest Mac available new is $600, and the cheap…

My problem is that its an annual cost. When I dabbled in Android development, I think I paid a one-time fee of $25. That's a cost I can swallow for someone who wants to release apps for free. If I have to pay $100 a year, I need to make that money back from my apps which means I probably need to make them subscription based. Which leads us to the world we live in today.

And that's Apple's goal, isn't it? Make you do enough recurring work and add enough recurring cost to get you to add subscription pricing to your app, that's the most profitable for them. Make you constantly rebuild your app with the latest iOS sdk in their IDE, on their OS, on their hardware, all in the name of security.

Re: iOS indie app development looks like

#56

Post by gumby271 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #53
999900000999 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All right, I'll give you an example. I made a small game about 4 years ago for iPhones, maybe 30 people downloaded it. It works fine, it's just a small game. To prevent apple from just taking it down I have to pay $100 per year, meaning even if I don't actively develop apps anymore, I'm just wasting money. Now if I wanted to play the Apple dance every 6 months and hope they let me actually publish my games, I got a l…

> I'm just wasting money. No, you're not. You're paying to have your game accessed by people. Do you also refuse to pay for web hosting on principle? Or some other WAN-addressable download location? This is such a bizarrely specific entitlement.

But web hosting fees aren't arbitrary, they're based on the cost of distributing the program they've written. Apple can just declare that you have to rebuild your program for $100 a year plus the cost of all their other hardware to build it on, that's the difference.

Re: iOS indie app development looks like

#57

Post by danielscrubs »

floydnoel wrote: post #40
lawgimenez wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have encountered the infamous > The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time; try breaking up the expression into distinct sub-expressions a lot. And it’s impossible to debug. https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/652691

that just means you have too many items together. break them up into smaller components or use something like a Group and that solves it. not a big mystery

The mystery is not why it happens, but how compiler tech can go backwards and still win.

Ps. I do like SwiftUI, just not the implementation.

Re: iOS indie app development looks like

#58

Post by wahnfrieden »

sandoze wrote: post #32
wahnfrieden wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you see that it does cell reuse? It does not... Their docs only talk about lazy loading, not reuse or unloading, eg: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui/creating-p... This is also why LazyVGrid/LazyHGrid are unusable as replacements for UICollectionView Yes you can replace SwiftUI with UIKit + AppKit - replace the navigation, the text rendering, the text editing, the collection views, etc. edit…

I’m on a phone which means digging through Apple docs or WWDC-ascii isn’t fun. But for my recent Insta-like infinite feed on iOS this was very helpful: https://fatbobman.com/en/posts/tips-and-considerations-for-u...

Your link is all about how to use List

Also... Funny that I'm getting downvoted for correctly pointing out that LazyVStack doesn't reuse or unload views. It's so obvious that they should, that no one can believe they don't.

Re: iOS indie app development looks like

#59

Post by emoII »

samtheprogram wrote: post #13
emoII wrote: post #5

Really, the fact that Apple pushes swiftui as production ready is laughable. The framework is so ridden in bugs, does not play nicely with the other frameworks like photosui, and the language itself is incredibly bloated.

People I know who are iOS developers say differently. The Swift language itself is bloated? Compared to what? Golang?

Something like go, yes. Imo there is benefit to only being able to do things one way, and in swift there are a lot of ways to do everything. A trivial example: why can you bind variables in pattern matches with both case let .some(x) and case .some(let x)?

Re: iOS indie app development looks like

#60

Post by wahnfrieden »

999900000999 wrote: post #54
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay; in which case, your little game was probably free. How much would you pay for hosting at this point? The cheapest Droplet on DigitalOcean will cost you $60 per year. Maybe you planned to have your game downloaded from Google Drive, but I’m with Apple on this one, a small fee prevents many bad actors. Especially when 95% of iOS developers are comfortably in the top 10% of US salaries, and top 1% worldwide.

Itch.io is 100% free. I'd be okay with it, if it was $100 per year while you're actively publishing new content. But just to keep old stuff up there is kind of steep

They don't want your unmaintained and unprofitable apps
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