In my experience this is only partially true. Apple has come a long way and their code signing experience is leaps and bounds better than Android at this point. Their UI testing is actually pretty solid, and Swift is a wonderful language to program in. The IDE part is partially true, but to be fair they are opening things up to coding agents (they're using Claude Code themselves) so I feel like this is only going to get better from here.
replyI used to drown in this stuff in the when I first did IOS dev back in 2017. I recently got back into it and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I could setup a ci/cd pipeline. What used to take hours figuring out certs, debugging build issues, I can now even test my build against prod without even deploying.
replyI'm not building anything complicated, just a iPhone / watch app, but when I do get stuck with env its codex to the rescue. IMO relative to my experience many years ago its amazing.
I assume you hit some limitations if you try to use Xcode Cloud for a larger project, but for small-scale use it’s pretty great. The setup is instant and seamless, builds are fast, and you get a bunch of minutes with your developer membership, which has been fixed at $99 for as long as I can remember.
replyand what kind of world do we live in now
replyAndroid tooling is cross-platform and easily executed in your choice of CI provider with cheap Linux ARM minutes. Simulator-based UI tests are headless (there are headless tests for iOS but not macOS). It's not even remotely a close comparison.
replyThat must be why everyone’s trying to release Android apps now.
replyNo, the apple ecosystem will always hold a monopoly over stupid upper class people to fleece. Apple will say "jump" and Developers will ask how high (if they know what's good for their wallet)
replyA world where people use Claude to operate doomed SaaS products
replyWhich are developed in jails, in virtual containers in other containers in virtual machines on top of hypervisor cloud system
reply>How I wish we have proper web app apis at last
replyYou mean APIs that inconsiderate developers use to release a simple calculator in the form of a 300+MB binary that eats a quarter of my RAM?
They might still be living in that world, but they also live in a world where they can do exactly $0 of R&D of actual rack server SKUs and still have people buying their high-end MBP SKUs at halfway-decent used car prices.
replySo I get why they don't care.