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

91–100 of 150 posts

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#91

Post by nicoburns »

trinix912 wrote: post #78
gyomu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-r…

The "target SDK" and "minimum SDK" versions can be set separately. It's mostly just a cultural norm in the Apple ecosystem not to support older versions.

This is supported by 1. Apple being relatively good at releasing new versions iOS for older hardware. 2. Users (at least historically) typically being on a ~2 year upgrade cycle. But it's also just the case that the Apple ecosystem (including on macOS) tends not to value backwards compatibility as much as other ecosystems.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#92

Post by dirkc »

monodot wrote: post #83

Fascinated to read this post as I’m doing almost exactly the same thing. Just started using Xcode for the first time, a month ago. I’m not inexperienced with software development, but having to rely mostly on Xcode, Apple’s Developer documentation, information embedded inside WWDC videos, and random forum posts, has been a pretty rough experience. So Claude has been a massive help, to get to a working app quickly. I…

> But the feeling of having your own app, that does something which improves your own life, running on that computer you’ve been carrying in your pocket for years, is extremely rewarding!

It's great that you did this, kudos to you!

At the same time it is a little sad to read a statement like this. It used to be so natural for anyone doing software development to write things that improves their lives running on their own devices. Mobile has made this so much more tedious and then you need to ask for permission if you want to share the app.

Last year I also launched my own app on the app store [1], and briefly reflected on the experience [2].

[1] - https://dingdongdoorbell.com/ [2] - https://www.thebacklog.net/2024/10/22/building-and-releasing...

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#93

Post by Daedren »

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…

>and what developers choose to do.

I disagree. Developers are VERY strongly encouraged by Apple to move their minimum deployment versions up.

New APIs and frameworks are never backported (Swift Concurrency and the COVID tracking API were notable exceptions), and additionally if you dipped your feet into SwiftUI, you've essentially jumped into river rapids. Despite its age at this point, SwiftUI is still very immature, and all the new stuff to fix its holes requires you to jump up versions or fall back to UIKit.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#94

Post by jacobp100 »

I do iOS dev as a side-hobby too (https://jacobdoescode.com/)

People are right it isn’t anywhere near a salary, but I have fun and it has opened job opportunities too

For marketing, I found /r/Apple very receptive to self promotion posts - just make sure you meet the criteria. You can also do a discount period and advertise on /r/AppHookup. Last Black Friday I reduced a $2 to 29c (lowest allowed price) and made just shy of $500, and it boosted my place in the store search

Best of luck!

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#95

Post by owebmaster »

monkeyelite wrote: post #57
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…

Yeah companies who care about this stuff use more mature ecosystems that don’t break api every year.

Wait what? Isn't App Store and Play Store mature ecosystems yet?!

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#96

Post by chii »

socalgal2 wrote: post #74
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…

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 Cha…

But apple explicitly tries to make the environment around the old phone obsolete. They have an incentive to do so.

Your old TV still works even with an adaptor - but there's no such a method for the phone.

I want my phone to work until the hardware fails, not when apple decides they want to push people to buy a new one next quarter.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#97

Post by dcow »

testing22321 wrote: post #71
dcow wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course. Either way you’re getting what you pay for and there’s no way to select “I don’t want a free phone every two years take $15 off my monthly payment please”. It kinda is moving that way now, though. The monthly cost for new hardware is increasingly more optional and better delineated from the phone service. But thats’s new stuff—it will take awhile for things to percolate down.

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#98

Post by chii »

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…

> a bunch of kids learned to program by picking up flash

flash does not have a free version (and i recall a trial version is locked after some days of usage). Guess where they got their flash development/program from?

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#99

Post by bowsamic »

rcarmo wrote: post #75

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.

Yes I don’t mind the App Store fee but the fact I can’t write my own apps for my own phone is insanity. I’d write little apps for myself otherwise. Apple do not care about such things of course. There is no modern HyperCard

Re: My first attempt at iOS app development

#100

Post by w10-1 »

The OP makes a surprising amount of progress.

As other comments note, it's easy to get caught in the weeds of Apple API's and tooling, but AFAICT they generally do as good as possible at the hard problem of compatibility.

The worse problem is that you will get blocked after significant investment.

It's because of Apple's scale and focus. They have millions of developers, but only about a thousand really significant ones driving the latest APIs. To avoid delay and noise, Apple ships and demos the happy path, but fails to warn about all the surrounding pitfalls.

You will hit one, sooner or later.

And any pitfall can be a complete blocker. Unlike web, enterprise, or back-end work, where Java, python, and javascript/typescript libraries and apps are readily available in open-source, bugs present as inscrutable binary blobs that are mostly ignored in the black hole of feedback assistant unless you have some real pull.

It's easy to get started as a solo, but to manage the infinite space of mine fields, you'd need to be in a large organization where people have learned where not to step.

Post reply on HN