5 ms·

I tried it an pretty quickly went back to C#. The Apple-only nature was the major downside to me, so maybe these kinds of changes will help (assuming it sees w

by skrowl 10y ago

I tried it an pretty quickly went back to C#. The Apple-only nature was the major downside to me, so maybe these kinds of changes will help (assuming it sees wide adoption outside of Apple-land). Check your local job boards, but if sell yourself as a Swift dev you're likely to be pigeon-holed into Apple-centric development for the foreseeable future. With Apple sales and market share dropping like a rock in the last 12 months, that might not be the best position to put yourself in long term, career-wise.

beerwulf 10y ago
That's rich coming from a C# developer looking at mobile...
- skrowl 10y ago
  You may have missed the announcement where MS bought out Xamarin and is now giving it away for free. You owe it to yourself to at least give it a try while waiting for actual cross-platform Swift. 90+% of your mobile code can be shared between Android and iOS. Not sure if that's something currently possible with Swift or not, but it was worth keeping C# around for our needs. We're more of a "mobile app is something we also offer" and web is our main presence though, so your mileage may vary (especially if you're mobile-only or mobile-centric).
  - neppo 10y ago
    90%+ shared code is a bold claim, Xamarin.com states 60-90%. In my experience it's closer to 60%.
  - danielrhodes 10y ago
    If there was a common native language between Android/iOS, it would make things easier for sure. But using a third language to solve the existing problem is a rookie error. > 90+% of your mobile code can be shared between Android and iOS This stat depends on how complex your app is, but it usually only applies to gaming. Otherwise it's almost always false. We've already been down this path with the webview craze a few years ago. It was a total nightmare. These newer cross platform frameworks may no longer use webviews, but under the hood things are just as gross. What is true though is that these cross platform frameworks always oversell themselves (with the exception of Unity3D). You end up trading in one problem for another. Among the many problems you will encounter: 1. You miss a lot of newer features in the native platforms. If you want to incorporate those features somehow, the code becomes a conditional mess. 2. Performance is very meh and your hands are mostly tied in optimization. In both Android and iOS, getting performance correct (for example in a table view) requires a lot of tweaking. All of the cross platform frameworks I've used, including React Native, work for basic cases but quickly start dropping frames after that. 3. The majority of a mobile app's code is front-end, and this is not the place where you want to share code. Users on each platform expect different types of interactions and behaviors, not to mention UI aesthetics. 4. These different platforms all have their own characteristics and ways of doing things. These differences are not easily abstracted out. At the point where you are coding around these differences, you might as well have two different code bases. For all the complaining about differences between WebKit/Chrome/IE etc, the behavior is remarkably similar -- mobile platforms are far more diverged. 5. Native third-party libraries are very difficult to use because there is never the same library on the other platform. If there is, say with Facebook, they are not in sync. 6. You end up writing a lot of bridge code between iOS/Android and the framework. It's never pretty and painful to debug. 7. Getting locked into a third-party's framework is a bad place to be later on. Once it's in there, it's never coming out. I could go on... If you absolutely need to go cross platform early on, the best thing you can do for yourself is to lock down a common API/data model as early as possible, and create an aesthetic and design that is simple to implement on both platforms.
    - carlosrg 10y ago
      I can see you have no idea what Xamarin is. With Xamarin, you still use UIKit and the native Android UI, the difference is that you program it in C# and thus the non-UI code can be shared seamlessly. Performance is not "very meh" as the UI is completely native and Xamarin compiles the C# to native code ahead-of-time. It has literally nothing to do with WebViews.
      - matthewmacleod 10y ago
        Hey, you need to read the parent a bit closer. Nobody's saying that Xamarin uses web views, but clearly there's a comparison to be drawn with the craze a few years back for writing mobile apps using web views. This was advocated as being cross-platform, allowing developers to write the same code and run it on multiple platforms. The downsides are the same in some ways, as the parent enumerated. Xamarin's use of native UI is important, but in my experience it's clearly not as seamless as you think; while you access the UI natively, there are intrinsic architectural differences that make it difficult to do so in a high-performance manner without a lot of fairly hacky code.
        carlosrg 10y ago
        Yes, I've read the parent closely. The downsides are still wrong, because they assume that Xamarin is a cross-platform UI toolkit, which is not true. The performance downside is wrong, the newer features downsides is wrong, the front-end code sharing is wrong, the third party libraries is wrong (Xamarin can generate bindings for other frameworks automatically), and the only debatable one is getting locked in a framework.
      - danielrhodes 10y ago
        I haven't used Xamarin, but I've used a number of other frameworks (some webview based, many not). Some had benefits, but many had a lot of drawbacks. I could write a long blog post about what a headache it is to support both platforms, but I don't think any of these frameworks solve the real pain points. It's generally a lot of small things which add up. It also takes a lot of team discipline. Code sharing would be useful, but not massively since the majority of code is in the UI. When the UI is different, a lot of differences start to be needed in the non-UI code as well. Suddenly you are back at square one. Depends on the app though.
  - rdsnsca 10y ago
    And you must of missed when Apple open sourced Swift and released binaries for Ubuntu 15.10 and Ubuntu 14.04.
coldtea 10y ago
>With Apple sales and market share dropping like a rock in the last 12 months, that might not be the best position to put yourself in long term, career-wise. Like "a rock"? Where exactly did you see that? Apple STILL sold 50M frigging iPhones in its "failed" quarter -- and had more profits and revenues that 3 next competitors combined. And that with supply constraints for mobiles, Intel dragging its feet with laptop/desktop CPUs, and an atypical extraordinary last year-over-year quarter to compare to. Here's the relevant chart: http://www.statista.com/statistics/263426/apples-global-revenue-since-1st-quarter-2005/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/263426/apples-global-reve...
danielhooper 10y ago
So abiding by that same logic, would you not agree that developing for Android has been a poor career decision up until say, 12 months ago?
- criley2 10y ago
  What is Google-only about Java code?
zepto 10y ago
Completely false. Neither sales nor market share have been dropping like a rock. Apple had had their first year on year revenue decline in 13 years of continuous growth, but there is no indication that that anything is 'dropping'.
- skrowl 10y ago
  I didn't really want to get into the reasons why. I was just pointing out that investing in an Apple-only tech might be a bad idea because it sure looks to me (and the stock market) that Apple has peaked and is now on the decline. However, since you said my statement was completely false without a source, I felt compelled to show my sources. 51 million iPhones sold compared to 61 million the same quarter last year a DROP of 10 million. iPad an Mac also down double digit percentages, but iPhone is the only thing that really drives Apple. Overall sales DROP from $58B to $50B Source: http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/26/technology/apple-earnings/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/26/technology/apple-earnings/in... iPhone market share also DROPPED from 18.3% to 15.3% in Q1. Source: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS41216716 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS41216716 Sure Apple makes a ton of money and profit still, but you can't really argue that it's not dropping like a roick in the past 12 months. If you put $1,000 into Apple stock a year ago today, you'd have about $700 today. Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AAPL+Interactive#{%22allowChartStacking%22:true} https://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AAPL+Interactive#{%22all... Let me know where I went wrong, but I'm showing double digit sales drops, a large market share drop, and 30% stock value drops in the last 12 months. I'm not sure how my post is "completely false".
  - zepto 10y ago
    There have been 30% stock price drops multiple times during the 13 years of continuous growth. They are clearly not correlated with the actual growth prospects, and if the stock market actually thought that Apple was dropping like a rock as you claim, you would expect to see a far higher discounting. You mention the Mac, which as declined in absolute terms but has continued to grow relative to the declining market. The same is true of the iPad, and there is evidence that it's decline is actually halting - I.e. it is reaching a plateau that is lower than its peak. Whether it will return to growth or not is an open question, but it is clearly not dropping like a rock. So - the stock market story doesn't support your conclusion, nor does the iPad or Mac. That leaves the iPhone. It is possible that the iPhone has reached a peak in terms of revenue. Is it possible that it has reached an all time high in terms of active user base? That seems extremely unlikely. For one thing, the total number of iPhones sold per year is still astronomical, and the devices have a long useful life. Even without a change of strategy, there will still be a huge number of new iPhone customers over the coming years. Secondly there are many possible strategic solutions to a reduction in sales. Apple is selling far more SE devices than they anticipated, suggesting that there is pent-up demand for cheaper iPhones. They can address this segment easily, which will continue to increase the user base of IOS, even if revenue growth stagnates as a result of lower ASPs. This is just one possible strategy adjustment that would address the concern. As I said, there has been a decline, but nothing supports your conclusion that Apple is 'dropping like a rock'. As such this is a bad conclusion on which to make a choice about whether to learn Swift or not.

by skrowl 10y ago

beerwulf 10y ago

That's rich coming from a C# developer looking at mobile...

skrowl 10y ago
You may have missed the announcement where MS bought out Xamarin and is now giving it away for free. You owe it to yourself to at least give it a try while waiting for actual cross-platform Swift. 90+% of your mobile code can be shared between Android and iOS. Not sure if that's something currently possible with Swift or not, but it was worth keeping C# around for our needs. We're more of a "mobile app is something we also offer" and web is our main presence though, so your mileage may vary (especially if you're mobile-only or mobile-centric).
- neppo 10y ago
  90%+ shared code is a bold claim, Xamarin.com states 60-90%. In my experience it's closer to 60%.
- danielrhodes 10y ago
  If there was a common native language between Android/iOS, it would make things easier for sure. But using a third language to solve the existing problem is a rookie error. > 90+% of your mobile code can be shared between Android and iOS This stat depends on how complex your app is, but it usually only applies to gaming. Otherwise it's almost always false. We've already been down this path with the webview craze a few years ago. It was a total nightmare. These newer cross platform frameworks may no longer use webviews, but under the hood things are just as gross. What is true though is that these cross platform frameworks always oversell themselves (with the exception of Unity3D). You end up trading in one problem for another. Among the many problems you will encounter: 1. You miss a lot of newer features in the native platforms. If you want to incorporate those features somehow, the code becomes a conditional mess. 2. Performance is very meh and your hands are mostly tied in optimization. In both Android and iOS, getting performance correct (for example in a table view) requires a lot of tweaking. All of the cross platform frameworks I've used, including React Native, work for basic cases but quickly start dropping frames after that. 3. The majority of a mobile app's code is front-end, and this is not the place where you want to share code. Users on each platform expect different types of interactions and behaviors, not to mention UI aesthetics. 4. These different platforms all have their own characteristics and ways of doing things. These differences are not easily abstracted out. At the point where you are coding around these differences, you might as well have two different code bases. For all the complaining about differences between WebKit/Chrome/IE etc, the behavior is remarkably similar -- mobile platforms are far more diverged. 5. Native third-party libraries are very difficult to use because there is never the same library on the other platform. If there is, say with Facebook, they are not in sync. 6. You end up writing a lot of bridge code between iOS/Android and the framework. It's never pretty and painful to debug. 7. Getting locked into a third-party's framework is a bad place to be later on. Once it's in there, it's never coming out. I could go on... If you absolutely need to go cross platform early on, the best thing you can do for yourself is to lock down a common API/data model as early as possible, and create an aesthetic and design that is simple to implement on both platforms.
  - carlosrg 10y ago
    I can see you have no idea what Xamarin is. With Xamarin, you still use UIKit and the native Android UI, the difference is that you program it in C# and thus the non-UI code can be shared seamlessly. Performance is not "very meh" as the UI is completely native and Xamarin compiles the C# to native code ahead-of-time. It has literally nothing to do with WebViews.
    - matthewmacleod 10y ago
      Hey, you need to read the parent a bit closer. Nobody's saying that Xamarin uses web views, but clearly there's a comparison to be drawn with the craze a few years back for writing mobile apps using web views. This was advocated as being cross-platform, allowing developers to write the same code and run it on multiple platforms. The downsides are the same in some ways, as the parent enumerated. Xamarin's use of native UI is important, but in my experience it's clearly not as seamless as you think; while you access the UI natively, there are intrinsic architectural differences that make it difficult to do so in a high-performance manner without a lot of fairly hacky code.
      - carlosrg 10y ago
        Yes, I've read the parent closely. The downsides are still wrong, because they assume that Xamarin is a cross-platform UI toolkit, which is not true. The performance downside is wrong, the newer features downsides is wrong, the front-end code sharing is wrong, the third party libraries is wrong (Xamarin can generate bindings for other frameworks automatically), and the only debatable one is getting locked in a framework.
    - danielrhodes 10y ago
      I haven't used Xamarin, but I've used a number of other frameworks (some webview based, many not). Some had benefits, but many had a lot of drawbacks. I could write a long blog post about what a headache it is to support both platforms, but I don't think any of these frameworks solve the real pain points. It's generally a lot of small things which add up. It also takes a lot of team discipline. Code sharing would be useful, but not massively since the majority of code is in the UI. When the UI is different, a lot of differences start to be needed in the non-UI code as well. Suddenly you are back at square one. Depends on the app though.
- rdsnsca 10y ago
  And you must of missed when Apple open sourced Swift and released binaries for Ubuntu 15.10 and Ubuntu 14.04.

coldtea 10y ago

>With Apple sales and market share dropping like a rock in the last 12 months, that might not be the best position to put yourself in long term, career-wise. Like "a rock"? Where exactly did you see that? Apple STILL sold 50M frigging iPhones in its "failed" quarter -- and had more profits and revenues that 3 next competitors combined. And that with supply constraints for mobiles, Intel dragging its feet with laptop/desktop CPUs, and an atypical extraordinary last year-over-year quarter to compare to. Here's the relevant chart: http://www.statista.com/statistics/263426/apples-global-revenue-since-1st-quarter-2005/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/263426/apples-global-reve...

danielhooper 10y ago

So abiding by that same logic, would you not agree that developing for Android has been a poor career decision up until say, 12 months ago?

criley2 10y ago
What is Google-only about Java code?

zepto 10y ago

Completely false. Neither sales nor market share have been dropping like a rock. Apple had had their first year on year revenue decline in 13 years of continuous growth, but there is no indication that that anything is 'dropping'.

skrowl 10y ago
I didn't really want to get into the reasons why. I was just pointing out that investing in an Apple-only tech might be a bad idea because it sure looks to me (and the stock market) that Apple has peaked and is now on the decline. However, since you said my statement was completely false without a source, I felt compelled to show my sources. 51 million iPhones sold compared to 61 million the same quarter last year a DROP of 10 million. iPad an Mac also down double digit percentages, but iPhone is the only thing that really drives Apple. Overall sales DROP from $58B to $50B Source: http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/26/technology/apple-earnings/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/26/technology/apple-earnings/in... iPhone market share also DROPPED from 18.3% to 15.3% in Q1. Source: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS41216716 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS41216716 Sure Apple makes a ton of money and profit still, but you can't really argue that it's not dropping like a roick in the past 12 months. If you put $1,000 into Apple stock a year ago today, you'd have about $700 today. Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AAPL+Interactive#{%22allowChartStacking%22:true} https://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AAPL+Interactive#{%22all... Let me know where I went wrong, but I'm showing double digit sales drops, a large market share drop, and 30% stock value drops in the last 12 months. I'm not sure how my post is "completely false".
- zepto 10y ago
  There have been 30% stock price drops multiple times during the 13 years of continuous growth. They are clearly not correlated with the actual growth prospects, and if the stock market actually thought that Apple was dropping like a rock as you claim, you would expect to see a far higher discounting. You mention the Mac, which as declined in absolute terms but has continued to grow relative to the declining market. The same is true of the iPad, and there is evidence that it's decline is actually halting - I.e. it is reaching a plateau that is lower than its peak. Whether it will return to growth or not is an open question, but it is clearly not dropping like a rock. So - the stock market story doesn't support your conclusion, nor does the iPad or Mac. That leaves the iPhone. It is possible that the iPhone has reached a peak in terms of revenue. Is it possible that it has reached an all time high in terms of active user base? That seems extremely unlikely. For one thing, the total number of iPhones sold per year is still astronomical, and the devices have a long useful life. Even without a change of strategy, there will still be a huge number of new iPhone customers over the coming years. Secondly there are many possible strategic solutions to a reduction in sales. Apple is selling far more SE devices than they anticipated, suggesting that there is pent-up demand for cheaper iPhones. They can address this segment easily, which will continue to increase the user base of IOS, even if revenue growth stagnates as a result of lower ASPs. This is just one possible strategy adjustment that would address the concern. As I said, there has been a decline, but nothing supports your conclusion that Apple is 'dropping like a rock'. As such this is a bad conclusion on which to make a choice about whether to learn Swift or not.