> On an unrelated side-note, if you've played Half-Life, Freeman's Mind is a must-watch: it's an astoundingly funny bit of comedy that is just so brilliant.
True. Also I just learned that he actually finished the whole game. I used to follow this series as he was producing it, and I thought he gave up halfway through.
Currently I found peace of mind with react+redux. Once you find a stable and well configured boilerplate (Redux slingshot for me), it's smooth sailing.
Way faster. We are using a rails API and a React+Flux app as a front end. The whole setup time alone is a considerable pain. I feel that the JS tooling is still too fragmented and sometimes messy, but I'm probably biased by years of rails and iOS development.
Writing the app takes more time since you need to write everything from the ground up (e.g.: no Devise views to just style and forget), but I really hope that in the future the investment will pay. I wrote about it a while ago (although now we are using the more terse Alt implementation): http://fancypixel.github.io/blog/2015/01/28/react-plus-flux-...
That would be great. Any idea on how effort is required for an incubator to become affiliated?
My incubator is a university, so they move their butt at a painfully slow rate.
I share your feeling. We are running our cloud platform on AWS, and it's hard to offer competitive prices when you are not founded and the AWS bills kick your ass.
We are in an university incubator that gives us the office space (we pay a 'friendly' rent) and that's it.
I realize it's a petty feeling, but...
What do you mean by lack of retro compatibility? You can still ship apps that target ios6, you have runtime checks for APIs that are missing in one version, the IDE suggests what is available or not.
The major versions (and minors) are thoroughly documented in API diffs, the IDE suggests what to modify according to your platform target.
The review guidelines are basically changing for the major versions, accordingly to the new tech introduced, and most of them are dictated by common sense.
If something goes awry the review team is available to discuss with you. Good luck getting an Android app reinstated if it is taken down.
The certificates are a pain in the ass, no way around that, but the rest of the platform makes up for this, the tools and language(s) are way easier to use.
Exactly. I'm a developer, but I try my hand desingning most of my apps. Sketch replaced Illustrator and in part Photoshop. I do all my vector graphics with it, from mockups to production assets. It's fast, easy to use and made by a small brilliant team. [Shameless plug]: I've been designing an icon every day with it: https://github.com/andreamazz/one-icon-a-day
Getting started is one thing, completing a product is another. It's not an uncommon metric to apply a 1.5x or 2x multiplier to the development time of an iOS app to obtain the time to develop the Android one.
I would also argue that from the same starting point (no java experience and no Swift experience) the learning curve is way smoother on iOS, with more fine tuned APIs and better tools (interface builder can be picked up easily by a designer with no coding background).
Yeah, the problem is that with this line of reasoning a startup is destined to fail. If I don't get clients, I can't keep my business open. That's what irks me. How can I prove myself in the market if I don't get a chance?
iOS development will always be native for me, the tools are not perfect, but they feel right, I can get stuff done in no time. Android on the other hand... I can't express how much I loathe the tools and language. So much that I stopped caring. React native might be an alternative.