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I recently wrote about how Apple now has the most hostile developer ecosystem of any major platform: https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/apple-development/ http

I recently wrote about how Apple now has the most hostile developer ecosystem of any major platform: https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/apple-development/ https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/apple-development/ Good to see VCs and Y Combinator now supporting and pushing for change.

dlcarrier 1y ago
A family member of mine has an Apple phone, and the lack of availability of not just open source software but even freeware or freemium software astounds me. They make it so difficult to distribute anything, that it's not worth it unless you are getting significant revenue. This means that often the only option is something extremely scammy that charges monthly for the most trivial capabilities. Of course, Apple gets a 30% cut in any scams, so they have absolutely no incentive to do anything about it, and really their policies are what create it, in the first place.
- furyofantares 1y ago
  Is that an Apple thing? People trying to monetize anything they make seem to vastly outnumber those of us who just want to make stuff for other people to enjoy. When I turn off an adblocker I'm shocked how many hobby projects spam ads at their users to try to make a few pennies. It feels like a social issue.
  - nickthegreek 1y ago
    Giving away free software on the appstore is gonna cost you $100/yr developer license. Sure, the more apps you make dilutes the cost, but it doesn’t seem like that inviting of a space for maintained free apps.
    - hu3 1y ago
      You'll also need a Mac computer for the happy path so it's more than $100/year.
    - Aloisius 1y ago
      Free for non-profits though. I'm a little surprised there isn't an open source non-profit set up to act as an umbrella for open source iOS app development.
      - oefrha 1y ago
        Then one bad app and the whole account is nuked. Not a great setup unless with explicit blessing from Apple, which they won’t give.
  - esalman 1y ago
    It's a thing that was started by Apple and now everyone is trying to mimic. The other day I transferred pictures from my android phone to my Windows desktop, and some of them required a codec to open. I followed prompts, which landed me on a page in Windows store asking for $0.99 in exchange for the said codec. We had a good Internet in the 90s and 00s. Apple had to ruin that.
- foobarian 1y ago
  You know how we got here? It used to be a free-for-all where grandma could download any software off the Internet on her Windows computer. You know how the rest went. I honestly don't mind it. It's so easy to recommend an iPhone to non-technical users, knowing the app store is still not compromised with low quality/malicious garbage. (Sure it requires a bit of expectation attenuation but the Android app stores are worse yet).
  - johnecheck 1y ago
    This is an argument for gating the free-for-all behind a setting technical users can find, not demanding 30% of revenue if a dev would like access to apple users. The security aspect is real, but this is really about maximizing profits by monopolizing access to anyone with an iPhone.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      When a normal user is highly motivated to install software, there is no such distinction from a "technical user". He wants to install AnimeWallpapersTotallyNotATrojan.app. The operating system disallows it. Then he just does a search for how to install AnimeWallpapersTotallyNotATrojan.app on iOS, and finds 20 tutorials walking him through the steps to ungate the install. You can make the expert mode dialog say "Clicking this button will erase your hard drive, drain your bank account, and give your dog cancer" and people will still click it.
      - foobarian 1y ago
        Grandma: Help me, Joey! After the neighborhood kid helped me install the coupon code app (he said something about expert mode, he is very smart!) my phone runs slow and crashes. :-( Me: ...
        kelnos 1y ago
        I love how the threat of Grandma installing malware on her phone is the new "think of the children!" And I love how the response to shit mobile security is to lock down devices so the people who buy them don't actually own them. Instead of, y'know, actually cleaning up the security posture of these devices.
- 1123581321 1y ago
  How did you conclude the lack of freeware? Both the Apple and Google app stores have a couple million apps, and most of them (about 95% in the App Store’s case) are free.
frollogaston 1y ago
I know this isn't the biggest thing, but it's funny how even simple questions have complicated answers in Swift, ex https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39677330/how-does-string-substring-work-in-swift https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39677330/how-does-string...
- JimDabell 1y ago
  Strings and Unicode are a lot more complicated than they first appear. I like the way this article puts it: > Swift’s string implementation goes to heroic efforts to be as Unicode-correct as possible. […] This is great for correctness, but it comes at a price, mostly in terms of unfamiliarity; if you’re used to manipulating strings with integer indices in other languages, Swift’s design will seem unwieldy at first, leaving you wondering. > It’s not that other languages don’t have Unicode-correct APIs at all — most do. For instance, NSString has the enumerateSubstrings method that can be used to walk through a string by grapheme clusters. But defaults matter; Swift’s priority is to do the correct thing by default. > Strings in Swift are very different than their counterparts in almost all other mainstream programming languages. When you’re used to strings effectively being arrays of code units, it’ll take a while to switch your mindset to Swift’s approach of prioritizing Unicode correctness over simplicity. > Ultimately, we think Swift makes the right choice. Unicode text is much more complicated than what those other languages pretend it is. In the long run, the time savings from avoided bugs you’d otherwise have written will probably outweigh the time it takes to unlearn integer indexing. — https://oleb.net/blog/2017/11/swift-4-strings/ https://oleb.net/blog/2017/11/swift-4-strings/ I’d encourage you to read that entire article before describing strings as simple.
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    I'm well aware of all of this. Swift strings aren't random-access. There are reasons no other language did it Apple's way. Even in the rare situations when you do care about the edge cases with these multi-code point symbols (basically just emojis), Swift strings still make that a nightmare, while in other languages you have easy ways to deal with it. I was on such a project where we cared a lot about these details, and the whole team agreed to throw Swift strings out the window and build our own array-based string replacement where each slot is a symbol. Which is probably what Apple would've done if it weren't for performance overhead. Didn't help that their API was really unstable. Every major Swift version broke our code in so many places that we started adding extra layers just to protect ourselves.

dlcarrier 1y ago

A family member of mine has an Apple phone, and the lack of availability of not just open source software but even freeware or freemium software astounds me. They make it so difficult to distribute anything, that it's not worth it unless you are getting significant revenue. This means that often the only option is something extremely scammy that charges monthly for the most trivial capabilities. Of course, Apple gets a 30% cut in any scams, so they have absolutely no incentive to do anything about it, and really their policies are what create it, in the first place.

furyofantares 1y ago
Is that an Apple thing? People trying to monetize anything they make seem to vastly outnumber those of us who just want to make stuff for other people to enjoy. When I turn off an adblocker I'm shocked how many hobby projects spam ads at their users to try to make a few pennies. It feels like a social issue.
- nickthegreek 1y ago
  Giving away free software on the appstore is gonna cost you $100/yr developer license. Sure, the more apps you make dilutes the cost, but it doesn’t seem like that inviting of a space for maintained free apps.
  - hu3 1y ago
    You'll also need a Mac computer for the happy path so it's more than $100/year.
  - Aloisius 1y ago
    Free for non-profits though. I'm a little surprised there isn't an open source non-profit set up to act as an umbrella for open source iOS app development.
    - oefrha 1y ago
      Then one bad app and the whole account is nuked. Not a great setup unless with explicit blessing from Apple, which they won’t give.
- esalman 1y ago
  It's a thing that was started by Apple and now everyone is trying to mimic. The other day I transferred pictures from my android phone to my Windows desktop, and some of them required a codec to open. I followed prompts, which landed me on a page in Windows store asking for $0.99 in exchange for the said codec. We had a good Internet in the 90s and 00s. Apple had to ruin that.
foobarian 1y ago
You know how we got here? It used to be a free-for-all where grandma could download any software off the Internet on her Windows computer. You know how the rest went. I honestly don't mind it. It's so easy to recommend an iPhone to non-technical users, knowing the app store is still not compromised with low quality/malicious garbage. (Sure it requires a bit of expectation attenuation but the Android app stores are worse yet).
- johnecheck 1y ago
  This is an argument for gating the free-for-all behind a setting technical users can find, not demanding 30% of revenue if a dev would like access to apple users. The security aspect is real, but this is really about maximizing profits by monopolizing access to anyone with an iPhone.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    When a normal user is highly motivated to install software, there is no such distinction from a "technical user". He wants to install AnimeWallpapersTotallyNotATrojan.app. The operating system disallows it. Then he just does a search for how to install AnimeWallpapersTotallyNotATrojan.app on iOS, and finds 20 tutorials walking him through the steps to ungate the install. You can make the expert mode dialog say "Clicking this button will erase your hard drive, drain your bank account, and give your dog cancer" and people will still click it.
    - foobarian 1y ago
      Grandma: Help me, Joey! After the neighborhood kid helped me install the coupon code app (he said something about expert mode, he is very smart!) my phone runs slow and crashes. :-( Me: ...
      - kelnos 1y ago
        I love how the threat of Grandma installing malware on her phone is the new "think of the children!" And I love how the response to shit mobile security is to lock down devices so the people who buy them don't actually own them. Instead of, y'know, actually cleaning up the security posture of these devices.
1123581321 1y ago
How did you conclude the lack of freeware? Both the Apple and Google app stores have a couple million apps, and most of them (about 95% in the App Store’s case) are free.

frollogaston 1y ago

I know this isn't the biggest thing, but it's funny how even simple questions have complicated answers in Swift, ex https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39677330/how-does-string-substring-work-in-swift https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39677330/how-does-string...

JimDabell 1y ago
Strings and Unicode are a lot more complicated than they first appear. I like the way this article puts it: > Swift’s string implementation goes to heroic efforts to be as Unicode-correct as possible. […] This is great for correctness, but it comes at a price, mostly in terms of unfamiliarity; if you’re used to manipulating strings with integer indices in other languages, Swift’s design will seem unwieldy at first, leaving you wondering. > It’s not that other languages don’t have Unicode-correct APIs at all — most do. For instance, NSString has the enumerateSubstrings method that can be used to walk through a string by grapheme clusters. But defaults matter; Swift’s priority is to do the correct thing by default. > Strings in Swift are very different than their counterparts in almost all other mainstream programming languages. When you’re used to strings effectively being arrays of code units, it’ll take a while to switch your mindset to Swift’s approach of prioritizing Unicode correctness over simplicity. > Ultimately, we think Swift makes the right choice. Unicode text is much more complicated than what those other languages pretend it is. In the long run, the time savings from avoided bugs you’d otherwise have written will probably outweigh the time it takes to unlearn integer indexing. — https://oleb.net/blog/2017/11/swift-4-strings/ https://oleb.net/blog/2017/11/swift-4-strings/ I’d encourage you to read that entire article before describing strings as simple.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  I'm well aware of all of this. Swift strings aren't random-access. There are reasons no other language did it Apple's way. Even in the rare situations when you do care about the edge cases with these multi-code point symbols (basically just emojis), Swift strings still make that a nightmare, while in other languages you have easy ways to deal with it. I was on such a project where we cared a lot about these details, and the whole team agreed to throw Swift strings out the window and build our own array-based string replacement where each slot is a symbol. Which is probably what Apple would've done if it weren't for performance overhead. Didn't help that their API was really unstable. Every major Swift version broke our code in so many places that we started adding extra layers just to protect ourselves.