throw14082020

> To avoid this problem in the future, I decided to splurge a bit and go for a cloud solution where I wouldn’t have to worry about reliability, performance, scaling or integrity ever again: Google Firestore.

> Google Firebase is nice and convenient, but it is quite expensive. We could investigate some other managed database options in future.

I've only seen people get annoyed with Firestore over time, and migrating out of it. People do end up worrying. At first, They seem to choose Firestore because it's strongly marketed and seems suitable for a new project. And then data modeling, high prices or scalability becomes a problem.

You missed the point, it's "pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular". There is a generous free tier, and for years I have paid nothing to Cloudflare, but I serve 2GB total every month to visitors, YMMV.

Thanks for your reply and time.

I noticed UnifiedPush and your efforts there and I am curious. My summary after a brief glance is UnifiedPush will not achieve anything useful, for the same reasons: iOS and Android push notifications are locked down. For example, sure, Android is OSS, but most of the functionality is provided by proprietary apps or Google Play Services. This results is challenges today, but further challenges down the road (App Store rules/policies change, stronger enforcement).

About the battery usage, this is always a hard question to answer. 4% is very low, which seems good. But how could you measure that effectively? Perhaps if the connection is good, it might take 4% battery over 17h of "use". But could this be worse if network is intermittent (i.e. realistic conditions)? Or lots of data being used (or *abused*).

A "foreground service" means 2 things: an unremovable notification is shown to the user in their notification tray AND specifically for ntfy, an additional connection open (additional battery usage) on top of the one engineered by Google.

Although I like seeing things attempt to compete with Google, this can't come close because of the restrictions of Android enacted by Google.

I tried TikTok, it reminds me of when I used facebook about 8 years ago: full of relaxing/ funny videos, but leaving a feeling of emptiness having not done anything for the past 30 minutes. So I uninstalled it after 30 minutes of viewing. It's the opposite of Twitter, which induces stress and the desire to reply to someones tweet.

Though I wonder if there's any educational/ productive content on TikTok. This was someones argument about the difference between Twitter and TikTok: TikTok doesn't allow conversations/ debate.

Aren't all the ones you mentioned all third party, so I would expect they won't be used at all internally. That makes me wonder if Apple uses open source much internally.

Also, DocC is integrated into Xcode, all the others tools could not be.

this article is saying how Apple DocC (the new documentation compiler revealed at WWDC 2021 this week) is not going to solve the problems Apple (and their developers) face. It has interesting examples.

I think it will make documentation better, not because DocC is the perfect solution, but because it re-emphasises the importance of documentation because its new. It also gives developers at Apple a standard tool, was there such a thing before?.

Yes true, but that's not required. You can still distribute apps, and your users can just "right click" and click "open", though this might be a little secret, since most people think they need to go into system preferences.

You only need it for iOS/ iPadOS/ watchOS development.

You can make a macOS app without a developer license, and just distribute it yourself (outside the Mac App Store). But the iOS app store is the only way users can get iOS apps, so you need to be on the apple developer program

> Apple has nearly a 50% market share

What market are you talking about? I haven't heard the 50% market share number in the US. - iOS is 59.71% of smartphones in the US - macOS is 27.16% of Desktop PCs in the US

https://www.mobileapps.com/blog/android-vs-ios-market-share#... https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...

I watched that on YouTube, and it was quite enjoyable! But how does TikTok help?

Even at the app store, they asked me to remove the password on my device. I still don't understand why there isn't a better way to do diagnostics.

We are also not allowed to go into the GP! Because of Covid!

Stop using your phone number. It's a drastic solution, but the sooner we stop and find alternatives, the better position we will be in. You don't get spam called on Signal, Facebook Messenger nearly as much, do you?

Of course there are problems with this, but these can be solved. Phone spam can't.

yea well thats not enough! Xcode should be using it too. They make us download 12GB for every update.

/s end open source entitlement section

Thanks for your great work

How do you get started doing effective homeschooling (though in my case, the UK)? It sounds hard to get a good structure or find other parents willing to do lessons as well. It seems like the network isn't very good? (I don't use Facebook)

If someone is doing so badly is school (they get expelled or they cannot handle school, or have special needs and the parents cannot find/ be bothered to send them to a school further away), they may get home-schooled.

Yes, so there might be this cause and effect, but this is not a correlation, i.e. we haven't seen data, they may well be more well rounded individuals being home-schooled because there are more parents who decided home schooling as a way to enhance education.

I don't think its necessarily the time of sleep that matters, but the consistent time of sleeping and waking up, including a long enough gap between (sleep hours). For me, that was what really helped.

Waking up early does boost confidence/ ego a bit though.

What needs to change to make use of this? Do any opportunities exist for open source projects?

Skripal is not dead?

Maybe because your opinion was shaped by their efforts. Perhaps maybe you would’ve bought from Anker instead? Perhaps they were able to charge you $30.99 instead of $10.99 after they faked the reviews.

Can you elaborate on your previous auditory experiences? I'm checking for Steve Jobs/ Apple's reality distortion field. I've seen many recommendations from people who have upgraded to Apple from bad products (e.g. This iPhone 12 is so much better than the Android phone from 2017 which I paid $300 for), as opposed to a fair competitor. In this case, have you used other high-end headphones released recently?

I've gotten emails from random people/ companies in the past. They found my name on LinkedIn and proceed to spam firstname.lastname@company.domain

These get ignored first time round. Second time they get marked as spam. Third time onwards, well I just get a bit annoyed. But I never reply. I should probably try to block that email straight up.

For example, I've received emails from someone every Monday for 5 weeks in a row. And then a few weeks of silence, and then a "circle back on this" email, followed by another few weeks of emails.

Oh yes, sorry, I think in the US, iPhone is dominant. Even more. I expect them to spend more money too. My perspective is the UK, where there is a 50:50 split of Android and iOS. A consumer app company I worked for previously made a lot more money from iOS users than Android.

In terms of market, do your research on jobs and skill demand in the area.

Good to know, thanks. Its been a few months since using Xcode, and recently have only done things in Xcode when it doesn't work in AppCode, preferring AppCode for actual coding.

> the new shiny thing that’s too immature for production use

Both Android (e.g. Jetpack Compose, new privacy centric storage APIs that we are now forced to use) and iOS (SwiftUI) have this. I guess we'd need to list them down and compare.

> iOS SDK is both generally more capable

Yes, Apple provide more higher level functionality, at the expense of flexibility. Android also provides higher level features, but these are provided in external libraries which you can package in your app. When it comes to auxiliary features though (e.g. machine learning), I think Apple does the high level APIs much better. Android's features are quite a bit buggy.

To explain further why I think iOS is harder

- Where will you learn it? Apple documentation is bad. remember this? "On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation", 1180 points to date https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046691 Android documentation is great. Yes there are at least 5 ways to do something e.g. schedule background work, load files, but its very clearly deprecated in their docs/ in the code. You can, read the code because it is open source. If you find a bug in Apple's library, what do you do?

- There are more developers, more stack overflow questions/ answers and more resources on the internet in general for Android. So even when Android has edge cases/ backwards compatibility issues, its more likely than iOS that someone has written about it.

- Apple tooling is bad: Xcode is not a good IDE to put it lightly. It gets 3 stars on the App Store. The actual code editing part is just a text editor, e.g. searching for function calls involves using the search function, as opposed to a keyboard shortcut that uses static code analysis. Most warnings for your code won't show up until you try to build it, therefore the feedback loop is extremely slow. Many iOS developers I've known admit they do not like Xcode. To upload your iOS app to the app store, you upload gigabytes of binaries. Code refactoring features do not exist on Xcode. Android Studio is one of the best IDE's I've used, and constantly adds support for more features: WorkManager inspector, deploy/debug multiple devices at once. Also, new features come out for Android Studio all the time, and Xcode seems to have not been updated with features that benefit me for a long time. Jetbrains IDEs generally work straight off the bat, and I'm very happy to see AppCode (Xcode competitor by Jetbrains) available, though it is thoroughly buggy at the moment, I still use it because writing code is nicer in AppCode.

- Basic things in the apple ecosystem are broken/ buggy: e.g. New developers in a team will have issues signing their application with the company team, the trick/ fix is to remove/ add a Xcode/ iOS capability to the project, and remove it immediately. Then signing will work. Signing the app is literally the first thing that needs to be done, why is this not fixed?

- Swift is much nicer than Objective-C to program in, but its not as nice as Kotlin. I don't want to get into programming language comparison (im sure there are connoisseurs here who can), but my opinion of reading Swift code is they are less readable and results in unusual architecture. Swift apps are also slower and bigger than Objective-C apps. Some Apple APIs are also designed in a painfully complicated way. It seems like they do not get much feedback from developers about their APIs, whereas Android is constantly getting feedback and improving. Some developers complain that Swift has changed, breaking older Swift code. I haven't heard this from Kotlin developers.

Sorry that felt like a rant. In the end you've can choose based on

- Comfort: Android is much more ergonomic for the reasons above

- Developer competition: You'll be competing with more Android developers worldwide: Android is more than 85% of the smartphone market

- Money: iOS costs $100 annually (not much but if you're starting out your first app, maybe it is). The upside is if you live in a rich country, many people use iPhones, and they also tend to spend more money on the app store.

- Market trends: iOS has added ATT/ privacy features. They've also got powerful chips but it seems like no one has learnt how to use them yet. They are ahead on hardware (M1, A14), they've got great market share in Western countries, and are poised to take even more with recent developments.

Most teams don't hire a "mobile developer", they hire an Android developer, and/or iOS developer, and/or React Native developer, and/or Flutter Developer. So unfortunately it requires some commitment, don't do all of them at once!

- React Native: Easiest to learn, good build tools/ developer experience, good amount of jobs already. Unfortunately, React Native is naturally intertwined with JS/ react, so you'll face issues with the complex world of javascript. I won't say its slow, but it certainly doesn't work for all types of apps. Also, avoid Expo completely.

- Flutter: Easy to learn, amazing build tools/ devex, very few jobs (though predictably growing). If you become a flutter developer, you can be confident the company that hired you has thought about the tech stack a little more. React Native is the defacto for quick and dirty apps (MVP), and Flutter is for more of a company thats investing in its technology, I would say.

- Android: Okay to learn, very good build tools/ devex, more jobs

- iOS: hardest to learn, okay build tools/ devex, fewer jobs

Difficulty is measured by how long it would take you to implement a feature you don't know, or just my rough feeling of building apps in all platforms, some of them professionally. Im very unusual to know all 4, and I have not met anyone else like me in my jobs.

I would pick Flutter, because you're not optimising for today, and Flutter will be there in 5 years, regardless of how big https://killedbygoogle.com/ gets E.g. The tech lead for Flutter worked on HTML, CSS, WebSockets.

There's a lot that goes on in a mobile app, please read https://developer.android.com/docs/ and https://developer.apple.com/documentation

It certainly is different to backend development, but not everything is a "JSON viewer", even if you exclude camera filters and games. Only the truly awful apps are "JSON viewers". There is a lot of complexity, and I've heard arguments from people that 'they don't want to be a front-end dev because that is just visual stuff': they're talking about pre-javascript days or talking about something they've never done to a good level.

Using a backend (adding network cost)/ sharing code should be the last on your mind for mobile apps. I've had once, where the logic for feature would take less than a day to implement (which I subsequently did), but inexperienced non-mobile developers decided it would be a good idea (and said exactly what you said) to put everything in the backend to share code between iOS and Android. The interface cost (network code) cost more time in development, and made a much worse user experience. Not to mention, I had to use the code written by the inexperienced person, which had bugs.

You might not understand mobile, but there's a lot more that goes on in a mobile app.

If the fine was $1.7-3.4B, you can expect facebook to spend $1.6999-3.3999B on undoing that (or have already spent preventing that, e.g. front pages on newspapers for Apple's ATT feature in iOS 14.5). Looking at a forces perspective, facebook has more weight/ incentive behind it because they stand to lose a lot of money, Zuckerberg will be managing the situation. Governments works with none of these pressures or systems. Yesterday, I got back a complaint I submitted to the ICO (information commissioners office) in February 2021, asking for more information/ data. Responding to my complaint in that quality should've only taken less than 5 minutes.