After 15 years of ios development, i must say i’m quite relieved that my next project is going to be web first.

PWA as well?

Until you find all the inconsistent behavior between chrome, Firefox and safari. Oh and mobile safari vs desktop safari. Bad accessibility support, poor programming languages, etc

[delayed]

I'm assuming that is sarcasm

At least you don't have the sensation of fighting against the owner of the platform you're developing on. Undocumented behaviors or system limits of closed-source systems is the worst. Then after a while you realize that :

- apple itself probably isn't using the architecture it wants you to use and so its products don't have the same limits (theirs being directly embedded in the OS)

- there are some special entitlements you can ask to bypass those limits, but you have to ask them politely and they can revoke them at any time.

At this point the only popular Apple-first maker that hasn’t been sherlocked by Apple is the Procreate team. Wonder when that will happen.

Apple can’t create any software as good as Procreate. They’d need to buy them.

Procreate is great, and reason alone to buy an iPad if you are a digital artist. But Apple's Flow and Notes will probably grow in capability over time. Apple is also building in AI image generation, which arguably replaces not just Procreate but also the artists who use it. ;-(

Apple's "pro" apps - Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro - are fairly successful in their categories. Personally I'm a big fan of GarageBand, especially on iOS. MainStage is also kind of cool. I wish Aperture hadn't been killed before its time.

And I still find that I use Preview, Safari, Mail, Terminal are on a day-to-day basis even though I have some good alternatives in each category. Keynote is my go-to presentation program even though I also have PowerPoint.

Final Cut Pro is not even used to create the Apple marketing videos.

It's popular enough that professionals banned together in 2022 to write an open letter to Apple complaining about it. ;-)

„…the letter then complaints some of its signees cannot use it for their work. "Work that could easily include productions for your very own Apple TV+ service," it states.“

Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/04/19/video-editors-dem...

I wouldn’t exactly call that popular or successful.

Logic Pro is quite widely in use in some areas though.

There are a number of iOS-first games.

That's really subjective. I've done web dev, embedded and now iOS. Quality of life has never been higher IMO

Quality of life in what sense? How do you contend with the fact that your iOS apps, unlike web apps, can be arbitrarily gate-kept?