[mdhb]

There is also something to be said for being a developer in an ecosystem that is actively hostile towards you and your interests as a software developer.

It looks a lot like Stockholm syndrome from the outside at least.

But I genuinely don’t understand how or why anyone would pick up native iOS / MacOS development in 2024. It seems like an incredibly shit medium to long term bet.

[jwells89]

My reason is that frameworks are generally more wide and deep than can be found elsewhere. It’s not difficult at all to build a polished app with nothing but Swift and AppKit/UIKit, with few or no third party libraries, which is increasingly rare in my experience (certainly not the case with WinUI or Android Framework). The next most comparable thing is Qt Widgets, but that’s for practical purposes restricted to either C++ or Python and is seemingly not receiving much attention any more than it’s been decided that the more “bring your own everything” style Qt Quick is the star of the Qt show.

AppKit/UIKit aren’t afraid to be opinionated either which is occasionally annoying but 90% of the time a good thing, because that makes for tested and supported happy paths that work well. Android Framework is the biggest contrast here, being littered with multiple half-baked ways to do everything, none of which Google has shown any particular preference toward until in just the past few years.

What would get me to move for my personal projects is something with that solidly “batteries included” aspect to it (there’s no excuse for needing to rope in a third party library to get something as mundane as a scrolling sortable table view with headers in a desktop UI framework, that’s like new cars coming without wheels) and similar opinionation, along with support for Swift or compiled Swift-like language.

[Cthulhu_]

I dunno about MacOS but iOS is a potential market of billions of users; for that kind of market people are willing to eat a lot of shit sandwiches. And there's plenty of markets where the development tools are much, much worse.

[greenthrow]

iOS is a better place to make money than Android.

[viraptor]

Until you're not allowed to anyone. You get the higher risk and higher reward with them and just have to hope they're not looking at your app specifically today.