iOS indie app development looks like
51 comments
·February 10, 2025999900000999
wahnfrieden
This article is about making money from the App Store, not distributing hobby projects. App Store is great for making money when that is your goal.
Some of the friction you mention is if anything a competitive advantage to those able to deliver quality work despite the challenges. I agree it's hostile to hobbyist development and early career learning.
ToucanLoucan
I have a hard time taking people seriously who make such a huge deal out of the developer account pricing. A hundred bucks per year just isn't much money, I'm sorry, maybe it's my privilege talking, but if you're getting into iOS development you have, at base, one mac and one iDevice, if for NO other reason than development and testing of the app you want to make. The cheapest Mac available new is $600, and the cheapest iDevice is the iPad, for $349, or the iPhone SE, for $429. At minimum to get started as an iOS dev then requires an investment of just shy of a grand, and like, I don't particularly like that, but to then turn that around and be like "but this $99 per year subscription is ridiculous" is just... what!?
I don't consider myself a huge "project guy" either but I do tinker, and I absolutely CRUSH $100 per MONTH in terms of buying shit to fiddle with, from Raspberry Pi's to 3D printer parts, to new PC peripherals I wanna try, etc. etc. I struggle to conceive of someone in this space to whom $99/year for an Apple dev account is just this unbearable outlay.
sylens
My problem is that its an annual cost. When I dabbled in Android development, I think I paid a one-time fee of $25. That's a cost I can swallow for someone who wants to release apps for free. If I have to pay $100 a year, I need to make that money back from my apps which means I probably need to make them subscription based. Which leads us to the world we live in today.
ryandrake
"But you pay for other things" is not a good excuse. It's not that the price is unbearable--it's that it exists at all. I'd also complain if the price was $10/yr or $1/yr. It's the principle. I'm not going to pay for a row in a database that doesn't cost the company anything, without grumbling about it.
999900000999
All right, I'll give you an example. I made a small game about 4 years ago for iPhones, maybe 30 people downloaded it. It works fine, it's just a small game.
To prevent apple from just taking it down I have to pay $100 per year, meaning even if I don't actively develop apps anymore, I'm just wasting money.
Now if I wanted to play the Apple dance every 6 months and hope they let me actually publish my games, I got a lot of pushback with my first project, then I guess it would be worth it.
gjsman-1000
Okay; in which case, your little game was probably free.
How much would you pay for hosting at this point? The cheapest Droplet on DigitalOcean will cost you $60 per year. Maybe you planned to have your game downloaded from Google Drive, but I’m with Apple on this one, a small fee prevents many bad actors.
Especially when 95% of iOS developers are comfortably in the top 10% of US salaries, and top 1% worldwide.
peterallport
Won't folks prefer to use native system features (e.g. password protected apps or the "hidden" album in Photos app)?
gumby271
Maybe, but does that mean this app doesn't deserve to exist on user's computers if they so choose? Not sure why Apple has a say in that just because they have a massive advantage over every other dev on their platform.
jll29
There can be different views on this, I guess.
Apple is known to like to exercise control and to keep their ecosystem closed (recall that Jobs was initially AGAINST the AppStore concept entirely, which was invented by someone else and now makes a ton of money for Apple).
Open systems with little control lead to a bazar like the various Linux distros with inconsistent-looking and buggy apps mixed with great apps - anything goes.
Imagine you are Apple and you want your AppStore to convey a professional and safe look and feel, you probably don't want 60,000 converter or image viewer app but a variety of tools, maybe 5-10 per category max, or it will be hard for users to navigate and tiring to explore.
CharlesW
> recall that Jobs was initially AGAINST the AppStore concept entirely…
Jobs was initially against allowing third-party native apps on the iPhone, but not App Store as a distribution mechanism. Once he relented on inviting ISVs to the profit party, the iTunes Store model was never in question.
gumby271
I guess my disconnect is that the computer that a person owns isn't the same as a store that Apple runs and can carefully curate that runs on that computer. Combining those into one thing strikes me as dangerous, with not much upside. Everything you described can be true while allowing the user to use their computer how they want, it just doesn't make Apple as much money.
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B
That, and how did Apple managed to approve an application that hides its true purpose like that?
Twisell
The scariest part is probably the user-base ready to purchase such an App. The demo gif literally showcase "Jenn*Nud*.jpg" as an example..
NoMoreNicksLeft
Maybe I'm way out of touch, but does anyone over the 18 bother to hide their stash of pornography unless it's somehow illegal? I mean, be worried whether or not there's parental controls so the kids can't get to it, but to encrypt it?
brailsafe
I mean, I don't like JPGs as much as the next guy, but idk that I'd call them scary
choxi
I like SwiftUI, reactive frameworks just make sense to me for UIs. It also interfaces with UIKit in a pretty nice way so you don’t have to commit to one or the other. I’m a newer iOS dev though, I’ve heard many complaints from more experienced devs.
lawgimenez
I have encountered the infamous
> The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time; try breaking up the expression into distinct sub-expressions
a lot. And it’s impossible to debug.
floydnoel
that just means you have too many items together. break them up into smaller components or use something like a Group and that solves it. not a big mystery
lawgimenez
We all know it’s just the Swift compiler getting confused.
In my cases I encountered this error in different scenarios in offset modifier, Strings, Colors.
danielscrubs
The Swift compiler is still the only compiler I know that times out.
Algorithmic complexity is such a large part of a fancy university education that I just don’t understand how they could come up with swifts feature set if they knew it would come back and royally bite them.
What an I missing? What is the backstory?
kridsdale1
Im guessing:
The post Next Apple is entirely dependent on llvm. The hardware is tuned to its outputs. The devX is based on generating it.
Apple 15 years ago was getting worried people are not learning C in school anymore. They were learning python and ruby and js.
Swift exists as a way to market llvm as a tool chain to that market of programmers.
My views are informed by years of talking to Apple and build-for-Apple engineers.
int_19h
C# can also do that - there's a general problem there with combinatorial explosion when you combine function overloading with generics and lambdas.
mertbio
> we decided to test a sharp pivot just before shutting it down: rename the app, change the concept from a photo vault to a converter disguise, and sell encryption as a feature.
I’m not really convinced that by just changing those you can suddenly get a lot of downloads.
feifan
Positioning/messaging matters a lot!
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emoII
Really, the fact that Apple pushes swiftui as production ready is laughable. The framework is so ridden in bugs, does not play nicely with the other frameworks like photosui, and the language itself is incredibly bloated.
sandoze
So many things wrong with this. Reminds me of the Objective-c vs Swift arguments from back in the day. The author mentions the initial release, as someone who held out migrating production apps to Swift until v3 I think we all know early adoption is going to be bumpy.
But as of iOS 15+ SwiftUI is very production ready. I’ve migrated two production applications from UIKit to SwiftUI. These have active users and are available on the App Store.
Bloated? The last migration resulted in 79k new lines of code written and 181k deletions after rewriting 80% of the application.
Photos album works out of the box. If you mean camera then there are some issues depending on your use case. Beauty of SwiftUI is we can wrap UIKit views and interop allowing it to play nicely with other frameworks.
If you’re supporting applications that target the last few iOS versions it’s time to learn the new paradigm. Do yourself a favor but most of all anyone who might inherit your codebase.
wahnfrieden
Try doing performant infinite scrolling on macOS
sandoze
I primarily do iOS and iPadOS, but it’s far easier to bridge the gap between all the platforms than the experience I had in the past with UIKit/AppKit. My last MacOS app sadly does not do infinite scrolling.
Off the top of my head, I’d consider the approach. Is it a ScrollView? A LazyVStack? What do your view redraws look like?
Anyone working with Swift Strings back in Swift 1+2 was in for some shockingly bad performance. We adopt, we adapt, and the framework matures.
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brailsafe
I have no idea how well it works on iOS, but on Mac it's a sluggish black box api that could otherwise have some potential. There are workarounds, there are some nice components you can put together, but for me it was a little defeating to continue bashing my head against it.
samtheprogram
People I know who are iOS developers say differently.
The Swift language itself is bloated? Compared to what? Golang?
wahnfrieden
there's a meme that it has too many keywords, but this criticism is shallow. it also grew a lot of features quickly to prioritize SwiftUI support perhaps with unnecessary language complexity as a result.
I'm an iOS dev full-time now (bootstrapped) and SwiftUI is definitely not production ready if it means that it can be used without needing UIKit introspection hacks. I like it and ship all my work with it, but it is painfully broken and will take years more to mature
kridsdale1
IMO UIKit is not production ready without Core Animation hacks.
At least you have the option in all cases.
internetter
Yeah. You can get far using SwiftUI as your scaffold but you'll need to have introspection and/or UIKit components to do any app of reasonable complexity.
Apocryphon
With all of the continued complaints about SwiftUI I almost wonder if, the specter of the Google Graveyard aside, Flutter would be a better bet. Yeah, it might be a second-class non-native citizen on iOS, but if you’re gonna use a half-baked cross-platform solution why not use one that can also target Android?
CharlesW
You can target Android with Swift/Swift UI with SKIP.tools (skip.tools) and SCADE (scade.io), both of which use native controls on Android as well.
Apocryphon
I always hear about projects like this or even back before Swift, like Codename One which allows iOS apps to be written with Java and my question is- does anyone actually use these? Why do this rather than use React Native, Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, even .NET MAUI or whatever Microsoft is on? One would assume that if these were good solutions more people would be adopting them.
hn-acct
[flagged]
I gave up on mobile app dev years ago.
To Apple, I'm not giving you $100 per year for four people to play my hobbyist games. Not to mention getting my account approved in the first place was such a horrible process. They can and will deny your app for random reasons. I don't know how any independent developer really wants to base their entire income around such madness .
What they want is multi-billion companies publishing content consumption apps, and occasionally some slightly smaller multi-million dollar companies might get some sales.
Google used to be cool, but now you need to have 20 or something people download the app to test it first. Which is easy to game if you have enough money ( or I guess you just go out and buy 20 devices yourself, a cheap Android device is going to run you $50 or so).
At least with Android I can point you to my git repository, feel free to download my free APK.
Look at the source code, the build process, install it if you'd like.
However, there's always light. WebGL is at the point where I can publish small games directly onto a web page. No one needs to download anything, and no one needs to worry about me doing something bad.