Between Apple's "monetize the developers" versus Google's "monetize the users" I think I prefer the monetization of the developers. I hope a successful alternative to either method comes along however.
Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
71–80 of 535 posts
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#72Apple is greedy, as all corporations are. But to me, more so than being defined by greed, I'd just say that the App store has been a badly managed product in many ways that hurts Apple's ability to make money.
Think about how many Mac Developers have been criticizing many of the policies and features surrounding the App store for their business for years. There's been kerfuffles about lack of update pricing, forced API updates for perfectly working software, bad search functionality, horrendous App approval stories, and many more complaints about features and policies on the App store that causes Apple to make far less money than they should.
IMO, the reason for this is that running a marketplace isn't Apple's core competency.
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#73I wrote an Android app for my little programming news aggregator, and published that on the Play Store because it was basically free (IIRC there might be a one-time signup fee). $99/yr is a ridiculous sum for the "privilege" of publishing in Apple's walled garden, and it's just not something I'm willing to do. The arguments for paying for review, distribution, advertising, search, etc feel so disingenuous when the co…
> $99/yr is a ridiculous sum for the "privilege" of publishing in Apple's walled garden
It’s a token amount, just enough to prevent spammers from creating thousands of accounts. It’s $99 for your entire organization for a year. Go check what Microsoft charges for a Visual Studio license per seat, per year.
$99 doesn’t even buy you 1 hour of a developer’s time. Even if you develop apps a a hobby, this is not a large amount of money. Few hobbies are a cheap as this.
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#74> All of this just smells of greed. Apple is a for profit company. I could turn this around and say that it's greedy to expect a company to offer these tools for free. There's an investment on their end as well.
You can be a profitable company without being greedy.
This response reeks of entitlement.
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#75I wrote an Android app for my little programming news aggregator, and published that on the Play Store because it was basically free (IIRC there might be a one-time signup fee). $99/yr is a ridiculous sum for the "privilege" of publishing in Apple's walled garden, and it's just not something I'm willing to do. The arguments for paying for review, distribution, advertising, search, etc feel so disingenuous when the co…
> these apps are contributing to its bottom line
Are they, though? If you don't have the $99 for a dev account, you don't have a marketing budget either, so your app won't make money, so Apple doesn't care.
I think the best argument to be made for catering to hobbyists is to attract new developers to the platform, but I doubt Apple cares about that any more. Apple wants developers who care about making money. Developers who care about making money will come to Apple because of how much Apple users spend on apps.
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#76When the mac came out in 1984 people had very much the same complaints as it was the first microcomputer to be released without software development tools.
There were hardly any free compiler toolchains outside the UNIX world in the 80's. But it's not the 80's anymore, time has moved on.
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#77I poured a year of my life into an app written in Swift for iOS before I ran into a brick wall trying to figure out how to use Apple's stuff to encode frames into an mp4 video. It's a pretty slick thing that uses low-level APIs like Metal, Core Audio, CFRunLoop, etc. https://github.com/realtaraharris/arezzo
I accidentally spilled a latte into my M1 MacBook Pro, which cost me $2000 to buy. At that point I decided to just forget about Apple and their entire ecosystem because it is designed to abuse everyone. $99/year, no source code for any of the stuff I'm struggling with, no access to any of the people that can answer questions about the black boxes? No thanks.
What am I doing now? I am rocking a ThinkPad T440p from 2012, which only cost me $285. I spend all my time writing apps in C++ for Haiku OS and I have never been happier. Instead of pouring more of your life and energy into a corporation that has labored tirelessly to destroy your freedom, please consider contributing to the commons instead.
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#78I wrote an Android app for my little programming news aggregator, and published that on the Play Store because it was basically free (IIRC there might be a one-time signup fee). $99/yr is a ridiculous sum for the "privilege" of publishing in Apple's walled garden, and it's just not something I'm willing to do. The arguments for paying for review, distribution, advertising, search, etc feel so disingenuous when the co…
>> The arguments for paying for review, distribution, advertising, search, etc feel so disingenuous when the company is worth so much money and these apps are contributing to its bottom line. No, they are not. We are talking about hobby apps and maybe free ones. Those don't contribute to their bottom line. We might say they contribute to the platform. For hobbyist they make it viable. But for paying customers maybe t…
This is the same disingenuous argument. The $99/year isn't preventing junk from showing up on the AppStore, and a lack of $99/year payments doesn't make the Google Play store a dumpster fire of garbage apps. [1]
The AppStore is currently filled with low-value junk published by people paying $99/year (1.8 million apps out there, of which most outside of the top X lists are terrible). Will hobby apps really decrease the average quality? I highly doubt it.
[1] I'll admit that this appeared to be the trend early on, but in the long term both platforms have converged to something similar.
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#79I really feel the author's pain. Apple is so developer-hostile that it's a wonder they have anyone developing for them at all. Maybe my bones are just too linux, but the AUDACITY of requiring that you pay money just to even get a foot in the door, but you also have to use their accursed operating system on your real computer? Disgusting. I can tolerate running iOS on my phone, which for pragmatic purposes I've already temporarily conceded is a necessary privacy and freedom nightmare. But it'll be a cold day in Hell before I do my actual development in their garden.
So to this end I've been trying to connive a way to develop an app for iOS without actually having to use a mac for anything I consider actual development. I'm ideologically opposed to buying a mac just to be able to sign, but not practically or monetarily.
Right now, it's looking something like this:
1. Develop my app in Godot (my app is technically a game but I think you could develop pretty much any non-game app in godot afaict)
2. Buy a mac mini. Shove it in my rack with a dummy monitor hooked up. Use VNC to remote control GUI for when I need to poke UI things. Configure SSH.
3. Develop my app in godot like normal, using their built-in runner for normal dev-test loop.
4. Set up a script to pull my app on the mac mini, build it, sign it, and deploy it to either prod or my test device.
As the author mentions, test apps expire periodically. I wonder if I can automate re-installing it every week/year.
I haven't tested any of this out yet, I'm mainly still making sure I like Godot enough to use it for my game. Then I'll expand out, testing out the mac stuff.
And all of this is hedged that if I for some reason switch away from iOS, I just export my game to android and continue with my day. (or at least something close to that, instead of having to rewrite from scratch).
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#80Something smells here. Does he or does he not want to publish to the App Store? And it is kind of weird. Apple only wants signed applications on their devices. They grant a one-week exception for developers because they expect that application to be in constant flux. You should never need more than a week. But you need to sign your code to run it on a more permanent basis. I look at it more like buying an SSL certifi…
It would be nice if I could compile my own little demos onto my own iOS device for showing them to others, and not have to care about doing this every single week. There's simply no justification for such bullshit.