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Comment by MichaelZuo | Hacker News Reader

Why cant you take $100 in donations to make an apple developer account and throw it on the app store?

That’s a ridiculous amount of friction for a kid who wants to mess around with programming on a phone. With $100 they could, I don’t know, pay to see a doctor or get a tank of gas, or throw a party. Immediate needs like that come first to teenagers who don’t know what to do with their life yet. Apple is limiting the next generation of hires to keep up the walls today.

I took the trouble of logging in to HN to call bullshit on this whole thread. The reason these teenagers aren’t building standalone apps is generally because they know that web apps are the future. Moreover, there are dozens of new travel planning startups every year (YC regularly funds them!) and they seem to discover the same thing that Microsoft did—the real reason they stopped updating this magical app—which is that everybody wants better travel apps but nobody wants to pay for it.

I’m sure someone will crack the code someday and I’m glad they will keep trying, but I refuse to accept the premise that $100 Apple developer accounts are their primary impediment.

You know who else said web apps are the future? Steve Jobs when he launched the iPhone.

$100 is $100, you seem to comment from a position of privilege. When I learned programming, in my early 20s, that was close to my monthly salary. Granted I've been a paid programmer for more than 15 years now and I make more than that, but, even so, seeing as app development is not what brings me money it looks like a waste to me to throw $100 at something each year so that I'd have the privilege of running my code on a piece of hardware I already own.

And let's say that maybe I'm a cheap bastard, but the reality remains that $100 is still a lot of money for a lot of young people around the world who have just gotten into programming.

No way my parents would have forked over $100 to me on some computer thing they didn't understand. Being able to spend your parents money on the internet as a kid is rare.

Maybe web apps are going to be used for commercial things but nothing beats the power of being able to write your own tools, and its just so easy to do that locally as its always been. A little bash script or some python goes far.

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