8 ms·

I recently decided to publish an app on the App Store just so I could say I accomplished that, and maybe even make a little bit of beer money on the side. Now,

I recently decided to publish an app on the App Store just so I could say I accomplished that, and maybe even make a little bit of beer money on the side. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage. I don’t expect it to be popular. It’s basically a worse version of stuff that is already available. I expected this to be a learning exercise about the process of getting stuff published. Long story short, by the end of the ordeal I was somewhat surprised that anyone independent bothers to publish apps at all. The amount of red tape and nitpicking by the initial app review process is astounding. The business/legal side is also annoying. I might be misremembering or misinterpreting, but it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address. On a website you can just not deal with any of that, and not give Apple $99/year just to keep your app on the store. And we haven’t even gotten into the big royalties you’re paying for App Store purchases. Still, I understand the appeal at some point, just not for an app like OP was forced to use. I certainly wouldn’t want to use something like Immich or Opencloud without an app: these apps need to deeply integrate with my phone to be truly useful.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
Steve16384 4mo ago
Couldn't agree more. I've only published on Google Play, but the number of hoops Google makes you jump through (and keeps making you jump through if you want to keep your app in the store) is a full-time job in itself. New permission requirements, needing to self-decalre that your app does/doesn't do this or that, forcing you to reveal your personal details. The list goes on.
criddell 4mo ago
As someone who uses apps, the hoops you have to jump through are one of the reasons I prefer apps. I'm glad Apple knows who you are and have scrutinized (to some degree) your app. I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.
- benoau 4mo ago
  If they were actually doing a good job this would make sense. Just weeks ago they published a sanctioned Russian bank's app masquerading as a pomedoro timer lmao.
  - essentia0 4mo ago
    And it's a long running practice, they've been at it for years now
  - Schiendelman 4mo ago
    It's not about a "good job" or a "bad job". It's a continuous game of cat and mouse. They're getting better at it just as some of the best funded bad actors are.
    - benoau 4mo ago
      They only have 500 reviewers for the whole App Store, and in fact, they were chastised by the judge in the Epic case for investing very little in the review process six years ago when they also only had 500 reviewers for the whole App Store. This isn't cat and mouse it's theater while they're shielded by section 230 immunity and pocketing enormous profits.
      - Schiendelman 4mo ago
        I'm not sure why it matters that they have 500 reviewers, or had six years ago. Is this a "that number seems small" argument?
        benoau 4mo ago
        It matters in the context of trusting their review process, and certainly "seems small" considering these 500 people oversee 2 million apps while scams and fraud have been prolific for years. I think if they didn't have immunity for all the scams and fraud - and that's being challenged by both the EU regulators and in US courts - they'd probably have a lot more than 500 people. Multiples of it.
groundzeros2015 4mo ago
> I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage It’s working. Your low quality project you weren’t really committed to got filtered.
- r2_pilot 4mo ago
  Aside from the low-effort snark and lack of empathy towards someone's project, this is also how you filter people out of caring about software development at at a young age, and then who's going to keep the computer systems running?
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    Nobody cares about the future, only the present. America forgot how to manufacture things, too, because it was momentarily uneconomical and there was no concern about how to keep the living knowledge going.
    - groundzeros2015 4mo ago
      Having standards is a normal and health professional environment.
  - groundzeros2015 4mo ago
    > this is also how you filter people out of caring about software development at at a young age I got apps on the store before age 18 because I did not believe they were low quality. You also can make software without selling it on a store.
- kibwen 4mo ago
  Both Google's and Apple's app stores are 99% slop by volume, so no, it's not working.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    It's professionally made slop, engineered precisely for maximum value extraction. This guy's app presumably didn't extract value successfully so they don't want it.
al_borland 4mo ago
I periodically try to put something together. I don’t even care about publishing to the app store really, I mostly want to make stuff for myself for macOS. My last attempt, it felt like Apple was no longer interested in the idea of hobbyist developers. The setup just to get the Xcode project setup felt like I needed to have a company and a website. When I selected something about iCloud, because I thought it would be nice if what I made synced to iCloud, I couldn’t even get started without paying $99, so I had to start again and choose a different option without it. And here I thought the $99 was just to publish to the store. Considering how Apple started, this trend feels wrong. When I wanted to make a simple little app a few weeks ago, I ended up using python with webview. It seemed to be one of the few ways to make a little GUI app without boiling the ocean.
- rpdillon 4mo ago
  This is exactly what I've been observing as well. As soon as the App Store became a cash cow, the incentive to support non-commercial development went away. It's now a place constructed by a giant company, for giant companies.
  - jandrese 4mo ago
    I am on a formerly fairly active game app forum elsewhere and it's been dead for years. Indie developers are still probably making some releases, but the combination of Apple being unfriendly to small developers and the economics of the whole thing means it's close to dead. There were tons of experimental little $1 or $2 games in the early days but that seems to be gone. Even worse many of the old ones aren't playable anymore because they never made the transition to 64 bits and OS support for them is gone.
inigyou 4mo ago
It's like a lot of tech trajectories. At first it was fairly easy and people did it, and then both the producer, consumer, and platform evolved off in some direction in an endless feedback cycle, and now a newcomer sees the whole ecosystem is all the way over there in some weird place and doesn't join it because why would you want to be over there, but the existing actors don't see it as strange because they acclimatized to each step along the way. Recently I tried out tiktok for a day and couldn't fathom why I would possibly want to ever use this app. Same with Instagram. But people who followed their trajectory since their earlier days find them normal. Same with Facebook, actually. And Google. On the other side of that equation, my very old YouTube account (which still has a subscription to "YouTube Red" that costs half of what a new subscription to YouTube Premium costs) has been trained to show me certain content, and if I joined with a new account or told someone else to join, I know the homepage would be filled with dumb slop.
- bee_rider 4mo ago
  Facebook only made sense in the context of living on a college campus… I think it doesn’t quite fit this pattern because realistically users were rarely in the “good fit” case for only ~4 years. Then, for each user, it becomes this sort of awkward slowly decaying network as people move on. I agree with everything else you said though.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    Facebook was once a friend network and they added more and more advertising and slop to it. If you were the frog in the pot as it heated, it feels normal to you that your feed is entirely made of spam. If you're still out of the pot now, it seems foolish to jump in, unlike when it was lukewarm.
    - bee_rider 4mo ago
      Maybe. I joined fairly early, still have an account, but did become pretty disengaged from it after graduation. So maybe I didn’t get the proper gradual boiling experience.
    - 4mo ago
hbn 4mo ago
> it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address That's an EU thing. If you don't publish in the EU you don't need to dox yourself.
- Izkata 4mo ago
  It's also in the US. A consumer protection law in California started it around a decade ago and Google applied it to everyone instead of letting us opt out of the state (it's why I let my Android app die), and since then they've also disallowed PO boxes.
  - Grombobulous 4mo ago
    The solution I figured out is to use a forwarding service (e.g., Anytime Mailbox) and then you fill out a form with USPS that basically declares that the business is the using that address as a proxy. Technically the government knows where you are and all that, but the public doesn't easily know where I literally sleep at night. And, really, if someone was to mail me a letter as a customer, I would get it. The forwarding service will scan mail for me or let me pick it up in person for a trivial fee This ends up costing about $10/month depending where you live. Just one more little way that this is a bit of a hassle to just sell a little $5 app as a side gig. And I know this is more of a government regulation thing but I wonder if there's no other way to be compliant with regulations and also save solo/small businesses from this little extra bit of annoyance and cost. Large companies or even relatively small businesses that exist in leased commercial space don't have this problem since their mailing address does not represent a real person's house and has no ties to an individual.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  It's also a very general European mindset thing. They have a very different approach to privacy there - they basically expect everyone's identity to be public, and then protect those identities from abuse, rather than the more US approach of letting you hide your identity so it can't be abused. You see supermarkets with the owner's full name plastered across the storefront underneath the franchise logo. "This store is EDEKA John Smith"
Telaneo 4mo ago
> I might be misremembering or misinterpreting, but it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address. For something free I can get why this would seem unreasonable (modulo scams, for which this is a hoop I would rather have than not), but if money's involved, a consumer should be able to contact a human and be made whole, and having the money be handled by a company (even if that company is just a one-man-show) honestly does not seem unreasonable. If you want to bypass that, you just shouldn't publish to the App Store, which does (or at least is supposed to) have protections suitable for most people. You should still be able to make apps and use them without the App Store involved, then the individual human who wants that app can make decisions based in the specific app in question and the people behind it, but that's a separate conversation.
- zacwest 4mo ago
  Developers cannot issue refunds from the Apple App Store. Contacting the developer by physical mail doesn’t have any effect.
  - Telaneo 4mo ago
    > Developers cannot issue refunds from the Apple App Store. That sounds like something that needs to be fixed. > Contacting the developer by physical mail doesn’t have any effect. Ditto.
    - Grombobulous 4mo ago
      Correct! In my other comment within the greater thread I detail how conceptually the App Store should be shouldering more of the burden considering they sell in a retail-like arrangement.
- Grombobulous 4mo ago
  Yes, you’re right that much of this only comes up when you’re trying to charge money for an app. However, if you’re running your own website you can make those decisions on your own without being forced into most of them. Plenty of very large “reputable” companies obfuscate their physical address and phone number, and don’t even offer an email address for contact. I’d also say that this shouldn’t be as necessary when an app platform is involved. Apple takes 15-30% of the revenue and acts as a full retailer. Why do App Store customers have any need to contact the underlying developers in this scenario? Walmart doesn’t make it easy/possible for me to contact the manufacturer of their t-shirts. There are even other digital software stores like GOG or Steam that really aren’t selling you software that has a guaranteed point of contact. Those platforms just have a half-decent to decent return policy and act as the middleman. But when you’re on iOS you have all the burdens of a third-party supplier without all the benefits.
gadders 4mo ago
The android store is the same. Jump through loads of hoops, fill in tax information for a bunch of countries, dox yourself, etc etc. I'm finding it hard to reconcile a) how difficult the process and b) the load of absolute garbage apps that are out there.
- Rohansi 4mo ago
  You'll still find people praising Apple (maybe even Google) for their review process even though their store is full of garbage. Really justifies their 30% cut.
  - gadders 4mo ago
    Yeah, it's a hard problem at their scale. It's almost you need an App Store++ where someone trusted verifies apps.
wahnfrieden 4mo ago
> it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address. This is an EU requirement, and Apple didn't do this before EU required it. All app marketplaces have the same requirement for EU > On a website you can just not deal with any of that This may violate other EU compliance requirements but sure there's obviously no authority determining your compliance before allowing you to publish on web
kokanee 4mo ago
Back when I used to freelance, somebody once paid me a scant fee to build a pretty cool online tool for music teachers, basically an interactive piano. I checked in on the website a few years afterwards and found that they had wrapped it into an app and been selling it for $5/install ever since I made it for them. Probably my fault for not licensing the software I wrote for them (I was basically a kid at the time) but it still bothers me.
- cgannett 4mo ago
  Time to make a better version for $4 install and a similar name... out of spite.
c0nsumer 4mo ago
I like making maps, and I wanted to do a certain bend on a very specific kind of online map, filling a gap I noticed in existing maps. The idea of an app really appealed to me (at first), but the more I thought about it the more I didn't want to deal with iOS and then Android and then maintaining parallel functionality on the web and all that mess just for a fairly-local hobby project that I make no money off of. So, I just kept it as a website (which is also a PWA) with extensive testing on every platform I can think of. It's just worked out so well and is so, so, so much less complicated. And if I abandon it, should just keep working for years so long as the website stays up (or until browsers start doing something very different JS-wise.) (You can see it at https://trailmaps.app https://trailmaps.app if you're interested.)
- verelo 4mo ago
  So i've done similar things in the past - and my justification for 'app' over website has been offline. Does the PWA state of things resolve that in the modern days? If it did, yeah I'd agree, no need for an app at all. In my case the app was being used in rural Ontario. I cant even make a phone call here without wifi.
  - c0nsumer 4mo ago
    This actually handles that, at least for my use case. Specifically, on first load of the page (in a browser, or the stripped-down browser that runs the app-like PWA install) a service worker gets installed, that caches the entire site/app/map locally, and runs it from there. Then every 24 hours, or on new page load, it checks the live site for content changes and pulls down the changes if they exist. If there's no network connectivity it just silently runs the map. Each map is 16MB - 20MB in total, so this is all nice and simple to do. Even on a slow 3G connection it's only a minute or so for a full map update to stream in. The whole point of this system was to take a snapshot of data (mostly OSM), add on some local things that can't really be represented in OSM (like WHICH parking lots are most appropriate, stylistic overrides, system descriptions, etc) and display them. Because of issues I've had in the past with well-meaning-but-misguided OSM mappers wrongly editing trail systems I did not want anything that pulls live. And then by having purely static content the hosting is very cheap and easy, there's no security concerns around... well... anything dynamic on the site. And each map is portable were I to want someone else to host them. And literally in a couple of years if I haven't updated the map it won't change yet still will work, and that's fine and accepted for this use. Sort-of like a mobile version of a traditional print map. Kinda like the print workflow of editing/design/etc and then rendering the PDF, but web. This all aligned nicely for me to have a tool that works this way, with each map generated by a tool. (Sort-of disclaimer: It was also a big personal project in learning to work with AI stuff for development. I knew and understood the inputs and outputs, was able to design the UI, handled/managed all the testing... But I didn't have to worry about the actual-code part. I was able to make pretty quick progress and iterate nicely on my ideas.) Happy to talk, etc, more about it too. Either here, or contact info is on the site.
dd8601fn 4mo ago
I did something similar. I wanted to tell myself I had done it, but also it was an inexpensive learning experience and I got an app that I wanted out of it. And I think I got that. I like how mine does what it does (maps breaker panels and records home maintenance and stuff) without someone trying to sell me something. But once I realized what advertising costs everywhere, I pretty quickly realized that app exists essentially just for me. And that’s ok, but it’s a stark contrast from the goldrush years of (even garbage) apps making money.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
svachalek 4mo ago
It's about tracking. Most of the money in the industry comes from knowing precisely when you were on the toilet every day and they can't get that from a web app.
paulddraper 4mo ago
> my actual app is pretty much garbage The app review process is explicitly meant to keep out garbage apps. Sounds like it worked as designed?
- autoexec 4mo ago
  > Sounds like it worked as designed? It didn't, because his admittedly garbage app ended up on the app store, because the app review process doesn't actually keep out garbage apps.
  - paulddraper 3mo ago
    Hm, I see your point, about it needing to be more restrictive.
busymom0 4mo ago
I have been publishing apps as a solo developer for a long time and every app I've published has been something I wanted for myself. For example, I spent so much time here on hacker news. So I wanted an app for a better experience. So I built my app almost a decade ago. Then people requested me build one for Android, so I built that too. I've similarly built various macOS apps which I use daily for myself. If anyone is interested, it's called HACK and I am writing this comment from it. Link is in my bio.
dirkc 4mo ago
I did something similar, for similar reasons. In the end I just did whatever to get it published. If you show up at my door, I'll pour you your choice of beer/coffee. But I agree, it feels very invasive! On the web side of things DNS only recently started being more private - 10+ years ago it was common to have your phone + postal address on whois. Two take aways from my experience 1. I'm happy that I invested more in the web 2. The app store gives you distribution - I have a few websites with almost 0 traffic, but the app I wrote gets a handful of downloads a week almost 2 years later?
- encom 4mo ago
  >10+ years ago it was common to have your phone + postal address on whois This is the .dk TLD today, and it's the reason I've never posted my website here. The .dk registry (punktum.dk) is run by absolute clowns. On the other hand, the first thing I do before spending money on a danish website is "whois eksempel.dk", and if it doesn't return a danish address (and wasn't created recently), I'm out.
bendangelo 4mo ago
Yeah it’s all a pain. One thing that helped was using hotwire native. It is basically a web view but it bridges the mobile app with your website and wraps it into a mobile app. This is the only way I can make apps now. Flutter never worked well for me.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

Steve16384 4mo ago

Couldn't agree more. I've only published on Google Play, but the number of hoops Google makes you jump through (and keeps making you jump through if you want to keep your app in the store) is a full-time job in itself. New permission requirements, needing to self-decalre that your app does/doesn't do this or that, forcing you to reveal your personal details. The list goes on.

criddell 4mo ago

As someone who uses apps, the hoops you have to jump through are one of the reasons I prefer apps. I'm glad Apple knows who you are and have scrutinized (to some degree) your app. I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.

benoau 4mo ago
If they were actually doing a good job this would make sense. Just weeks ago they published a sanctioned Russian bank's app masquerading as a pomedoro timer lmao.
- essentia0 4mo ago
  And it's a long running practice, they've been at it for years now
- Schiendelman 4mo ago
  It's not about a "good job" or a "bad job". It's a continuous game of cat and mouse. They're getting better at it just as some of the best funded bad actors are.
  - benoau 4mo ago
    They only have 500 reviewers for the whole App Store, and in fact, they were chastised by the judge in the Epic case for investing very little in the review process six years ago when they also only had 500 reviewers for the whole App Store. This isn't cat and mouse it's theater while they're shielded by section 230 immunity and pocketing enormous profits.
    - Schiendelman 4mo ago
      I'm not sure why it matters that they have 500 reviewers, or had six years ago. Is this a "that number seems small" argument?
      - benoau 4mo ago
        It matters in the context of trusting their review process, and certainly "seems small" considering these 500 people oversee 2 million apps while scams and fraud have been prolific for years. I think if they didn't have immunity for all the scams and fraud - and that's being challenged by both the EU regulators and in US courts - they'd probably have a lot more than 500 people. Multiples of it.

groundzeros2015 4mo ago

> I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage It’s working. Your low quality project you weren’t really committed to got filtered.

r2_pilot 4mo ago
Aside from the low-effort snark and lack of empathy towards someone's project, this is also how you filter people out of caring about software development at at a young age, and then who's going to keep the computer systems running?
- inigyou 4mo ago
  Nobody cares about the future, only the present. America forgot how to manufacture things, too, because it was momentarily uneconomical and there was no concern about how to keep the living knowledge going.
  - groundzeros2015 4mo ago
    Having standards is a normal and health professional environment.
- groundzeros2015 4mo ago
  > this is also how you filter people out of caring about software development at at a young age I got apps on the store before age 18 because I did not believe they were low quality. You also can make software without selling it on a store.
kibwen 4mo ago
Both Google's and Apple's app stores are 99% slop by volume, so no, it's not working.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  It's professionally made slop, engineered precisely for maximum value extraction. This guy's app presumably didn't extract value successfully so they don't want it.

al_borland 4mo ago

I periodically try to put something together. I don’t even care about publishing to the app store really, I mostly want to make stuff for myself for macOS. My last attempt, it felt like Apple was no longer interested in the idea of hobbyist developers. The setup just to get the Xcode project setup felt like I needed to have a company and a website. When I selected something about iCloud, because I thought it would be nice if what I made synced to iCloud, I couldn’t even get started without paying $99, so I had to start again and choose a different option without it. And here I thought the $99 was just to publish to the store. Considering how Apple started, this trend feels wrong. When I wanted to make a simple little app a few weeks ago, I ended up using python with webview. It seemed to be one of the few ways to make a little GUI app without boiling the ocean.

rpdillon 4mo ago
This is exactly what I've been observing as well. As soon as the App Store became a cash cow, the incentive to support non-commercial development went away. It's now a place constructed by a giant company, for giant companies.
- jandrese 4mo ago
  I am on a formerly fairly active game app forum elsewhere and it's been dead for years. Indie developers are still probably making some releases, but the combination of Apple being unfriendly to small developers and the economics of the whole thing means it's close to dead. There were tons of experimental little $1 or $2 games in the early days but that seems to be gone. Even worse many of the old ones aren't playable anymore because they never made the transition to 64 bits and OS support for them is gone.

inigyou 4mo ago

It's like a lot of tech trajectories. At first it was fairly easy and people did it, and then both the producer, consumer, and platform evolved off in some direction in an endless feedback cycle, and now a newcomer sees the whole ecosystem is all the way over there in some weird place and doesn't join it because why would you want to be over there, but the existing actors don't see it as strange because they acclimatized to each step along the way. Recently I tried out tiktok for a day and couldn't fathom why I would possibly want to ever use this app. Same with Instagram. But people who followed their trajectory since their earlier days find them normal. Same with Facebook, actually. And Google. On the other side of that equation, my very old YouTube account (which still has a subscription to "YouTube Red" that costs half of what a new subscription to YouTube Premium costs) has been trained to show me certain content, and if I joined with a new account or told someone else to join, I know the homepage would be filled with dumb slop.

bee_rider 4mo ago
Facebook only made sense in the context of living on a college campus… I think it doesn’t quite fit this pattern because realistically users were rarely in the “good fit” case for only ~4 years. Then, for each user, it becomes this sort of awkward slowly decaying network as people move on. I agree with everything else you said though.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  Facebook was once a friend network and they added more and more advertising and slop to it. If you were the frog in the pot as it heated, it feels normal to you that your feed is entirely made of spam. If you're still out of the pot now, it seems foolish to jump in, unlike when it was lukewarm.
  - bee_rider 4mo ago
    Maybe. I joined fairly early, still have an account, but did become pretty disengaged from it after graduation. So maybe I didn’t get the proper gradual boiling experience.
  - 4mo ago

hbn 4mo ago

Izkata 4mo ago
It's also in the US. A consumer protection law in California started it around a decade ago and Google applied it to everyone instead of letting us opt out of the state (it's why I let my Android app die), and since then they've also disallowed PO boxes.
- Grombobulous 4mo ago
  The solution I figured out is to use a forwarding service (e.g., Anytime Mailbox) and then you fill out a form with USPS that basically declares that the business is the using that address as a proxy. Technically the government knows where you are and all that, but the public doesn't easily know where I literally sleep at night. And, really, if someone was to mail me a letter as a customer, I would get it. The forwarding service will scan mail for me or let me pick it up in person for a trivial fee This ends up costing about $10/month depending where you live. Just one more little way that this is a bit of a hassle to just sell a little $5 app as a side gig. And I know this is more of a government regulation thing but I wonder if there's no other way to be compliant with regulations and also save solo/small businesses from this little extra bit of annoyance and cost. Large companies or even relatively small businesses that exist in leased commercial space don't have this problem since their mailing address does not represent a real person's house and has no ties to an individual.
inigyou 4mo ago
It's also a very general European mindset thing. They have a very different approach to privacy there - they basically expect everyone's identity to be public, and then protect those identities from abuse, rather than the more US approach of letting you hide your identity so it can't be abused. You see supermarkets with the owner's full name plastered across the storefront underneath the franchise logo. "This store is EDEKA John Smith"

Telaneo 4mo ago

> I might be misremembering or misinterpreting, but it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address. For something free I can get why this would seem unreasonable (modulo scams, for which this is a hoop I would rather have than not), but if money's involved, a consumer should be able to contact a human and be made whole, and having the money be handled by a company (even if that company is just a one-man-show) honestly does not seem unreasonable. If you want to bypass that, you just shouldn't publish to the App Store, which does (or at least is supposed to) have protections suitable for most people. You should still be able to make apps and use them without the App Store involved, then the individual human who wants that app can make decisions based in the specific app in question and the people behind it, but that's a separate conversation.

zacwest 4mo ago
Developers cannot issue refunds from the Apple App Store. Contacting the developer by physical mail doesn’t have any effect.
- Telaneo 4mo ago
  > Developers cannot issue refunds from the Apple App Store. That sounds like something that needs to be fixed. > Contacting the developer by physical mail doesn’t have any effect. Ditto.
  - Grombobulous 4mo ago
    Correct! In my other comment within the greater thread I detail how conceptually the App Store should be shouldering more of the burden considering they sell in a retail-like arrangement.
Grombobulous 4mo ago
Yes, you’re right that much of this only comes up when you’re trying to charge money for an app. However, if you’re running your own website you can make those decisions on your own without being forced into most of them. Plenty of very large “reputable” companies obfuscate their physical address and phone number, and don’t even offer an email address for contact. I’d also say that this shouldn’t be as necessary when an app platform is involved. Apple takes 15-30% of the revenue and acts as a full retailer. Why do App Store customers have any need to contact the underlying developers in this scenario? Walmart doesn’t make it easy/possible for me to contact the manufacturer of their t-shirts. There are even other digital software stores like GOG or Steam that really aren’t selling you software that has a guaranteed point of contact. Those platforms just have a half-decent to decent return policy and act as the middleman. But when you’re on iOS you have all the burdens of a third-party supplier without all the benefits.

gadders 4mo ago

The android store is the same. Jump through loads of hoops, fill in tax information for a bunch of countries, dox yourself, etc etc. I'm finding it hard to reconcile a) how difficult the process and b) the load of absolute garbage apps that are out there.

Rohansi 4mo ago
You'll still find people praising Apple (maybe even Google) for their review process even though their store is full of garbage. Really justifies their 30% cut.
- gadders 4mo ago
  Yeah, it's a hard problem at their scale. It's almost you need an App Store++ where someone trusted verifies apps.

wahnfrieden 4mo ago

> it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address. This is an EU requirement, and Apple didn't do this before EU required it. All app marketplaces have the same requirement for EU > On a website you can just not deal with any of that This may violate other EU compliance requirements but sure there's obviously no authority determining your compliance before allowing you to publish on web

kokanee 4mo ago

Back when I used to freelance, somebody once paid me a scant fee to build a pretty cool online tool for music teachers, basically an interactive piano. I checked in on the website a few years afterwards and found that they had wrapped it into an app and been selling it for $5/install ever since I made it for them. Probably my fault for not licensing the software I wrote for them (I was basically a kid at the time) but it still bothers me.

cgannett 4mo ago
Time to make a better version for $4 install and a similar name... out of spite.

c0nsumer 4mo ago

I like making maps, and I wanted to do a certain bend on a very specific kind of online map, filling a gap I noticed in existing maps. The idea of an app really appealed to me (at first), but the more I thought about it the more I didn't want to deal with iOS and then Android and then maintaining parallel functionality on the web and all that mess just for a fairly-local hobby project that I make no money off of. So, I just kept it as a website (which is also a PWA) with extensive testing on every platform I can think of. It's just worked out so well and is so, so, so much less complicated. And if I abandon it, should just keep working for years so long as the website stays up (or until browsers start doing something very different JS-wise.) (You can see it at https://trailmaps.app https://trailmaps.app if you're interested.)

verelo 4mo ago
So i've done similar things in the past - and my justification for 'app' over website has been offline. Does the PWA state of things resolve that in the modern days? If it did, yeah I'd agree, no need for an app at all. In my case the app was being used in rural Ontario. I cant even make a phone call here without wifi.
- c0nsumer 4mo ago
  This actually handles that, at least for my use case. Specifically, on first load of the page (in a browser, or the stripped-down browser that runs the app-like PWA install) a service worker gets installed, that caches the entire site/app/map locally, and runs it from there. Then every 24 hours, or on new page load, it checks the live site for content changes and pulls down the changes if they exist. If there's no network connectivity it just silently runs the map. Each map is 16MB - 20MB in total, so this is all nice and simple to do. Even on a slow 3G connection it's only a minute or so for a full map update to stream in. The whole point of this system was to take a snapshot of data (mostly OSM), add on some local things that can't really be represented in OSM (like WHICH parking lots are most appropriate, stylistic overrides, system descriptions, etc) and display them. Because of issues I've had in the past with well-meaning-but-misguided OSM mappers wrongly editing trail systems I did not want anything that pulls live. And then by having purely static content the hosting is very cheap and easy, there's no security concerns around... well... anything dynamic on the site. And each map is portable were I to want someone else to host them. And literally in a couple of years if I haven't updated the map it won't change yet still will work, and that's fine and accepted for this use. Sort-of like a mobile version of a traditional print map. Kinda like the print workflow of editing/design/etc and then rendering the PDF, but web. This all aligned nicely for me to have a tool that works this way, with each map generated by a tool. (Sort-of disclaimer: It was also a big personal project in learning to work with AI stuff for development. I knew and understood the inputs and outputs, was able to design the UI, handled/managed all the testing... But I didn't have to worry about the actual-code part. I was able to make pretty quick progress and iterate nicely on my ideas.) Happy to talk, etc, more about it too. Either here, or contact info is on the site.

dd8601fn 4mo ago

I did something similar. I wanted to tell myself I had done it, but also it was an inexpensive learning experience and I got an app that I wanted out of it. And I think I got that. I like how mine does what it does (maps breaker panels and records home maintenance and stuff) without someone trying to sell me something. But once I realized what advertising costs everywhere, I pretty quickly realized that app exists essentially just for me. And that’s ok, but it’s a stark contrast from the goldrush years of (even garbage) apps making money.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

svachalek 4mo ago

It's about tracking. Most of the money in the industry comes from knowing precisely when you were on the toilet every day and they can't get that from a web app.

paulddraper 4mo ago

> my actual app is pretty much garbage The app review process is explicitly meant to keep out garbage apps. Sounds like it worked as designed?

autoexec 4mo ago
> Sounds like it worked as designed? It didn't, because his admittedly garbage app ended up on the app store, because the app review process doesn't actually keep out garbage apps.
- paulddraper 3mo ago
  Hm, I see your point, about it needing to be more restrictive.

busymom0 4mo ago

I have been publishing apps as a solo developer for a long time and every app I've published has been something I wanted for myself. For example, I spent so much time here on hacker news. So I wanted an app for a better experience. So I built my app almost a decade ago. Then people requested me build one for Android, so I built that too. I've similarly built various macOS apps which I use daily for myself. If anyone is interested, it's called HACK and I am writing this comment from it. Link is in my bio.

dirkc 4mo ago

I did something similar, for similar reasons. In the end I just did whatever to get it published. If you show up at my door, I'll pour you your choice of beer/coffee. But I agree, it feels very invasive! On the web side of things DNS only recently started being more private - 10+ years ago it was common to have your phone + postal address on whois. Two take aways from my experience 1. I'm happy that I invested more in the web 2. The app store gives you distribution - I have a few websites with almost 0 traffic, but the app I wrote gets a handful of downloads a week almost 2 years later?

encom 4mo ago
>10+ years ago it was common to have your phone + postal address on whois This is the .dk TLD today, and it's the reason I've never posted my website here. The .dk registry (punktum.dk) is run by absolute clowns. On the other hand, the first thing I do before spending money on a danish website is "whois eksempel.dk", and if it doesn't return a danish address (and wasn't created recently), I'm out.

bendangelo 4mo ago

Yeah it’s all a pain. One thing that helped was using hotwire native. It is basically a web view but it bridges the mobile app with your website and wraps it into a mobile app. This is the only way I can make apps now. Flutter never worked well for me.