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Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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?

year of the linux mobile

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

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