apapli

TLDR; We want to get free users to move to paid plans sooner, by (a) relaxing sharing limits, and (b) reducing the amount of pages you can create to 3 unless you upgrade.

Existing work created prior to 21 April will be unaffected.

I taught myself to code, started in 2010 after 10 years in IT infra/networking. I’m not a professional developer and it’s a hobby for me - I did a humanities degree with no comp/sci background.

Initially I built a simple crud app to track water changes for my aquarium. For a while there I had it online as a free SaaS app too. It was using Ruby on Rails, and I had no idea how to use JavaScript to make the UX better.

Fast forward a few years and I was getting fed up with voicemail, so I read up on APIs and figured out how to use GCPs transcription service, pointing to audio files in twilio (I diverted my mobile to twilio to act as my voicemail). Actually pretty simple even though it might sound complicated.

Fast forward to last year and I built a free directory to raise the profile of primary producers who were missing out on foot traffic as a result of COVID, closely followed by another project I’m close to launching. These last two projects were in nodejs as I figured I had better finally figure out JavaScript.

When I was completely stuck on something I did a lot of googleing and watching YouTube - that happened a lot, particularly when trying to get my head around promises.

Moral of the story, don’t be put off with CRUD apps, they are very rewarding. Just build stuff you enjoy when you have spare time (for me evenings after child in bed).

I started doing an MBA at a top Australian university. I won the top student award in digital marketing.

I found that I was spending most of my time carrying other students rather than actually learning something beyond what I could read in a book or already knew, at least at the conceptual level.

And believe me when I say I’m not smart in an academic sense.

Family issues came up and with a waning interest I dropped out while getting enough points for a Grad Cert.

Fast forward a decade later and I’ve filed a patent pending in AI and another one in video messaging.

The MBA was for the most part a waste of time, money and energy.

I really didn’t learn much, except to recognise getting an MBA is more to do with ones ability to persevere through an incredibly dry and uninteresting range of subjects for many years at a time.

Save your money, and spend it on something more useful. $40k gets you a lot of azure/aws/gcp credits plus lifetime accounts of Lynda.com training and pretty much any other online course aggregator you care to imagine.

You’re spot on!

expo.io

Agree, but my needs are simple and I develop using expo.io. So once my app is published often minor changes can be pushed straight through to my app without App Store approvals. So it would be $26 per upload (ouch), but my “upload” may only be once every few months so I’d easily be ahead.

My needs are simple enough that the standard inclusions in expo.io work without complication. I could imagine more complex apps need a more involved dev setup but not in my case.

Expo.io is good enough for my needs. Cross platform, just run it on my iPhone and and android simulator. Also, the way expo works is that not all updates need to go through the App Store approvals. I can quickly dev/test/release once I have the app container approved by the relevant store.

expo build:ios actually.

My only need for a Mac with expo is for the upload. The apk file is taken care of with the command above.

I have an iPhone I use for development and testing. Bonus points is that expo is cross platform, so I can publish to google play with the same single code base too.

I’m always developing without xcode. Using expo I can write apps in react native on my desktop and vscode. Mac only required for the upload to the App Store.

Interesting. The deciding factor for our family when buying a Mac or Windows 10 device for my wife’s small business was actually my need to upload iOS apps for review by apple.

I’m an after hours hobby developer, and use a windows desktop. It’s powerful and has all the tooling I require. And it supports all the games I want to play from the steam store.

So - I think apple will lose a little bit of business from people like me with this announcement, as I’m sure we would not have purchased a Mac when we did only a few months ago.