5 ms·

If Apple holds the future of computing, I don't want to be a developer (2010)

54 points by phatak-dev 12y ago

garrettgrimsley 12y ago
Phatak ,what is with the oddly spaced punctuation ?
- phatak-dev 12y ago
  It was one of my first posts. I kept it just to remind myself how I evolved over time.
  - garrettgrimsley 12y ago
    Ah OK. I thought that maybe it was for emphasis since the rest of the English is decent.
AnonNo15 12y ago
Seems like the fear of Apple monoculture is now less of a concern. Android marketshare is larger now then Apple's.
- danieldk 12y ago
  Worldwide, it is not only larger. iOS is now a tiny blip on the radar, compared to Android: http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp (Of course, iOS users may be outspending Android users, etc.)
  - grouperfish 12y ago
    Technically yes, but a lot of Android phones are used in lower-income countries and areas as essentially dumbphones. In the high-end smartphone world, Apple is king.
  - aikah 12y ago
    It doesn't matter if most paying customers are on IOS(which I dont know if it is the case or not,it's just that specific case where global market share is not that relevant). It's a bit like TV,where a tv show can have loads of viewers it doesn't matter,advertisers are interested only in a specific demographic.
austinz 12y ago
This histrionics-filled article is a waste of time. There is far more to software engineering than building mobile apps for either iOS or Android. Even back in 2010 it should have been abundantly clear that mobile was not going to subsume all of software engineering.
coldtea 12y ago
Don't let the door hit you in your way out.
taylorlapeyre 12y ago
I'm sure that your thoughts are interesting, but the lack of grammar, punctuation, and spelling in this article makes it very hard to read.
- exDM69 12y ago
  Did you not notice that this was written by someone not speaking English as their primary language? You will miss a lot of interesting thoughts and ideas if you don't put a bit of effort in trying to understand bad grammar, spelling and foreign accents.
RRRA 12y ago
Android won a lot, but I still don't think that is the openness I am looking for. I need a true community around a project which entails a governance model that actually is more open, be it democratic or meritocratic. I wish the Ubuntu phone and others would catch on faster.
- spacefight 12y ago
  Maybe more like Firefox OS?
  - fidotron 12y ago
    FFOS just encourages more dependence on the cloud, and thus less freedom. Smart devices need to function without connection to the Internet. With the SPE hack there will be increasing noise about this and it's going to give Apple (especially their P2P protocols) a major boost.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      FirefoxOS apps work without Internet connection, they're a package that gets downloaded and installed on the device. See "Installable apps for Firefox OS": https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Build/installable_apps_for_Firefox_OS https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Build/installable_a...
    - badsock 12y ago
      Not sure I agree with your first sentence. It's awfully easy to write a FFOS app that doesn't need an Internet connection to function.
- fatihpense 12y ago
  Also, Google Play is the dominant market for Android. A crucial thing as sharing your app is not that open practically. Sure you can share .apk file, however user also should enable third party apps, passing security warning dialogs... etc.
fidotron 12y ago
The big question needs to be if the platform backer actually has the success of the platform at heart, or if it's just a moat for something else. Apple have the killer advantage that the ongoing success of iOS makes them money directly, thus iOS gets improved in and of itself, and not as a gateway drug to something else. This is why they are proving stubbornly effective at holding on to all the valuable parts of the market.
everyone 12y ago
Mobile is the future.. Meh. Maybe mobile and some shit ecosystem like apple is the future for most people. But most people arent into interesting esoteric things. The pc and internet revolutions were started by small groups of some weird people. The fact that something has been embraced by all the 'norms' usually means that thing is not interesting anymore. For example, the internet used to be a crazy, mysterious, lawless place. Now people do their shopping and banking there and governments and big corps are policing it.
- cinquemb 12y ago
  Having developed on both android and ios, the platforms and the ecosystems leave a lot to be desired, not to mention I feel like I'm running a expensive dumbed down computer in my pocket. If I want download a file on my phone and pipe it into another process, I shouldn't have to download an app that exports everything on the phone for w/e purposes or write one when a simple script would do…
  - jorgecastillo 12y ago
    https://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ https://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ This project hasn't received any updates in a while but so far it has never let me down when I need to do some text processing in my smartphone.
rubbingalcohol 12y ago
Hitching your wagon to one company, whether it's Apple or Google, is a great way to set yourself up for being exploited. And, yeah. That whole "mobile is the future" thing really was so 2010. But mobile only turned out to be _part_ of the future. Everyone was so convinced that tiny plastic devices with no keyboards or computing power would supersede decades of awesomeness that was, and continues to be, the personal computer. "Mobile is the future" didn't pan out, similarly to how today's "enterprise is the future" fad is going to. Developers should be able to see past all this noise, choose a compromise between what they enjoy doing and what makes money, and go do some cool shit.
- phatak-dev 12y ago
  True. I was a fresher passing out of the college and I was not able to cut through the noise as I can do today. Today I work on Big data and other areas which have same momentum and importance.
- ddebernardy 12y ago
  > "Mobile is the future" didn't pan out, Really? Please enlighten me. A recent mobile phone, such as an iPhone, has approximately the same computing power as Deep Blue when measured in Flops, i.e. the same as a super-computer from 15 years ago. It's about as powerful as a PC from a half decade ago. (And it's currently made of aluminum, rather than plastic.) Moreover, Apple's iPhone revenue (just the iPhone) is in the same ballpark as the revenue from everything sold by Microsoft. As for the equipment rate of smart phones, it's steadily growing higher than PC equipment rates. This is particularly true in developing countries and in lower-income segments of the population in developed ones (both groups are Android users for the most part). In both cases, a smartphone is becoming (indeed, has become in the case of the former, since they often skipped the PC step altogether) the main device they use to access the internet. I'm not really seeing how "mobile is the future" didn't pan out... Please, please, enlighten me.
  - foolrush 12y ago
    Agree with original sentiment. Part of the future. More serious work in the arts (imaging, music, architecture, etc.) and sciences is simply a ridiculous suggestion to accomplish on mobile devices. Horsepower, input / output contexts, technological hurdles, and a plethora of other issues make mobile devices simply useless in many of those contexts.
meesterdude 12y ago
I think this article is HN worthy, but the lack of attention to grammar and punctuation is off putting and makes it harder to take this seriously, or link to coworkers. > Mobile is the feature and what a feature it is! But I know you meant "future". And on that, I disagree. it is NOT the future. They aren't going to obsolete PC's. They are a new branch of computing, but PC's are still around and are still the primary content creators, while mobile is primarily geared to consumption. But I'm glad to be a web developer for many of the reasons you identified. i don't need approval, I can use an array of technologies and techniques to deliver the same end product, and collaborate with others via open source projects or in online forums. It's really a great time to be a webdev. My eyes glaze over a bit when people talk iOS or android development. I just don't care. The apps I use the most are the ones that came with my phone, and I only use a handful in addition to that. I have no desire to deal with all the BS that's associated with mobile development or trying to turn a profit on the app store. If I launch my side project and it does well, I'll certainly consider native apps if the demand is there. Otherwise I'm quite happy to develop for the web/mobile-web.
- rebootthesystem 12y ago
  The App Store quickly became a lowest-bidder marketplace with flash-in-the-pan hits here and there and state lottery level probability of success. We jumped in and gave it an honest try in the education category. We soon realized we could make a far greater impact and have massively better control with equivalent web-based products. We can control the design, marketing, business model, interface, analytics and more. Right of the line the value proposition is enhanced by the fact that you can easily differentiate from a sea of crappy free mobile apps and we can communicate directly with our customers with depth and personal engagement. On iOS we had to deal with such nonsense as not being able to disable multitouch gestures frim the app (and only for the app, not globally). The use case being small children or developmentally disabled children, where multitouch gestures can range from a distraction to a usability nightmare. Anyhow, this is jut to echo some of what you said about web dev.
  - meesterdude 12y ago
    A great reflection, and wonderful comment! It echos the echos of others I've talked to who went back to a web focus after mobile development bit them in some way.
zubspace 12y ago
I wonder, what's the next hot thing made by apple? Whats going to be the next iPod/iPhone/iPad...? How long will apple be able to continue without a new, unique and hot-selling thing? I know, that apple has a ton of money, but the apple tv and the iWatch are not something major. And i don't see them on the front of interesting stuff (cloud, containers, virtual reality, social networks). How long can they increase the screen of the iphone each year? how long can they let the app store like it was, well, since forever...?
antranigv 12y ago
Lucky us, now we have Jolla and Sailfish OS (: there are also platforms like mer - nemomobile - maemo - tizen... but the average user likes iPhone/iOS and Android, that is marketing of course... Personally, I'd go with Jolla and Sailfish, as now I have N900 with maemo, and I feel the freedom, even after 5 years, it is still the one of the best phones. Communities are what we need, not capitalism.
tvon 12y ago
FWIW: > Develop in their own hardware and OS Strictly speaking this is still true, though a Hackintosh isn't hard to setup. > Closed minds : iPhone SDK policies states that you cannot share what you are making with your fellow I think something is lost in translation here. You can certainly share code, there is loads of it on github. Perhaps the author is talking about the core iOS source...? > No choice in language and tools This may have been true in 2010 but it is not true now, you can write iOS apps in Ruby, Swift, Objective-C, C# and a few other languages. There is also the excellent App Code IDE if you don't like Xcode. > Big boss has to approve your application in order to reach the users Sort of, ad-hoc distribution is an option (though a pain in the ass). But if you want to write an app for 10 of your friends, or whatever, you can do so without going through the App Store.
- ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
  But its a markedly inferior experience to write iOS apps in those non Apple approved languages. That's like saying Linux is easy to install on your Windows laptop, except the machine doesn't hibernate when you close the lid and the battery life has been halved.
solomone 12y ago
It's what I always find odd about the incredible open armed love of developers for Apple. People used to hate Micro$oft ( $ uses for emphasis. ) I can't imagine what the 90's would look like if MS took 30% of every software sale and decided what software could and could not exist on it's OS. The walled garden's have peeps and minor outrage, but I never understood why it wasn't more of a roar.
- archagon 12y ago
  Apps are the spiritual successor to the single-purpose applets that riddled our pre-smartphone phones and other appliances. They were always proprietary and always relatively simple. It's only recently that we've gotten the ability to perform more complicated tasks with our apps.
Animats 12y ago
"Mobile" has dropped the price for software applications has dropped by about two orders of magnitude. Huge volumes are necessary to make up for that. It's also given the "app store" vendors much more control. Previously, that level of control only appeared if you were developing for game consoles. Sometimes I go over to Hacker Dojo, which is near Google HQ. They have a big, bleak room with overhead industrial mercury-vapor lamps, cheap tables and power outlets, and broken vending machines. People sit there in silence, working on their laptops. They pay about $100 a month for that space. Most think they're writing the next killer app. Most are wrong.
- ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
  Its a good place for personal work or as a co working space, but yeah, a lot of people there are trying to make the Silicon Valley Dream work. They've really bought into the VC hype.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    The picture makes it look like a school gym at a science fair.
- Animats 12y ago
  Appslaves of Silicon Valley - Hacker Dojo, 8 PM on a Friday: http://tinyurl.com/qfl5msh http://tinyurl.com/qfl5msh
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

54 points by phatak-dev 12y ago

garrettgrimsley 12y ago

Phatak ,what is with the oddly spaced punctuation ?

phatak-dev 12y ago
It was one of my first posts. I kept it just to remind myself how I evolved over time.
- garrettgrimsley 12y ago
  Ah OK. I thought that maybe it was for emphasis since the rest of the English is decent.

AnonNo15 12y ago

Seems like the fear of Apple monoculture is now less of a concern. Android marketshare is larger now then Apple's.

danieldk 12y ago
Worldwide, it is not only larger. iOS is now a tiny blip on the radar, compared to Android: http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp (Of course, iOS users may be outspending Android users, etc.)
- grouperfish 12y ago
  Technically yes, but a lot of Android phones are used in lower-income countries and areas as essentially dumbphones. In the high-end smartphone world, Apple is king.
- aikah 12y ago
  It doesn't matter if most paying customers are on IOS(which I dont know if it is the case or not,it's just that specific case where global market share is not that relevant). It's a bit like TV,where a tv show can have loads of viewers it doesn't matter,advertisers are interested only in a specific demographic.

austinz 12y ago

This histrionics-filled article is a waste of time. There is far more to software engineering than building mobile apps for either iOS or Android. Even back in 2010 it should have been abundantly clear that mobile was not going to subsume all of software engineering.

coldtea 12y ago

Don't let the door hit you in your way out.

taylorlapeyre 12y ago

I'm sure that your thoughts are interesting, but the lack of grammar, punctuation, and spelling in this article makes it very hard to read.

exDM69 12y ago
Did you not notice that this was written by someone not speaking English as their primary language? You will miss a lot of interesting thoughts and ideas if you don't put a bit of effort in trying to understand bad grammar, spelling and foreign accents.

RRRA 12y ago

Android won a lot, but I still don't think that is the openness I am looking for. I need a true community around a project which entails a governance model that actually is more open, be it democratic or meritocratic. I wish the Ubuntu phone and others would catch on faster.

spacefight 12y ago
Maybe more like Firefox OS?
- fidotron 12y ago
  FFOS just encourages more dependence on the cloud, and thus less freedom. Smart devices need to function without connection to the Internet. With the SPE hack there will be increasing noise about this and it's going to give Apple (especially their P2P protocols) a major boost.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    FirefoxOS apps work without Internet connection, they're a package that gets downloaded and installed on the device. See "Installable apps for Firefox OS": https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Build/installable_apps_for_Firefox_OS https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Build/installable_a...
  - badsock 12y ago
    Not sure I agree with your first sentence. It's awfully easy to write a FFOS app that doesn't need an Internet connection to function.
fatihpense 12y ago
Also, Google Play is the dominant market for Android. A crucial thing as sharing your app is not that open practically. Sure you can share .apk file, however user also should enable third party apps, passing security warning dialogs... etc.

fidotron 12y ago

The big question needs to be if the platform backer actually has the success of the platform at heart, or if it's just a moat for something else. Apple have the killer advantage that the ongoing success of iOS makes them money directly, thus iOS gets improved in and of itself, and not as a gateway drug to something else. This is why they are proving stubbornly effective at holding on to all the valuable parts of the market.

everyone 12y ago

Mobile is the future.. Meh. Maybe mobile and some shit ecosystem like apple is the future for most people. But most people arent into interesting esoteric things. The pc and internet revolutions were started by small groups of some weird people. The fact that something has been embraced by all the 'norms' usually means that thing is not interesting anymore. For example, the internet used to be a crazy, mysterious, lawless place. Now people do their shopping and banking there and governments and big corps are policing it.

cinquemb 12y ago
Having developed on both android and ios, the platforms and the ecosystems leave a lot to be desired, not to mention I feel like I'm running a expensive dumbed down computer in my pocket. If I want download a file on my phone and pipe it into another process, I shouldn't have to download an app that exports everything on the phone for w/e purposes or write one when a simple script would do…
- jorgecastillo 12y ago
  https://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ https://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ This project hasn't received any updates in a while but so far it has never let me down when I need to do some text processing in my smartphone.

rubbingalcohol 12y ago

Hitching your wagon to one company, whether it's Apple or Google, is a great way to set yourself up for being exploited. And, yeah. That whole "mobile is the future" thing really was so 2010. But mobile only turned out to be _part_ of the future. Everyone was so convinced that tiny plastic devices with no keyboards or computing power would supersede decades of awesomeness that was, and continues to be, the personal computer. "Mobile is the future" didn't pan out, similarly to how today's "enterprise is the future" fad is going to. Developers should be able to see past all this noise, choose a compromise between what they enjoy doing and what makes money, and go do some cool shit.

phatak-dev 12y ago
True. I was a fresher passing out of the college and I was not able to cut through the noise as I can do today. Today I work on Big data and other areas which have same momentum and importance.
ddebernardy 12y ago
> "Mobile is the future" didn't pan out, Really? Please enlighten me. A recent mobile phone, such as an iPhone, has approximately the same computing power as Deep Blue when measured in Flops, i.e. the same as a super-computer from 15 years ago. It's about as powerful as a PC from a half decade ago. (And it's currently made of aluminum, rather than plastic.) Moreover, Apple's iPhone revenue (just the iPhone) is in the same ballpark as the revenue from everything sold by Microsoft. As for the equipment rate of smart phones, it's steadily growing higher than PC equipment rates. This is particularly true in developing countries and in lower-income segments of the population in developed ones (both groups are Android users for the most part). In both cases, a smartphone is becoming (indeed, has become in the case of the former, since they often skipped the PC step altogether) the main device they use to access the internet. I'm not really seeing how "mobile is the future" didn't pan out... Please, please, enlighten me.
- foolrush 12y ago
  Agree with original sentiment. Part of the future. More serious work in the arts (imaging, music, architecture, etc.) and sciences is simply a ridiculous suggestion to accomplish on mobile devices. Horsepower, input / output contexts, technological hurdles, and a plethora of other issues make mobile devices simply useless in many of those contexts.

meesterdude 12y ago

I think this article is HN worthy, but the lack of attention to grammar and punctuation is off putting and makes it harder to take this seriously, or link to coworkers. > Mobile is the feature and what a feature it is! But I know you meant "future". And on that, I disagree. it is NOT the future. They aren't going to obsolete PC's. They are a new branch of computing, but PC's are still around and are still the primary content creators, while mobile is primarily geared to consumption. But I'm glad to be a web developer for many of the reasons you identified. i don't need approval, I can use an array of technologies and techniques to deliver the same end product, and collaborate with others via open source projects or in online forums. It's really a great time to be a webdev. My eyes glaze over a bit when people talk iOS or android development. I just don't care. The apps I use the most are the ones that came with my phone, and I only use a handful in addition to that. I have no desire to deal with all the BS that's associated with mobile development or trying to turn a profit on the app store. If I launch my side project and it does well, I'll certainly consider native apps if the demand is there. Otherwise I'm quite happy to develop for the web/mobile-web.

rebootthesystem 12y ago
The App Store quickly became a lowest-bidder marketplace with flash-in-the-pan hits here and there and state lottery level probability of success. We jumped in and gave it an honest try in the education category. We soon realized we could make a far greater impact and have massively better control with equivalent web-based products. We can control the design, marketing, business model, interface, analytics and more. Right of the line the value proposition is enhanced by the fact that you can easily differentiate from a sea of crappy free mobile apps and we can communicate directly with our customers with depth and personal engagement. On iOS we had to deal with such nonsense as not being able to disable multitouch gestures frim the app (and only for the app, not globally). The use case being small children or developmentally disabled children, where multitouch gestures can range from a distraction to a usability nightmare. Anyhow, this is jut to echo some of what you said about web dev.
- meesterdude 12y ago
  A great reflection, and wonderful comment! It echos the echos of others I've talked to who went back to a web focus after mobile development bit them in some way.

zubspace 12y ago

I wonder, what's the next hot thing made by apple? Whats going to be the next iPod/iPhone/iPad...? How long will apple be able to continue without a new, unique and hot-selling thing? I know, that apple has a ton of money, but the apple tv and the iWatch are not something major. And i don't see them on the front of interesting stuff (cloud, containers, virtual reality, social networks). How long can they increase the screen of the iphone each year? how long can they let the app store like it was, well, since forever...?

antranigv 12y ago

Lucky us, now we have Jolla and Sailfish OS (: there are also platforms like mer - nemomobile - maemo - tizen... but the average user likes iPhone/iOS and Android, that is marketing of course... Personally, I'd go with Jolla and Sailfish, as now I have N900 with maemo, and I feel the freedom, even after 5 years, it is still the one of the best phones. Communities are what we need, not capitalism.

tvon 12y ago

FWIW: > Develop in their own hardware and OS Strictly speaking this is still true, though a Hackintosh isn't hard to setup. > Closed minds : iPhone SDK policies states that you cannot share what you are making with your fellow I think something is lost in translation here. You can certainly share code, there is loads of it on github. Perhaps the author is talking about the core iOS source...? > No choice in language and tools This may have been true in 2010 but it is not true now, you can write iOS apps in Ruby, Swift, Objective-C, C# and a few other languages. There is also the excellent App Code IDE if you don't like Xcode. > Big boss has to approve your application in order to reach the users Sort of, ad-hoc distribution is an option (though a pain in the ass). But if you want to write an app for 10 of your friends, or whatever, you can do so without going through the App Store.

ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
But its a markedly inferior experience to write iOS apps in those non Apple approved languages. That's like saying Linux is easy to install on your Windows laptop, except the machine doesn't hibernate when you close the lid and the battery life has been halved.

solomone 12y ago

It's what I always find odd about the incredible open armed love of developers for Apple. People used to hate Micro$oft ( $ uses for emphasis. ) I can't imagine what the 90's would look like if MS took 30% of every software sale and decided what software could and could not exist on it's OS. The walled garden's have peeps and minor outrage, but I never understood why it wasn't more of a roar.

archagon 12y ago
Apps are the spiritual successor to the single-purpose applets that riddled our pre-smartphone phones and other appliances. They were always proprietary and always relatively simple. It's only recently that we've gotten the ability to perform more complicated tasks with our apps.

Animats 12y ago

"Mobile" has dropped the price for software applications has dropped by about two orders of magnitude. Huge volumes are necessary to make up for that. It's also given the "app store" vendors much more control. Previously, that level of control only appeared if you were developing for game consoles. Sometimes I go over to Hacker Dojo, which is near Google HQ. They have a big, bleak room with overhead industrial mercury-vapor lamps, cheap tables and power outlets, and broken vending machines. People sit there in silence, working on their laptops. They pay about $100 a month for that space. Most think they're writing the next killer app. Most are wrong.

ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
Its a good place for personal work or as a co working space, but yeah, a lot of people there are trying to make the Silicon Valley Dream work. They've really bought into the VC hype.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  The picture makes it look like a school gym at a science fair.
Animats 12y ago
Appslaves of Silicon Valley - Hacker Dojo, 8 PM on a Friday: http://tinyurl.com/qfl5msh http://tinyurl.com/qfl5msh

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]