Archive for October 15, 2020

Thursday, October 15, 2020

The Developer Experience Gap

Stephen O’Grady (via Hacker News):

Fragmentation makes it impossible for vendors to natively supply the requisite components for a fully integrated toolchain. That does not change the reality, however, that developers are forced to borrow time from writing code and redirect it towards managing the issues associated with highly complex, multi-factor developer toolchains held together in places by duct tape and baling wire. This, then, is the developer experience gap. The same market that offers developers any infrastructure primitive they could possibly want is simultaneously telling them that piecing them together is a developer’s problem.

Thoughts on the App Store

Riley Testut:

As a user, I love the App Store and would hate to see it become less important to iOS. In practice though, the current App Store situation has some significant problems which are getting harder and harder to ignore — several of which Congress’ antitrust report explicitly call out, such as requiring developers to implement in-app purchases or risk being thrown out of the App Store. I’ve wrestled with these two seemingly conflicting notions for a long time, but after running an alternative app store for the past year I’ve finally been able solidify my thoughts on what I believe is best for the platform.

So to celebrate AltStore’s first birthday, I decided to finally write up my thoughts on the App Store — including why I went through all this effort in the first place and why I believe sideloading is ultimately the right long-term solution for iOS.

[…]

12 years on, it’s clear that while band-aids can be applied to the App Store Guidelines every few years or so to quell developer dissent, the underlying philosophy that Apple maintains sole discretion over which apps are allowed to run on its platform is showing its age.

Previously:

Deliveries Switches to Subscription

Ryan Christoffel:

Deliveries, the package tracking app for iOS and Mac, has received a strong update today with a wide variety of quality of life improvements. There’s nothing huge or flashy here, but the sum of the many small changes should help Deliveries continue being one of the best and easiest ways to track that steady stream of packages heading your way.

Joe Rossignol:

A subscription will unlock all features of the app across the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, with pricing to be set at 99 cents per month or $4.99 per year through the App Store.

Deliveries until now has been a one-time purchase, with iOS and macOS versions of the app each costing $4.99.

Junecloud:

For those who purchased Deliveries before subscriptions were available, most of the features from earlier versions are included without a subscription. You will need a subscription to sync with Junecloud, and for new features we add in the future.

You’ll get a complimentary subscription for up to 18 months from the date you purchased the app. If you bought the app more than 18 months ago, your complimentary subscription will end February 1, 2021.

iCloud sync is free, however.

Previously:

A Warning About Glassdoor

his_rotundity_ (via Hacker News):

I have a very close family member that works for Glassdoor. I spoke to this person and found out that a strategic repositioning, if you will, for Glassdoor is that they are trying to become a PR company of sorts, so they are focusing on brand management for companies. As a result, they are getting very aggressive with negative review-takedowns while allowing very obviously fraudulent positive reviews to remain the same.

shiftpgdn:

I worked at a mid sized company that was going through a very rough patch (right before the inevitable bankruptcy.) During this time I got a call from a Glassdoor rep who explicitly offered to remove bad reviews in exchange for us moving to a high paid tier and putting up X amount of job listings.

Glassdoor is just corporate Yelp.

See also: Quora.