Hacker News Reader

Comment by borschtplease | Hacker News Reader

Apple still lives in the world where software developed in IDE on a personal computer and shipped as a boxed software on a disquette with a licence key. Xcode cloud is a joke. All their automation is a joke. It’s not surprising even their own software development stuck because of their ecosystem because they use same tools, same cryptic software signing with their plists, p8, chains, certificates, lack of ui testing, horrible cpp, objc legacy. You just drowning in this environment. How I wish we have proper web app apis at last

View on HN

I used to drown in this stuff in the when I first did IOS dev back in 2017. I recently got back into it and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I could setup a ci/cd pipeline. What used to take hours figuring out certs, debugging build issues, I can now even test my build against prod without even deploying.

I'm not building anything complicated, just a iPhone / watch app, but when I do get stuck with env its codex to the rescue. IMO relative to my experience many years ago its amazing.

So is Codex the real reason it’s much easier to setup?

Codex is definitely the reason I'm able to debug ops issues so quickly. For instance, I introduced a watch app into my iphone project. The build failed in xcode cloud but didn't give a reason. I gave codex some context and had it scan the project and it found the problem almost immediately.

In my experience this is only partially true. Apple has come a long way and their code signing experience is leaps and bounds better than Android at this point. Their UI testing is actually pretty solid, and Swift is a wonderful language to program in. The IDE part is partially true, but to be fair they are opening things up to coding agents (they're using Claude Code themselves) so I feel like this is only going to get better from here.

> their code signing experience is leaps and bounds better than Android at this point.

In which universe ? You generate a signing key, its password, configure the alias, the alias password and then just modify your gradle build script to say signingConfig.set(file("file/path.jks"))

Hell, if you want to go even further, give up on signing, use the debug signing certificate and let google sign for you with their own keys.

I've stopped counting how many issues you get on trying to build iOS apps because "whoops, sorry, xcodebuild just farted and can't sign"

Back in the early/mid 2010's when I was still a native iOS dev, I remember interviewers would ask how do you code sign an app.

And when they started trying to "automate" the process, it was a roll of the dice if it would work.

I have been out of that game for last 5 years, but I occasionally still open Xcode and it _seems_ it works most of the time.

I understand the technical difference between signing, stapling and notarization, but c'mon man, what the hell‽

> Apple has come a long way and their code signing experience is leaps and bounds better than Android at this point

"Apple has come a long way and has made a very inconvenient and complex process only slightly less inconvenient, and people somehow are happy and pretend Android sucks."

We moved off GL/GH CI for iOS apps and switched to XCode Cloud only because of the pain that Apple is w.r.t. to signing. This is the other way, and luckily we have LLMs now: https://docs.fastlane.tools/actions/match/

Whatever we pay in runner-minutes/month is the price of our sanity so we don't have to deal with the nightmare that is their signing/release process, and their stupid CLI/XCode tools. Not to mention that even XCode Cloud seems to have been coded and shipped without any kind of second pair of eyes (QA nowhere to be found), and the XCode UI and Web UI behave in totally different ways for the same input. Of course without any kind of proper explanation for any errors, as in Apple's fashion.

Fastlane has existed for more than a decade; this has nothing to do with LLMs.

SwiftUI is one of the nicer UI frameworks to use imo. And fast

I assume you hit some limitations if you try to use Xcode Cloud for a larger project, but for small-scale use it’s pretty great. The setup is instant and seamless, builds are fast, and you get a bunch of minutes with your developer membership, which has been fixed at $99 for as long as I can remember.

and what kind of world do we live in now

A world where people use Claude to operate doomed SaaS products

Which are developed in jails, in virtual containers in other containers in virtual machines on top of hypervisor cloud system

Android tooling is cross-platform and easily executed in your choice of CI provider with cheap Linux ARM minutes. Simulator-based UI tests are headless (there are headless tests for iOS but not macOS). It's not even remotely a close comparison.

That must be why everyone’s trying to release Android apps now.

No, the apple ecosystem will always hold a monopoly over stupid upper class people to fleece. Apple will say "jump" and Developers will ask how high (if they know what's good for their wallet)

It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out with their "no unapproved code" stance. The old excuse was that normal users don't know how to write code and so don't need to be able to run their own code.

But now normal users can have some AI thing write single-use code for them, and for relatively simple code like "show me all my pictures between these two dates that are in landscape rather than portrait" they'll usually get it right.

And now who wants a phone where you can't do anything like that?

year of the linux mobile

We are there with the kernel, folks tend to forget about the userspace when celebrating it.

You absolutely can. You just have to pay Apple their $99/yr for the privilege. I have an app I vibecoded running on my phone to do regexps against a phone copy of /usr/share/dict/words because I find the regexp practice to be more fun when faced with a word game compared to getting stumped. There's some restrictions, like no running your own JIT on user specified JavaScript, aka no making a web browser, but for most apps I dare say you won't run into the limitations trying to scratch an itch.

> You just have to pay Apple their $99/yr for the privilege.

Do you expect ordinary people to do this?

Also, what's the excuse for even having a "developer" distinction if ordinary users are expected to need it?

>How I wish we have proper web app apis at last

You mean APIs that inconsiderate developers use to release a simple calculator in the form of a 300+MB binary that eats a quarter of my RAM?

I’m not active in mobile development, how do the iOS and Android development practices differ?

They might still be living in that world, but they also live in a world where they can do exactly $0 of R&D of actual rack server SKUs and still have people buying their high-end MBP SKUs at halfway-decent used car prices.

So I get why they don't care.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com