It's crazy how much easier development on Windows is. And Microsoft's is almost all cross-platform. None of those things you mentioned allow you to work in a platform agnostic manner. Whereas Windows supports their own stuff like DirectX but still allows direct running of Vulkan, OpenGL, etc.
If you want to develop for Apple's devices, you have to sacrifice your future career options with any other tech stack/vendor by investing your limited time into skills that are only relevant in the Apple ecosystem.
Then you have to hope that it's still financially viable to do software dev in Apple's world for the next few decades - which given their demonstrated behavior of scraping back more and more of the pie for themselves and their shareholders, seems like a risky bet.
And you also left out key information. I don't have any issues with the same development on Windows or Linux. Apple is the outlier and isn't doing some reasonable thing.
Apple is by far the most troublesome platform to develop for. They literally make you do it their way, and you cannot recover any of that work for other platforms.
I am obviously over-simplifying it, but my point is it really depends on the market you’re aiming for. Like if you think you’ll make an app for users in North America, not supporting Android makes more sense. On the opposite side, if you want India, LATAM, you can drop iOS and never learn anything about Swift since your ROI will be very little. Again, heavily depends on what your goal is.
It's not like Apple provides their platform and then if you don't want to use it then fine, you're on your own. They are actively hostile towards you doing something else.
If I leap off your analogy, which again doesn't really work, it's as if they throw tomatoes from their steakhouse as you go towards the pancake house.
Of course they can do whatever they want. But it makes everyone slowly hate them.
But the fact that he got in to work on a music app is illuminating. The Apple audio APIs are an absolute mess. Media Player, AVPlayer, Core Audio, AVFoundation, AVAudioEngine… it's like competing teams dating all the way back to NeXT kept writing their own libs and somehow they all persisted through the iPhone era.
I spent about three months of the COVID lockdown trying to make a Shoutcast/Icecast player, it was excruciating.
And you know the reason why it's macOS only? because the Apple App store reviewer rejected it heh.
They've made it practically impossible to write native cross platform code that runs on IOS, and they've everything they can (within political limits) to prevent web apps from being able to compete with native apps.
Specially for applications where the DB is a platform on its own.
I don't know you, but even if you had a highly successful app on the appstore, I (an internet stranger) would care more about you being hit by a bus than the Apple corporation would, or any of the MBAs over there that you worship.
Any relationship you think you have with Apple is completely in your head. They take advantage of people like you all the time. Developing for Apple is an abusive relationship, and that's always a difficult thing to come to terms with.
I know this comment is probably just going to annoy you and result in a long, ranty, defensive, passive aggressive response. I don't care. I still love you more than Tim Cook/Steve Jobs does/would, my fellow dev.
Yeah okay, I guess you worship google if you support webapps too?
Personally if I were working on mobile stuff, I'd be looking at .NET MAUI.
I'm not an Apple user and when I have to do anything I don't know on Mac, the way to find it is always with the question "what's the simplest way to do it".
Except xcode. I always have to google or gpt to find what I want.
Then make CMD+s the shortcut.
I use the workaround of Command-A, command-X, command-V aka “Select All, Cut, Paste”.
Unfortunately that loses cursor position in the file and gives you a free newline at the end of your content.
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1...:
“3.206 Line
A sequence of zero or more non- <newline> characters plus a terminating <newline> character.”
That’s consistent with:
> echo test | wc
1 1 5
> echo -n test | wc
0 1 4In my experience, Xcode has been terrible, sometimes borderline unusable. The horrible project format, merging pains when working in a team, interface builder being trash in general but completely unusable when you use a lot of custom components with @IBDesignable properties across multiple modules - in that scenario it sometimes rebuilds everything in an endless loop, and brings even the most powerful Mac machines to their knees.
In that state even changing a simple property on a view takes 15 seconds of 100% cpu time.
Sure nowadays there's SwiftUI but IMO it can't be considered as anything more than an alpha until they fix the horrible navigation woes. And even then it still uses UIKit under the hood and you can see countless internally used constraints breaking all the time in the logs. At least that's how it was when I tried it a year and a half ago.
And that's not even touching on the cruel joke that is the xcodeproj project format.
Apple didn't even provide a package manager until relatively recently for God's sake. It was left to the community (cocoapods) to fend for themselves in this regard.
Also Gradle breaking the DSL all the time has become such a pain, that eventually they had to create an upgrade wizard, as if debugging performance issues with the build wasn't fun enough.
The whole thing takes 13GB to download where resuming fails, has an undocumented config format which doesn't work with git properly and is more sluggish than an Electron app.
The app upload process itself is so broken that even Apple had to release a third party tool to bypass it.
I refuse to believe they are using this thing internally, they must have some kind of special internal process to make this mess sort of work.
I could say similar things about appstoreconnect where even reordering app images is broken with a race condition if you click too quickly and you have to reload the page.
You're one of the lucky ones, eh?
It is utterly insane to me that this is the only way to build and sign apps for Apple devices locally. At one point, I almost burst into tears cause I was excited that they finally added an update that highlighted the line the cursor was on
For me, that's part of the problem. I'm sure Swift is a nice enough language based on what I've seen. But I'm not going to invest a substantial amount of time learning a language that is realistically only ever going to be useful to target one platform by a single company.
Sure, buddy… They don’t care about you unless you develop for their platform. And who can blame? The above is a terribly expensive and timely investment.