Archive for August 28, 2024

Wednesday, August 28, 2024

Updating Apple Developer Credit Card on File

Adam Tow:

I created my Apple Developer account many years ago, and I think I’m stuck in some kind of limbo state where my credit card information is stored in some forgotten part of Apple’s backend systems.

[…]

Yet, even after updating the one card that I thought was expired with the new expiration date and verification code, I was still seeing the warning atop the Apple Developer Account page.

[…]

After some more internet sleuthing and digging, I found this thread from 2019 on StackExchange which described a workaround. It involves going to an older Apple Store url.

I had a similar issue updating my address recently. The online forms didn’t fully work, and eventually someone had to fix it manually. I don’t understand how this site used by tens of millions of developers is still so rickety.

Matthias Gansrigler:

I can’t state how much I love when App Store Connect logs me out right after I reply to the App Review board, completely deleting everything I wrote.

Google Delayed Removing Yobit Pro Scam App

Zack Abrams (via Hacker News):

Google has been served with a lawsuit from a Florida woman who claims she lost $5 million to a scam cryptocurrency app downloaded from the Google Play Store.

Though Google received a complaint about the app from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the lawsuit claims Google took three months to remove the scam app, and that at least five other users of the app had similar experiences while it was available on the store.

[…]

Vaca’s lawsuit says she only downloaded the app because she believed Google was successfully preventing scam apps from becoming available on the Google Play store.

There were 12,759 installations of the app.

Previously:

Making Shortcuts’ Action Editor Easier to Browse

Matthew Cassinelli:

In iOS 18.1 developer beta 2, Apple has updated how it organizes actions in the Shortcuts app to create a better experience for users, including a new ordering inside action and categories, as well as two new categories.

This a long overdue change to the Action Editor, which should make it easier for new users to learn how to use Shortcuts – categories are more distinct, important actions are easier to find, and there’s a logical sort order inside groups to help you progressively understand how to use them.

Previously:

Skip 1.0

SKIP.tools (via Abe White, Hacker News):

Skip brings Swift app development to Android. Share Swift business logic, or write entire cross-platform apps in SwiftUI.

Skip is the only tool that enables you to develop genuinely native apps for both major mobile platforms with a single codebase. Under the hood, it uses the vendor-recommended technologies on each OS: Swift and SwiftUI on iOS, Kotlin and Compose on Android.

Marc Prud’hommeaux:

It doesn’t embed a separate engine or runtime into your app, but instead lets you use pure Swift and SwiftUI to create the iOS side of the app (as per Apple’s recommended best practices for creating iOS apps), and transpiles it into a pure Kotlin and Jetpack Compose app for the Android side (which is Google’s recommendation for building Android apps). So your application will use platform-native controls and will automatically have all the affordances provided by the platform vendor: animations, accessibility, and future-proof evolution alongside OS updates.

Previously:

Update (2024-09-13): Craig Hockenberry:

I love what the folks at skip.tools are doing.

But the deal killer for us, and I suspect many others, is the inevitability of UIKit in your SwiftUI app. No matter how hard you try, you’ll eventually have a UIViewControllerRepresentable implementation and that’s all code that’s going to need a separate Kotlin/Compose code.

Worse, these views tend to be a core part of the performance/experience in the app. Like Tapestry’s timeline.

And when you try to implement UIKit as a cross-platform toolkit, you quickly realize that it’s a Sisyphean task.

Previously:

Update (2024-09-25): Helge Heß:

To be honest, I’ve long held the opinion that the @skiptools approach would work really well for doing a Web SwiftUI. I.e. having a Swift to JavaScript transpiler. This is on my long to do list, might be somewhat viable w/ SwiftAST / SwiftSyntax 🙂

Update (2025-11-06): Skip Team:

Since the launch of the official Swift SDK for Android on swift.org last month, we have been overwhelmed by a surge of interest in building cross-platform apps using a single shared SwiftUI codebase. Skip’s earlier “Lite” mode, whereby your Swift code is transpiled into Kotlin, has been free for Indie developers for over a year, but since the launch of Skip’s “Fuse” mode — which is based on the native Swift SDK for Android — it has required a paid commercial license.

Today we are happy to announce that Skip Fuse is now free for Indie developers as well!

Update (2025-11-10): Fatbobman:

Naturally, Skip’s definition of an “indie developer” comes with clear conditions: it applies only to individuals or teams of up to two people, with annual revenue below US $30,000, and it permits the release of one closed-source commercial app (open-source projects are unlimited). Even so, this policy opens the door for Swift developers to enter the Android market at virtually no cost — offering new opportunities for experimentation, growth, and revenue on a massive platform.