The Decline of Mobile Development
donnfelker.com
The Decline of Mobile Development
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: The Decline of Mobile Development
#2How much does developer happiness really play a role?
Probably significant in terms of speed of development, time spent maintenance projects, etc
Re: The Decline of Mobile Development
#3I have a pretty simple game on the iOS app store. It is simple enough that I have probably written it about three times. One of the times I tried to do everything the "apple happy path", but the final iteration in the app store completely rejected it (and was written in C, primarily on Linux then ported to iOS as a final step). I know that familiarity plays a huge part, but the experience of just writing it in plain C (and using SDL2 as the platform abstraction) was so much simpler and nicer. The things I had to implement myself instead of "coming for free" (simple physics, app lifecycle stuff etc) were relatively easy to do.
I haven't ported it to android, but I expect it to be simple too.
What I don't understand from the article is the moving goalposts. I had one threat of store removal because of a lack of sales and updates, so I found some stuff I didn't need to ship and removed it and pushed that as an update. Not so. I think it has been in the store 4 years or so now, so this doesn't seem too much work. I guess it could be churn in the areas that I deliberately avoid (e.g. I have no networking and only use the screen and audio out)
Re: The Decline of Mobile Development
#4I was so frustrated by this that I quit Apple altogether. Bought a Windows laptop and an android phone.
WSL was good enough to keep me on Windows, but I am back on iPhone one generation later (android was not my jam).
If I had unlimited time, I’d be tinkering on PWAs (super glad to see rails pushing in that direction).
Re: The Decline of Mobile Development
#5I currently only do web development. I figured if and when I needed to develop a mobile app, it would probably be easiest to use something like React Native. Most of my skills would transfer. And I wouldn't have to deal with majority of the issues the author of the article pointed out. This is likely not an option for games. But for non-games I thought it wouldn't be a massive challenge.
I have never developed a mobile app, so I may be oversimplifying it. Let me know if you have been down this path and agree/disagree.
Re: The Decline of Mobile Development
#6The actual work of mobile development is much easier now than it used to be. The tooling and APIs have evolved and matured and the hardware is so much faster now that you have to spend a lot less time worrying about performance.
The issue with mobile development is that web apps and PWAs can cover a lot of the same ground now and getting people to install new native apps is really hard.
Re: The Decline of Mobile Development
#7I have a pretty simple game on the iOS app store. It is simple enough that I have probably written it about three times. One of the times I tried to do everything the "apple happy path", but the final iteration in the app store completely rejected it (and was written in C, primarily on Linux then ported to iOS as a final step). I know that familiarity plays a huge part, but the experience of just writing it in plain…
There is the target API level policy: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
So if your app was for Android, it would not be installable on new devices.
For iOS I am not sure, I think they are better about leaving old apps alone.
Re: The Decline of Mobile Development
#8The de-facto apps should have been PWA, free, open, accessible, cross platform.
Re: The Decline of Mobile Development
#9How much does developer happiness really play a role? Probably significant in terms of speed of development, time spent maintenance projects, etc
Re: Happiness, my personal experience corroborates, for what it's worth - though inversely to the headline: I love iOS development and can produce reliable, complex UIs with react-ish state-view management in a day, with no 3rd party frameworks; when I do web (UI mostly), I'm miserable and unmotivated.
I've been lucky enough not to run into the things people often complain about with Apple. They don't mysteriously reject my apps; and when they deprecate/require something, the reason makes sense to me and it's easy to accommodate. The differences I experience are rather in the quality of languages and APIs/frameworks.
SwiftUI is the exception. If they deprecate UIKit/autolayout, I'll move to the backend in one weekend.
Re: The Decline of Mobile Development
#10The actual work of mobile development is much easier now than it used to be. The tooling and APIs have evolved and matured and the hardware is so much faster now that you have to spend a lot less time worrying about performance. The issue with mobile development is that web apps and PWAs can cover a lot of the same ground now and getting people to install new native apps is really hard.
The shear number of apps that provided no value to the users, but were merely a data grab has resulted in a serious impediment in my circles.
I think the industry is going to need to find a new source of income or focus on customer value beyond dark patterns on mobile web to change that.
I don't envy mobile developers trying to regain that trust.