Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My first attempt at iOS app development

mgx.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 150 posts

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#71

Post by testing22321 »

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…

> get essentially a new phone for free every 2 years

What you mean to say is the payments for the phone (and the interest for the loan) are just bundled into the monthly plan.

The phone is categorically not free, the payment is just obfuscated to the point that many people don’t understand.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#72

Post by neepi »

dylan604 wrote: post #34
neepi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an idea years ago for an app but came to the same conclusion after some market research and a risk assessment so didn’t bother. I do not regret that decision for a moment. I either have to put enough time into the idea to do it full time or do a shitty job. I can’t win either way without incurring massive risks so I will continue to part time two jobs and invest the earnings from those wisely instead.

Did the idea really require being an app? Could it have been a website/webapp instead?

It could but I respect my potential userbase too much to make it more convenient for me and less convenient for them.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#73

Post by monegator »

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…

yeah, no. I do both (and to the user asking for an opinion wether to switch from embedded to app.. don't!) and i loathe making apps. Sure, the dev tools are supposedly better, more modern.. but they are also an evermoving target. You can never declare a project done.

This is because every new OS update breaks compatibility in subtle ways, or new requirements or behaviour changes remove capabilities you were using before and were essential for your app, or simply: the new major update breaks BLE / Wifi / Background operation and you waste three weeks of your life trying to make it work again, only to find that an OS update restored things. This happens every single year, at least once.

Then you have the store policy (Play store for example) that changes the Target SDK so you MUST recompile the app with the new SDK or else, and the iOS certificate expiring every year so you have to pay for the privilege, then you have to recompile / resign... which means that the project must be compilable at all times, and every year the SDK version changes, the toolchain changes.

In the embedded world i can effectively freeze the development environment, with my ancient GCC version, and it will work forever. Well, that's not really true anymore if you use Zephir, IDF or other framework monters :(

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#74

Post by socalgal2 »

ryandrake wrote: post #49
xnyan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to respond, not because I think you are wrong, but because I have had almost exactly the opposite experience and conclusions from you apparently. > iPhone 7 I still have one as a TV device for me and my son to watch paw patrol. I can only speak for the set of apps I use on it, but as of a few hours ago they all still work (streaming, email, browser. no banking or other apps in that class). I am looking to repla…

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…

I am sympathetic to the argument/feeling that somethings last a long time therefore all things should last a long time.

> What is so special about phones where we allow them to be considered obsolete so quickly?

The phone / computer works exactly as it did when you bought it. What changed is everything around it. That's not true of those other things. New video codex, new services, new sites, new apps. Let's pick ChatGPT. They have app. It's about 2 years old? It strictly costs them more money to cover older hardware than just not supporting it. And, going forward, each year they want to support the newest phones/OS but keeping support for both strictly increases costs. I work on a project that run on nearly every device (Windows/Mac/Linux/iOS/Android) and we are always evaluating which devices we can stop supporting and what new devices we need to add to our testing infra going forward.

Your 18yr old TV is great. It works exactly as it did when you bought it. But for example, let say your TV was 25 years old. It wouldn't have HDMI and there for, without expensive adapters, would not work with an XBox, PS5, Switch (afaik).

The point is, your TV does exactly what it did when you bought it. No changes. For a smartphone to keep working requires constant changes. As a simple example, HEIF images didn't exist before. JPEG's with gain maps didn't exist. Zoom didn't exist. Etc... Your phone needs constant updating. Your TV, A/V receiver, speakers, thermostat do not. It costs money to keep the phone up to date. It costs nothing to keep the TV, A/V receiver, speakers and termostat up to date because there is nothing to update

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#75

Post by rcarmo »

The author hasn’t yet realized that will need to re-download their app to the phone once a week even if they don’t make any changes, which is the main reason I just don’t bother with iOS development.

Not being able to easily maintain apps on hardware I own and having to check in with Apple every few days is insane, and the workarounds are ridiculous and unwieldy. It’s the principle of the thing that gets to me.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#76

Post by fractallyte »

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.

I released my game for free on the App Store. 1.5 years of effort - for free?

Well, it's a calling card that I can flaunt whenever needed. So far, it's helped me land two jobs, and I can confidently leverage it in future too.

I never bothered with rankings or marketing, since I can send out the link to anyone.

So, that's how I get value out of the App Store.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#77

Post by Gisbitus »

This post was a wake up call. Last year I spent a week learning Swift the "old fashioned way" following Apple's tutorials, with not much to show for it when I was done. Even though I use AI for coding daily, since XCode doesn't natively support it, I just decided to not use it.

Seeing how far you went in just a couple of days, I realize now how much I missed out.

Congrats on the app!

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#78

Post by trinix912 »

gyomu wrote: post #20
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…

> the updated tools tend to drop support for older SDKs and devices. You have to kind of go out of your way to keep your app targeting them. You can see how this plays out by getting a second hand iPhone 7 today and go to the AppStore looking for apps. It will be very difficult to find an app that will run on it. This phone is not that old, but the ecosystem abandons you pretty quickly. Well, you're mixing 2 things h…

Apple requires developers to build the apps with at least Xcode 16 targeting the SDK of least iOS 18 to submit new apps / updates to the App Store [1]. This limits how far back you can go with the iOS version, thus dropping older phones.

Yes, you can definitely download older SDKs and target older iOS versions, but you cannot publish those apps on the App Store anymore.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/news/upcoming-requirements/

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#79

Post by trinix912 »

F7F7F7 wrote: post #31
x0x0 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just developing in Apple's crappy ecosystem. eg Apple publishes a new ios rev; debugging on it requires upgrading xcode; and that requires updating your OS. . Good thing you don't mind wasting a full day or more reinstalling every other devtool you may happen to use. Or xcode just doesn't connect to your ios device because reasons. (The reason is apple writes shoddy slapdash software because monopoly.) So now you'…

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…

I can easily do those on my Late 2013 MBP running Catalina, but not iOS development for the App Store, because it has a minimum Xcode version requirement, which in turn requires a newer OS, which requires buying a new Mac.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#80

Post by nikolayasdf123 »

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.

true to that. App Store is flooded with junk. it is hard to get to users even with legit free good app. and marketing is unbelievably expensive. users trust into random apps on App Store is very low too. getting iOS apps to work is very very hard.
Post reply on HN