Aulig

I've published hundreds of apps over the past 6 years and Google's review times had a similar spike during covid. It took a very long time to recover but now it's back to being bad, I can confirm that.

I wrote about it a while ago, might be time to upsate that post. https://webtoapp.design/blog/time-to-publish-apps

It's to fool primitive scrapers looking for e-mail addresses with the @ symbol. It's handled like that on the entire KIT website.

Oh cool :) I've tried out cursor for a more AI driven development experience, but didn't end up making the switch from Pycharm. I'm just so used to the Jetbrains IDEs that the additional AI capabilities (over the Github copilot plugin) didn't make it worth it for me to switch. But I'm thinking that gap in capabilities may be widening, so I want to give it another shot.

Which IDE do you use?

From my experience, your best bet is to remove references to these agencies from the app and especially the app description.

I publish lots of apps and don't have a great explanation either. I guess if you say that you just fixed some bugs, neither the app reviewers nor the users will pay too much attention and just approve/download the update, which is what you want as the app developer. Or it's just laziness. Or a communication disconnect between the person in charge of writing the changelog and the product/development team.

Disclosure: I run https://webtoapp.design where I convert websites into mobile apps (and help publish them).

Basically, yes, wrap it in a WebView. I'd need to see your mobile website to judge it better, but if it looks like a website, Apple might reject it. Your website really needs to look like an app to have some certainty of getting it through if your app only consists of a WebView.

At webtoapp.design we usually include some native components in the apps. Although they might not add functionality (just replaces some website components), they help get the app published.

I guess you'll have to decide based on your hourly rate whether it's worth it to tinker with some self-built solution or if you are also open to going with a finished product. I don't want this to sound too much like an ad, just expanding on the time save (because often you don't think about all the things in advance): - If your client decides he wants push notifications: A finished solution should already have support for that - For Apple, you'll also need to set up your Xcode developer environment and manage all the certificates and provisioning profiles (personally, I found that complicated when I started out). With webtoapp.design we handle all of that automatically (we upload a finished build to your developer account) - not sure if some competitors do that too.

I guess you could use this opportunity to update your dependencies and target the latest SDK version.

I've never heard of that before. Are your apps just for internal use of your team?

I've been working on https://webtoapp.design for for 4 years now (in 10 days). It's my first business, so I've made plenty of mistakes. By now I have someone that handles the easier customer support inquiries and after all the other costs I can live off of it (not an appropriate software engineer salary for Europe, but it's enough).

It can be very frustrating, since I help my customers through the entire app creation and publishing process, so that includes dealing with Google and Apple.

I keep working on it because it's growing slowly but steadily and it provides me a lot of flexibility. I don't know which marketing channels to focus on to speed up growth though, at the moment it's pretty much all SEO.

What a stupid requirement. I run an app builder and offer my users plenty of ways to test their app beforehand, but outside of Google Play, since their system is just cumbersome.

This will make it nearly impossible to get an app published as a small business, since who the hell has 20 users just waiting for your app? It's already a huge struggle to help people with publishing their app.

The road to hell is truly paved with good intentions. All the scam apps will have no problem cheating this system, but honest devs will struggle. I can only hope Google reconsiders this requirement, otherwise it might be worth it to push my users more towards alternative app stores. We already support the Amazon App Store and the Huawei App Gallery (which are a lot easier to publish apps in), but the user base is just not there unfortunately.

The publishing date of the article is 2017, so pre-ChatGPT. Of course there were spintaxes back then, but those articles were way worse.

Either way, the article seems mostly fine to me.

I'm always amazed by how amazing the results are (compared to alternatives), even though it's 10+ year old software afaik.

I've been self-hosting this for a year or so and it's pretty neat.

It happens quite often that I need to wait for something which doesn't have a builtin alert.

Currently I'm for example using it to get an alert when a flutter package has been updated on pub.dev

You could check out portfolio performance for an offline, open source portfolio tracker.

I use that too. Ghostfolio looks a lot more beautiful but probably is more limited in terms of features :)

These minimum SDK requirements have been known for a very long time. It's correct that the email only got sent recently, but the requirements are usually announced 2 years in advance in this manner:

After 0 days: New Android version comes out After 1 year: App Updates need to target the latest Android version After 2 years: Apps can't be downloaded on devices with the "new" Android version anymore unless they target the "new" Android version

So normally there should be plebty of time to prepare. However, if you're an indie developer or not actively maintaining the app, then it definitely is annoying, since usually the apps would work perfectly fine on the new Android version without updating the targetSdk version.

Modded discord clients have been around for quite while. But indeed, the threat of being banned deters most people and if just a handful of people use a modded client discord doesnt care probably.

As the comments on the post say - it's most likely due to the generally slow job market. 3.5 years later I'm still glad that I chose to use Flutter in my business.

Or you could just create one page that shows the weather/gas prices/etc that updates?

Yes, that's what the paper argues too. The inventions made during the industrial revolution were so massively impactful that today's inventions are nothing by comparison.

I use Paddle for that. They handle sales tax/VAT and offer all kinds of payment options.

I used to have high myopia and continuously increasing, which is also a large risk factor for retinal detachment. I think I originally learned about vision improvement through wearing weaker glasses on HN so I feel the obligation to share it since it has helped me manage (and even reduce) my myopia.

https://wiki.reducedlens.org/wiki/Main_Page

Just yesterday I gave ChatGPT a summarization task and it performed horribly. I even tried multiple times and got the identical answer. Then I gave the identical prompt to gpt-3.5-turbo via the API and I immediately got the expected good answer.

When my bike was stolen, they drove up with a large van, threw a bunch of bikes in the back, and drove away. A handlebar lock wouldn't do much here unfortunately.

The guideline to be able to access apps without an account still exists, but the enforcing might have become lighter - or it's just the random fluctuations in review qualities we all know by now :)

I found that really interesting too. I've often wanted something like that!

Yea, I think that's all it is.

Is it the same people though? The Github link is different.

I visited South Africa in February. You can tell crime is rampant by how every home has 2m walls with barbed wire or electric fencing on top.

Most of the country was still very beautiful, but man Johannesburg is really run down. My father was there 30 years ago and he couldn't get over how this once beautiful city could have come to this. Vacancies and broken windows everywhere right in the city center.

If you're just looking to go on vacation in the general region, Namibia is a better option in my opinion.