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My first attempt at iOS app development

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Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#61

Post by ryandrake »

abtinf wrote: post #58
ryandrake wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s weird how confused people get when you suggest a 9 year old electronic device should work. Every computer in my house is over 10 years old. My A/V receiver and home theater speakers are 15 years old. My TV is 18 years old. My electronic thermostat is 11 years old. While they no longer receive firmware updates, they all continue to work as well as they worked on the day I bought them. For some reason, nob…

> My TV is 18 years old … they all continue to work as well as they worked on the day I bought them. This is unlikely to be true. The process is slow so you may not have noticed it, but the tv is probably much dimmer than when it was brand new. You may have a reasonable point about device longevity, but comparing full blown, internet connected, general purpose computing devices to an A/V receiver is obviously intenti…

It's a Hitachi 42 inch plasma and it still looks absolutely beautiful. Not a single problem with it in almost two decades.

Want to know what failed first? The goddamn Mac Mini I have attached to it as a HTPC, where, after "upgrading" to Big Sur or Monterrey, suddenly Apple just up and decided to drop 1080i resolution support (the TV only supports 1080i, not 1080p).

The weakest link, in terms of longevity, is always the software developer.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#62

Post by m3kw9 »

bredren wrote: post #13
earthnail wrote: post #2

The author will learn the hard way that their proposed, fair pricing model won’t even pay a solo dev. Making reasonable money on iOS is hard, like, really hard, and just having a good product is definitely not enough. Sorry to sound so pessimistic; I just want to emphasise that monetisation and marketing is at least as important on iOS as product development.

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…

Apps will work if you don’t update it I have apps that are 10 years old not updated and still work

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#63

Post by m3kw9 »

tabarnacle wrote: post #9
RASBR89 wrote: post #8

The Photos app has a delicates option - not that I want to piss on your parade but the functionality is already present? Or am I missing something?

Didn’t realize this existed, nice.

This is how a lot of apps make money. People don’t know something free existed. It’s a lot of marketing and is super important

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#64

Post by matwood »

dcow wrote: post #59
ryandrake wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s weird how confused people get when you suggest a 9 year old electronic device should work. Every computer in my house is over 10 years old. My A/V receiver and home theater speakers are 15 years old. My TV is 18 years old. My electronic thermostat is 11 years old. While they no longer receive firmware updates, they all continue to work as well as they worked on the day I bought them. For some reason, nob…

It may be an unfortunate relic of the carrier upgrade economics. Most people, in the US at least, on a subscription phone plan get essentially a new phone for free every 2 years. Things are changing a little lately and now it’s not quite a free phone but a heavily discounted one, but it’s still pretty reasonable to expect most of your uses won’t have phone much more than a few years old. I guess that means if we want…

The one thing in phones that was pulling people along to upgrade was the camera, but even that is leveling off now.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#65

Post by TheDong »

deadbabe wrote: post #56
TheDong wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 side projects.

Too late for that, the app store already has a huge amount of trash on it.

If apple insists that the appstore is the only way to get software on a computer in my pocket which I paid for and own, then yes, they are obligated to let me put trash on it.

If apple won't let people put anything on it (as they don't), then they should be obligated to let me install devices in another way.

It's already incredibly silly that if I want to just have my own simple app (like idk, a native app that lets me upload a photo to my personal archive over a custom protocol I use), I have to jump through hoops as if I want the whole world to use it, even if I never intend for anyone outside literally just me to touch it.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#66

Post by matwood »

Spivak wrote: post #42
jll29 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

We're talking about an app made as a weekend project to solve a problem the developer themselves has. Most normal humans would count their time as being free. I pity the person who considers the economic value and tax implications of their leisure time projects. So the calculation is just how many downloads do they need to make up for the $99 developer fee which breaks even at 47 downloads at 30% or 38 at 15%. Defini…

> I pity the person who considers the economic value and tax implications of their leisure time projects.

Learning iOS development also has economic benefit beyond the app created.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#67

Post by gofreddygo »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #41
F7F7F7 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 of this pattern.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#68

Post by josephcsible »

deadbabe wrote: post #52
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…

> 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.

The difference is that LLMs are optional, but the Apple tax is mandatory.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#69

Post by bboygravity »

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…

I'm in embedded development right now (switched from EE, because higher pay, easier to find clients and more flexibility).

Would you recommend the switch from embedded to app writing?

What I'm looking for: more location independence (no on-site work) and more clients/work/jobs.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#70

Post by bboygravity »

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…

You're speaking of kids.

What kids? We don't really make much kids anymore in the developed world :p

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