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jauntywundrkind • today at 2:24 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

well you don't really know much about shipping native apps then do you?

getting them approved and updated is fucking hell and a half. these companies owning these platforms are ghoulish monsters doing everything they can to make the process shit. and it's gotten vastly worse.

want to give away open source? too bad, pay apple. too bad, pay google. if things had gone differently for microsoft, too bad pay microsoft. for a watch, for a tv? pay x, pay y.

> the OpenCode ios app has been ready for weeks but apple hasn't approved it \ even worse they categorized it as an "internal app" so i don't even know how much they're prioritizing it https://bsky.app/profile/thdxr.com/post/3mzlbwhubqm2t

one of the top 10 ai apps of all time and they're still getting yanked around, can't get things going.

someone else in my feed had a creative neat tarot card app, with some fun twists. that apple outright said they wouldn't even evaluate, because it was already a served market, tarot cards.

a lot of ya'll weren't around and/or dont remember when you had to pay for Microsoft Visual Studios to develop windows apps. to just develop them! as an adult a couple hundred dollars (1996 dollars) isn't so attrocious, but as a grade schooler, it was an so sad knowing i had no chance to get started making gui apps. now it's developer fees yearly, and app store control, which has gotten more and more annoying to work around, with limits on number of installs for pre-releases, with limits on how long the builds work. native platforms are vicious nasty bad things, owned by massive terrible companies. even KDE spent probably two decades being super on the fence, with Trolltech's weirdly Qt licensing being already on the fence and only a rug-pull away from being a horrible mistake to have built to.


Replies

cowlevel • today at 6:23 AM

Android still allows people to install apps. So does Windows. iOS is the only major platform that doesn't.

➕ show 1 reply
palata • today at 9:51 AM

> well you don't really know much about shipping native apps then do you?

I don't know about that, but I sure as hell do ship native apps. On Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android. I admittedly have never shipped a native app on BSD, but I don't imagine it's very different.

> getting them approved and updated is fucking hell and a half

Oh, so your experience is limited to iOS and the Play Store? Is that it?

> want to give away open source? too bad, pay apple. too bad, pay google

What a weird take. If you want to open source code, you can just put the code on a server and have people download it over your favourite protocol. Typically HTTP works well. On any* server.

> one of the top 10 ai apps of all time and they're still getting yanked around, can't get things going.

Oh yeah, iOS sucks. Welcome to the real world.

> a lot of ya'll weren't around and/or dont remember when you had to pay for Microsoft Visual Studios to develop windows apps

As a high schooler, I was developing for Linux. I admittedly had to pay to receive a CD-ROM with my first Linux distro, and by the minute when connecting to the Internet.

> native platforms are vicious nasty bad things, owned by massive terrible companies.

Right, so your experience is iOS, and Android with the Play Store. And then you assume that you know all platforms and can teach people.

> Qt licensing being already on the fence and only a rug-pull away from being a horrible mistake to have built to.

Sure, maybe. Good thing that in 2026 there are so many open source alternatives to build upon.