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bentocorp | 6 months ago

I recently wrote about how Apple now has the most hostile developer ecosystem of any major platform:

https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/apple-development/

Good to see VCs and Y Combinator now supporting and pushing for change.

discuss

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dlcarrier|6 months 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.

foobarian|6 months 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).

1123581321|6 months 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.

furyofantares|6 months 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.

frollogaston|6 months 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...

JimDabell|6 months 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/

I’d encourage you to read that entire article before describing strings as simple.