[HN Gopher] The Decline of Mobile Development
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       The Decline of Mobile Development
        
       Author : karlicoss
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2024-07-25 21:40 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.donnfelker.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.donnfelker.com)
        
       | unicornhose wrote:
       | How much does developer happiness really play a role?
       | 
       | Probably significant in terms of speed of development, time spent
       | maintenance projects, etc
        
       | TheNewAndy wrote:
       | I 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)
        
       | SimianLogic wrote:
       | I 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).
        
       | cheema33 wrote:
       | I 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.
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-25 23:06 UTC)