It's an unrealistic advice. It's easy to say it when your income is not dependent on these apps. But if you have an app in a marketplace that pays your bills, you can't afford to risk it just because you don't like dev tools...

It's only unrealistic if you aren't willing to adapt to changing market conditions.

This may not be what HN readers want to hear, but users, not developers, have the primary influence over what the market is.

is the market still apps? I don't work on mobile, so I guess I wouldn't know, but my feeling was that people install way fewer apps than they used to

As a mobile developer, I can confirm this. They mostly just install all their social networks and a couple of games, but there's still demand from businesses who want their own apps.

But the market conditions are what's holding us in place.

Unpopular advice here in HN but I honestly advice people to think twice about devoting all their career to technologies made and developed for a single company, there are some big risks there, you never know what Apple will do in the future.

You know Apple will sell a ton of iOS devices to people who have enough money to actually buy apps, which isn't yet true of Android.

I'm not advocating for Android instead, I'm personally not a fan of mobile apps myself.

What I'm saying is you never know what's going to happen on a single heavily controlled platform. In 2 years time, Apple can create a competitor to your app and ban you (happened), create new guidelines so you can't publish your app anymore (happened), change search algorithms and your app drops (happened?), remove you for political disagreements (happened), remove your app because of API deprecations and non-backward compatibility (happened).

Developing on a platform like this in inherently risky, this is probably fine for (most) companies but I would advice developers to avoid devoting all their careers to a single platform and try to diversify a bit in case something happens in the future.

Absolutely this, the most recent example is the Dash fiasco. It turned out OK for the developer, but had he been only on iOS for example, Apple would've ended his source of income. They also add more and more hoops to install non Mac App Store apps with each macOS release, I mean you can no longer install apps from "Anywhere" for example, like you used to.

What I recommend doing is to learn how to develop solid, cross platform APIs and you then have the flexibility to develop as many clients as you like, web, iOS, Android etc. with no single point of failure.

Yup, that. Vote with your keyboards. Apple writes software with the same tools and languages - if they considered this stuff a problem, they'd have fixed it by now. Besides, Apple has mechanisms for feedback, and it's not open letters on GitHub.

> if they considered this stuff a problem, they'd have fixed it by now

It's not good but it's workable. Which Apple accepts as a reason to focus very few resources on dev tools.

Sure. My point is more if it's good enough for Apple at their scale - I mean, Xcode itself is written in Objective-C with Xcode - and they're willing to work around it, then 25 developers (at time of viewing) in a GDocs sheet and a readme file will probably not be the straw that breaks this camel's back.

They don't really, not ones that they won't delete when they want the problem to go away. Using corporate forums for problems is a losing game.

Yes, this letter should probably reference a bug#, but it should not be in the bug itself. And, because it's an open letter, you can go add a bug and make a PR to add it to the letter.

Unfortunately, studies have shown that developing for iOS is much more profitable than developing for Android.

Customers aren't switching to Android. Apple is making almost all the profits in the mobile space and it's developers are making much more than android developers.

Those are the important things, quibbling about some features in the development system is silly, esp. when Apple has poured tons of resources into Swift and done it really well.

I guess you can only do this when you're not dependent on App Store income or you're big. Tencent has a top hit mobile game 皇者荣耀 that is only Android. They can afford due to China market. Both Facebook Messenger & WeChat has no integration to iOS 10 CallKit and Siri.

> Both Facebook Messenger & WeChat has no integration to iOS 10 CallKit and Siri

Messenger has had CallKit integration for quite a while now.