It’s been over a decade since indy developers really made a dent in the App Store.
Android is not exactly a piece of cake to develop for, the tool chain is slow, the emulator is slow, the device market os fragmented and people are still mostly running old versions of Android you have to support.
Not to mention most Android devices on the market are slow.
xcode itself is 12GB and doesn't support partial updates, the projet file is some hot garbage and plays badly with git, the whole ide is lagging pretty hard on clicka, app upload is so broken Apple themselves had ro release a third party tool to bypass it, the developer portal looks like it hasn't changed since 2010 and has a number of shameful bugs...
How slow is the emulator? How many Android versions do you have to test for because of the piss poor support for OS updates from Android manufacturers?
> How slow is the emulator? How many Android versions do you have to test for because of the piss poor support for OS updates from Android manufacturers?
I prefer to use my real device since it's not taking any screen space but the Android emulator is much much faster than the one from Apple, every click takes 3s on the Apple one, I don't know what they have done exactly to make it perform so badly.
I gave up on Apple because of the overall poor dev experience actually, I now consider the devices legacy and tell users who ask that I will only support Android to guarantee a better experience, I won't upload the app back.
Of course it doesn’t even do that on ARM based Macs.
If you’re not testing on a wide variety of devices for Android or OS’s, how complex is this app?
I don't know how it works, is that the reason it's so slow?
> If you’re not testing on a wide variety of devices for Android or OS’s, how complex is this app?
around 30k lines of code I'd say, I only had minor problems due to screen sizes but that's pretty much the same everywhere.
> You are running into problems that most iOS developers don’t run into
Those problems are real and you have tons of threads online. The thing is, the iOS dev stack looks brittle, you're unlikely to have the different problems as somebody else and there's no way to debug it anyways.
Hell even when it comes to development, you can't just build your iOS/MacOS app on a regular Linux CI machine, no you must have MacOS machines for building, so you need that special hardware on top of all the other expenses.
I almost feel like Apple setup the developer program with the idea that it's just going to be 15 year old prodogies making apps on their parents computer, their whole stack just seems incompatible and PIA to work with when it comes to actual software development. It should be a sign when you have popular products like CodePush that were designed specifically to address the shortcomings of developing iOS apps.