6 ms·

Eh, I get the position here. Different device classes, different markets. I've gotten more than a few apps approved on tv, watch, Mac, iOS, iPad. They are dist

Eh, I get the position here. Different device classes, different markets. I've gotten more than a few apps approved on tv, watch, Mac, iOS, iPad. They are distinctly different. As much as Apple is helping us leverage 'one code base to rule them all' there are so many gotchas and detail required to make great experiences on each.

_the_inflator 3y ago
I agree. Almost anyone of these one size fits all approaches hits a wall sooner or later. Besides very basic applications, I would never make use of frameworks like Flutter or React Native. Same goes for Windows Universal Apps. Great concepts, but not very feasible in reality for slightly complex apps with good UX.
- makestuff 3y ago
  Do you think it is worth the increased time to start out as a native app, or is it still worth rolling your MVP as flutter/reactive native?
  - karmelapple 3y ago
    IMO, roll your MVP with something like React Native, although it all depends how important the user experience is for your end users. Snapchat built with some platform-independent UI toolkit would have felt kind of wrong, and the speed at which I've seen teenagers use it (this was years ago) shows that they would have been frustrated with anything that is slow-ish. I assume similar trends dominate for TikTok and Instagram today. So unless you're attracting a very hip, fast-moving, perhaps even young-person's market, you probably just want an app that basically works and is available to folks on whichever phone they use. React Native, Flutter, Xamarin / .NET MAUI will all get you there.
  - mycall 3y ago
    This depends on the number of platforms you're trying to support. iOS, Android, mobile web, Windows and Linux? Flutter or Expo.
- rnk 3y ago
  I strongly disagree. This is just big companies artificially separating their market segments to argue against too large of a market, and preserve their enormous profits with their huge percentage take. The world would be much better off with multiple stores. It will take legal action by the eu, and it will be hard, these rich companies are very influential. In the us we have too much capture of federal politicans, I only hope the eu can push it.
  - nextos 3y ago
    I hope multiple stores shake a bit the iPad ecosystem. It's a great device and, unlike in mobile, there's no competition. Android tablets are pretty bad. Google dropped the ball, although they seem to be coming back. iPads could be fantastic devices to program in, but they are quite crippled by limitations. Boutique software companies, such as Panic or Omni Group, plus other developers could really extend the ecosystem beyond content consumption and simple document creation tasks.
    - shagie 3y ago
      I believe that Google's ball drop with tablets has to do with that the phone manufacturers that Google partners with for Android are not as interested in tablets (likely using wifi) as they are with phones. Combine that with a lack of standardization and lack of focus for the tablet form factor... and that's what you've got. The iPad, on the other hand was the original "this is what we want". The iPad was the first thing that Apple was trying to make. > Work on the iPad itself actually traces back to 2004, when designer Jonathan Ive and others crafted a new tablet prototype. The product was originally supposed to ship before the iPhone, but the company came to decide the latter was more important, premiering it in 2007 using similar technologies. ( https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/03/a-brief-history-of-the-ipad-apples-once-and-future-tablet https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/03/a-brief-history-o... ) So from the very beginning with the iDevice, the idea of different form factors and sizes was part of how it was written rather than as a phone that grew bigger.
      - derefr 3y ago
- post-it 3y ago
  I'm currently on a four-person team developing/maintaining a popular React Native app. Working with React Native is awful, but having two of us doing Android and two doing iOS would be worse.
eptcyka 3y ago
Yeah, sort of how Microsoft could argue that there exists two separate markets for Windows running on stationary compute devices and Windows for mobile devices. Except this is a sad joke and letting Apple get away with two devices running the same OS would be playing into their hand that they stacked years ago when they split them off. What is up with the enormous amount of people on this site who are inexplicably apologetic to Apple and other FAANG giants.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- beaned 3y ago
  I don't think it's apologetic, it's two different approaches. MS has chosen to try to kill 2 birds with one stone, and Apple has allowed their devices to become more focused. As someone with an iPad, I appreciate Apple not trying to force that iPhone and iPad apps be the same thing. The experience is better.
- Twisell 3y ago
  This is hilarious considering that the classical, yet irrational, fear amongst long time MacOS users is that Apple might be secretly planing an OS convergence. This is usually perceived as doomsday for MacOS and have been feared by some for up to 15 years. You are basically stating the opposite while completely ignoring the actual complexity of such an hypothetical merge for codebases that forked 15 years ago. They share a kernel and some API, but on the UI side recent cross platform framework are more like a proof of concept than a production ready thing.
  - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
    Another thing that's hilarious[1] is in the Epic lawsuit Apple wanted to define the market as big as possible while here they define it as small as possible. [1] not actually hilarious
    - brookst 3y ago
newaccount74 3y ago
The App Stores share user accounts, send a shared invoice at the end of the month, and many of the apps you buy are compatible with multiple platforms (eg. my calendar app comes with an iOS, a watchOS and an iPadOS version). And the store is called just "App Store" on every platform. Claiming that I somehow used 3 different stores to buy a single app is an accounting trick, nothing else.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  But does the iOS app run directly on the iPad? (with a good user experience?) It does not run on watchOS without extra work, correctly? I think their position is kinda defensible here. Yeah maybe with iPad/iOS not so much, but for the other devices, definitely
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    That's a weird argument. Are Aldi supermarkets the same, "no the one on 5th avenue sells vegetables in isle 5 and the one on 3rd they are on isle 2". It's still really the same and particularly they advertise it to be the same. I think there should be a hard rule, that if companies try to sell something as the same to consumers, they immediately loose if they try to argue they are separate things when it comes to regulations.
    - raverbashing 3y ago
      But all Aldi stores sell the same stuff more or less > "no the one on 5th avenue sells vegetables in isle 5 and the one on 3rd they are on isle 2" But that's not what's happening here Is an iPad app the same thing as an iPhone app? Or a watch app? If an iPhone app took minimal work to work on the iPad, then I'd say it's the same thing, sure
      - goosedragons 3y ago
        You can literally run iPhone apps on an iPad and have been able to since day one. You can also run some iPhone/iPad apps on a Mac if the developer allows it. Often the iPhone/iPad apps are the same binary and the same purchase gets you both versions, you just get a different UI depending on the device.

_the_inflator 3y ago

I agree. Almost anyone of these one size fits all approaches hits a wall sooner or later. Besides very basic applications, I would never make use of frameworks like Flutter or React Native. Same goes for Windows Universal Apps. Great concepts, but not very feasible in reality for slightly complex apps with good UX.

makestuff 3y ago
Do you think it is worth the increased time to start out as a native app, or is it still worth rolling your MVP as flutter/reactive native?
- karmelapple 3y ago
  IMO, roll your MVP with something like React Native, although it all depends how important the user experience is for your end users. Snapchat built with some platform-independent UI toolkit would have felt kind of wrong, and the speed at which I've seen teenagers use it (this was years ago) shows that they would have been frustrated with anything that is slow-ish. I assume similar trends dominate for TikTok and Instagram today. So unless you're attracting a very hip, fast-moving, perhaps even young-person's market, you probably just want an app that basically works and is available to folks on whichever phone they use. React Native, Flutter, Xamarin / .NET MAUI will all get you there.
- mycall 3y ago
  This depends on the number of platforms you're trying to support. iOS, Android, mobile web, Windows and Linux? Flutter or Expo.
rnk 3y ago
I strongly disagree. This is just big companies artificially separating their market segments to argue against too large of a market, and preserve their enormous profits with their huge percentage take. The world would be much better off with multiple stores. It will take legal action by the eu, and it will be hard, these rich companies are very influential. In the us we have too much capture of federal politicans, I only hope the eu can push it.
- nextos 3y ago
  I hope multiple stores shake a bit the iPad ecosystem. It's a great device and, unlike in mobile, there's no competition. Android tablets are pretty bad. Google dropped the ball, although they seem to be coming back. iPads could be fantastic devices to program in, but they are quite crippled by limitations. Boutique software companies, such as Panic or Omni Group, plus other developers could really extend the ecosystem beyond content consumption and simple document creation tasks.
  - shagie 3y ago
    I believe that Google's ball drop with tablets has to do with that the phone manufacturers that Google partners with for Android are not as interested in tablets (likely using wifi) as they are with phones. Combine that with a lack of standardization and lack of focus for the tablet form factor... and that's what you've got. The iPad, on the other hand was the original "this is what we want". The iPad was the first thing that Apple was trying to make. > Work on the iPad itself actually traces back to 2004, when designer Jonathan Ive and others crafted a new tablet prototype. The product was originally supposed to ship before the iPhone, but the company came to decide the latter was more important, premiering it in 2007 using similar technologies. ( https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/03/a-brief-history-of-the-ipad-apples-once-and-future-tablet https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/03/a-brief-history-o... ) So from the very beginning with the iDevice, the idea of different form factors and sizes was part of how it was written rather than as a phone that grew bigger.
    - derefr 3y ago
post-it 3y ago
I'm currently on a four-person team developing/maintaining a popular React Native app. Working with React Native is awful, but having two of us doing Android and two doing iOS would be worse.

eptcyka 3y ago

Yeah, sort of how Microsoft could argue that there exists two separate markets for Windows running on stationary compute devices and Windows for mobile devices. Except this is a sad joke and letting Apple get away with two devices running the same OS would be playing into their hand that they stacked years ago when they split them off. What is up with the enormous amount of people on this site who are inexplicably apologetic to Apple and other FAANG giants.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
beaned 3y ago
I don't think it's apologetic, it's two different approaches. MS has chosen to try to kill 2 birds with one stone, and Apple has allowed their devices to become more focused. As someone with an iPad, I appreciate Apple not trying to force that iPhone and iPad apps be the same thing. The experience is better.
Twisell 3y ago
This is hilarious considering that the classical, yet irrational, fear amongst long time MacOS users is that Apple might be secretly planing an OS convergence. This is usually perceived as doomsday for MacOS and have been feared by some for up to 15 years. You are basically stating the opposite while completely ignoring the actual complexity of such an hypothetical merge for codebases that forked 15 years ago. They share a kernel and some API, but on the UI side recent cross platform framework are more like a proof of concept than a production ready thing.
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  Another thing that's hilarious[1] is in the Epic lawsuit Apple wanted to define the market as big as possible while here they define it as small as possible. [1] not actually hilarious
  - brookst 3y ago

newaccount74 3y ago

The App Stores share user accounts, send a shared invoice at the end of the month, and many of the apps you buy are compatible with multiple platforms (eg. my calendar app comes with an iOS, a watchOS and an iPadOS version). And the store is called just "App Store" on every platform. Claiming that I somehow used 3 different stores to buy a single app is an accounting trick, nothing else.

raverbashing 3y ago
But does the iOS app run directly on the iPad? (with a good user experience?) It does not run on watchOS without extra work, correctly? I think their position is kinda defensible here. Yeah maybe with iPad/iOS not so much, but for the other devices, definitely
- cycomanic 3y ago
  That's a weird argument. Are Aldi supermarkets the same, "no the one on 5th avenue sells vegetables in isle 5 and the one on 3rd they are on isle 2". It's still really the same and particularly they advertise it to be the same. I think there should be a hard rule, that if companies try to sell something as the same to consumers, they immediately loose if they try to argue they are separate things when it comes to regulations.
  - raverbashing 3y ago
    But all Aldi stores sell the same stuff more or less > "no the one on 5th avenue sells vegetables in isle 5 and the one on 3rd they are on isle 2" But that's not what's happening here Is an iPad app the same thing as an iPhone app? Or a watch app? If an iPhone app took minimal work to work on the iPad, then I'd say it's the same thing, sure
    - goosedragons 3y ago
      You can literally run iPhone apps on an iPad and have been able to since day one. You can also run some iPhone/iPad apps on a Mac if the developer allows it. Often the iPhone/iPad apps are the same binary and the same purchase gets you both versions, you just get a different UI depending on the device.