Getting out of iOS dev was the best career decision I’ve ever made. My baseline level of stress and frustration has plummeted. I also enjoy using my Samsung Note much more than I ever did any iPhone. It feels like the training wheels have been taken off my phone.
As developers I think we should all do what we can to nurture the open web. It’s the last truly developer friendly platform.
Apple more than anyone is hostile to the web. I still have a recurring iCloud charge I tried to cancel today. But I literally can't as it's not doable on any Apple website. You must use an Apple device or iTunes, neither of which I have.
I agree. There really is nothing more frustrating than spending months working on an app, to get it either rejected on some really minor issue or have to go back and forth with Apple for weeks explaining how things work from a customer and business perspective, constantly on tenterhooks as to whether they will give it the OK nod.
Then you go through the same thing each time you push an update, even for a minor bugfix like amending some foreign language strings, get a different reviewer who hasn't read the case notes (I'm guessing these must exist) and decides to do a deep-dive, or maybe a quick rubberstamp in a matter of hours. It seems like a total lottery from my experience. Maybe they just suddenly added a new clause that requires something being done differently and you aren't up on the latest app store guidelines... It really is so frustrating from a developers mental health perspective.
That's your choice to make, but pretending that developing web apps is all sunshine and lollipops and developing local apps for distribution via an OS vendor's store is fire and brimstone, is not realistic.
I don't know because you started off by making claims about "broken ecosystem".
The App Store may have undesirable qualities for some parties but to claim that it is a "broken ecosystem" just tells me that you're looking to exchange ridiculous hyperbole.
An ecosystem where one reviewer having a bad day can destroy your business meets just any useful definition of broken. And that's not even considering that most of the real money to be made in the app store is fleecing whales with scammy IAP.
It's not really practical to develop apps for iOS without owning an iPhone. Yes, there is a simulator available which you can run on Mac OS in a VM or on a Hackintosh, but you still will need a real device at the end of the day. Certain features like in-app purchases can only be tested on real devices. Furthermore, the App Review Board has the power to reject your app at any time until you provide them with a demonstration video which must be screen recorded on a real physical device, and on this ridiculous and unnecessary hoop to jump through I am speaking from personal experience.
Of course, you could always have a personal Android device and an iPhone solely for development purposes. Apple tries to force you to own a Mac and at least one iOS device (be it iPhone or iPad) to develop apps for the App Store. This is yet another example of their corporate greed. You can develop Android apps on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and there's no need for a physical device.
> It's not really practical to develop apps for iOS without owning an iPhone
This applies to all platforms. I wouldn't want to do business with a developer that doesn't own the device they're developing for, we learned that lesson with Blackberry thank you.
$94 million income. RIM was definitely in decline by then. Both the iOS and Android market were very much mature 7 years after the iPhone was introduced.
"At its peak in September 2013, there were 85 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide."
I never said that they made more money but that the platform was generally better for executives
In 2012 I had a blackberry because clients that had strict security rules (one of them was in the diamonds business) allowed blackberrys but not other smartphones in their offices
As developers I think we should all do what we can to nurture the open web. It’s the last truly developer friendly platform.