• Moonrise2473@feddit.it
    65·
    1 year ago

    To make apps for Android you can take a 15 years old PC from the dumpster and a 5 years old smartphone that your cousin threw away and you’re done. No other payment required.

    To make apps for iOS you need to have a supported Mac and you need to have a supported iPhone. The OS upgrade treadmill means you need to buy a new one of both every 5-6 year (or used every 2-3 years). Finally, you need to pay a yearly $100 development subscription forever. (When you stop paying, your apps are unpublished)

    Also: on Android you share the source and anyone can compile it even a decade after release. On iOS compiling old source is much more difficult as you probably need to change or fix to the updated apis

      • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
        12·
        1 year ago

        Android studio on a modern computer is painful

        Also on Android, Google decides what models of phones are able to use the Play Store. So unless you get into a third party store, or expect your users to side-load, that old smartphone might not be so useful.

        • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
          13·
          1 year ago

          The old smartphone is only used for testing, you can literally use whatever you want (with increasing limitations), if you really want you can use even an HTC dream with Android 2

    • NightOwl@lemmy.oneEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, subscription cost has led to apps that would be free on Android being paid on Apple or opting out of being available all together. Not just on iOS but MacOS too, and opting for being available outside the Mac store.

    • mtchristo@lemm.ee
      4·
      1 year ago

      Android studio is a very heavy peace of garbage! you need modern hardware to get somewhere.

      • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
        11·
        1 year ago

        Can use an ancient version of eclipse if you really want.

        The point btw is that there’s isn’t a marketing department that artificially decides that your computer is too old to run a specific application and you need to buy a new one

        • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
          1·
          1 year ago

          I thought Android Studio (or more specifically, the Android SDK) is required for making Android apps?

          • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
            4·
            1 year ago

            You aren’t limited to that, android studio is just a customized specialized version of JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA, if someone has a lot of time and patience, can use another ide

    • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      You can side-load an app from anywhere so you don’t even need storefronts like f-droid, you can just have the APKs as releases right with wherever you’re hosting the source code!

  • Elise@beehaw.org
    24·
    1 year ago

    I’ve made some apps in my life and one time I made something for myself and simply skipped apple because it isn’t worth the headache.

    For starters you’ll need an OSX VM, then pay 100 eur a year for a dev account, and then manage those god awful provisioning profiles.

    Finally, side loading wasn’t possible back then and their store is a black box and follows strange arbitrary American centric rules.

    Edit: Also I should add that in order to get my hands on an OSX iso ten years ago I had to find someone with an apple computer to be able to purchase the OS with my account. And apparently this is a legal gray zone.

    These days it’s a bit easier because you can use a cloud build provider and just stuff the provisioning profiles in there, for example if you use Unity3d.

  • Muddybulldog@mylemmy.winEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    In addition to the reasons already mentioned, Apple has a requirement that applications have a novel component. While it’s often questionable as to what is considered “novel” Weather applications get contrasted against the built-in weather app. If the app simply duplicates the functionality it will be rejected.

    • spiritedpause@lemmy-u6723.vm.elestio.appOP
      6·
      1 year ago

      haha not at all, it’s moreso that it seems like the open source weather app category has a particularly large gap in options on iOS vs Android compared to other categories, which I found strange. But I can see why the usual factors are causing it, as other commenters mentioned.

      • Lem Jukes@lemm.ee
        2·
        1 year ago

        Not a dev just a vaguely informed layman. But my understanding would be that the primary API iOS weather apps would use is weatherkit, which is not open source.

  • shexbeer@feddit.de
    4·
    1 year ago

    Where do these opensource apps get their data from? Usually retrieving weather data costs money when you use an api. I guess those „opensource“ weather apps use an ad model to finance this api calls. May work on a large user base.

    Usally iOS users buy their products so i guess gathering a large user base for ad revenue model isnt working for those devs