Ok, but he also mentioned it took him 6 months to make it, so those skills might not be quite up to date...

Personal attacks are a bad look.

This sort of nitpicky comment is exactly why people stress about putting stuff on the Internet.

It's not an attack, it's just a statement. If one purpose is to appear employable, he should not mention that it took him 6 months to write it because that is just too long.

It's one thing to "write an app" and something else completely to bring it to a standard consumable by lay users.

Having published and maintained an app that is in active use by even a couple hundred users gives you an advantage in employability and quite a big one at that.

Your post makes it seem like you have neither published an app yourself nor hired single devs who have, and it's easy to not appreciate.

I've been a professional iOS developer for a decade. 6 months is way too long for that app. My very first app took 10 weeks, including learning to program, and it was more complex than MaskerAid. And better looking, was even featured in the app store in a few countries.

Well then - congratulations! You are an outlier.

From my experience significantly less than 5% of iOS/Android devs have created a somewhat popular app, and maintained it for some time.

Oh, it wasn't popular, only got a few thousand downloads, I was hired by a social media app right when I finished my own app so I never had time to market it. Not that I would know how to do that. It was just an experiment.

I just took a look at your website, and your profile there, such as it is, it says you “built product at Apple”. Not sure what that means, though it implies you worked at apple, meanwhile your LinkedIn profile only lists your finance and environmental industry positions, so not really sure what to make of that. Regardless you appear to be a 0.01%er congrats, but no need to talk down to others.

Unless you want to hire me or invest, you don't need to make anything of that. Just trust me, 6 months is way too long. Or listen to the cohosts' reaction when he mentions it.

Not talking down, just telling it like it is. There is no rule on HN that you may only post laudatory comments. That would make the whole site useless. My point is that if he wants to be employable, he either needs to become more efficient, or at least hide how slow he is.

I'm sure he's raking in cash from the podcast so he shouldn't really worry about it at all in my opinion.

It was a passion project. I’m sure he wasn’t expecting to make even as much money as he makes from being a cohost on a podcast that charges $5500/ad read * 3 ad reads.

I wouldn’t be in a hurry to get it done either.

That's not the impression I got. To me it sounded like he was hoping to earn money from it. He said the same thing about his youtube channel, which also seemed very unlikely.

He’s been friends with most of the most successful indie developers in the iOS world - his cohost Marco - do you really think that Marco didn’t help set realistic expectations?

Well clearly he didn't, or at least it didn't help. Did you hear Casey talk about the app? Very unrealistic. Plus Marco didn't even test the app before it was launched, so I don't think he's been very involved. To be honest their friendship looks very asymmetric.

Now let’s say you were already making over a quarter million a year doing one podcast for 3 hours a week. How much effort would you put into an app?

Zero, that's my point. It's a waste of time.

It's something to talk about on a podcast, so it is not a waste of time. Also, for many of us programmers, we really need programming in our lives otherwise we get that itch.

Your comments have been terribly absolutist about your own opinions. Please accept that other people have different priorities than you. Accept that other people have different comfort levels regarding their children's privacy than you. There's nothing wrong with your priorities, but there's also nothing wrong with people whose priorities are different.

I'm not saying people don't hide their children's faces, I know they do, saw it first in Japan more than a decade ago.

Im also not saying anything against his priorities, I don't care how he spends his time.

What I am saying is I don't think this app will make money, so if that is his main motivation, then it's a waste of time.

So you have never done passion projects just to keep your skills up and stay familiar with an ecosystem?

No, not really. I've done passion projects for things I have a passion for, but not for keeping my skills up.

Well many people do. Like Casey, I did a pivot from pure software development to a job that pays much more given my skillset and interest. But is much more of a niche.

I keep an active open source profile just so I can pivot back to pure software development if needed. Casey likely makes more as a podcast host than he would make in corp dev as a mobile developer. Before that he was a .Net developer.

From reading your comments it seems like you're hoping or at least expecting this app to fail, not because it's bad, but because of what you think about the personality of the creator. It's weird and seems pretty toxic. You don't like the app, say what's bad about the app, don't shit all over the creator.

The app is not bad. If I had this need I would have used it. Well if Instagram hadn’t had it built in.

Many apps with worse UX and UI have been roaring successes, that is not the issue. I’m just saying that I think it’s very unlikely he will make any money from it, for reasons I’ve outlined before.

If malice was my motive, then I would egg him on, encourage him to spend lots of time doing something that doesn’t appear to be a strength.

When someone says they spent N months on something, that's not total clock time they spent in the code editor. It means they built it over the course of N months. You actually have no idea how long it took them.

Yeah, unless Liss explicitly said he was working full-time on it, I'd very much assume this is a "the thing I was fiddling with around my other responsibilities" project.

It isn’t his full time job. He was doing it as a side project

He’s on a 3 person podcast that could very well gross over $850K a year - 3 ad reads * 5500 * 52 weeks a year [1]. I wouldn’t make doing an app a high priority either.

He’s also on other podcasts.

[1] https://atp.fm/sponsor

Yeah I wouldn't spend a second thinking of that if I were on a high profile podcast like that. Much better to focus on growing that brand.

Mind you, given that Liss is on a bunch of Apple-focused podcasts, writing and publishing and marketing an iOS app really is giving him useful brand-related experiences. Being able to pull out recent personal anecdotes is very handy, even if he doesn't make any notable money directly from it.

Sure, in theory that makes sense. But he hasn't mentioned it once before last week, and he usually talks very little about his apps, so I don't think that is the main, or even an important reason. He also hasn't mentioned that as a reason.

He’s been talking about his apps for a decade. I first heard about FastText from an episode of Marco’s first podcast.

He talked about his other app too.

Siracusa even talks about his little Mac App Store apps that he admits may have made $30.

Marco is the only one who considers his app development as a real income stream.

Not long after that, they talk about how the first version of the app that had all the functionality was done much earlier, and the rest of the time was due to him doing pass after pass improving the UX (and time off for the holidays). That's incredible dedication and I honestly think it reflects well on him.

Have you tried the app? The UX is not that good, you can't resize and move the emojis at the same time, you have to choose one task at a time. Plus you need to put both fingers inside the rectangle it seems, there should be a very generous touch area outside the emoji itself.

Most corporation don’t hire iOS developers because of their great UX skills. They have an entire department to worry about the look and feel of the app.

Heck Marco, his cohost, has been very successful first with Instapaper and then with Overcast. He will be the first to admit that his UI skills aren’t that great.

It’s not like Tumblr - he was the initial developer - was ever a thing of beauty.

It was a comment on the comment I replied to.

But:

1. UI is not UX 2. Marco doesn’t have a UX department

Not sure what your point is about Marco to be honest.

That software engineers are not usually judged by their ability to do good UX and UI.

I replied to this:

> the rest of the time was due to him doing pass after pass improving the UX

From what he's said, MaskerAid is completely written in Swift/SwiftUI so perhaps his goal is to bring his skills up to date?