itsovermyhead

I think you're misinterpreting the sentence, I did too when I first read it. He's using plain old, as a reference to normal or regular.

Like, I just wore a plain old shirt to the concert. Meaning, I just wore a regular shirt to the concert.

In this sentence, it means, "or just the regular reason of 'you're not doing a great job'."

Thanks for the reply! I'm going to give it a shot!

Any chance you can write down a little more tactical instructions on how you did this? I'd love to try this out, but am not super technical.

He doesn't HAVE to be, but he is. Isn't that a good thing?

> It could be that while a small number of users are helped by his personal attention on the forum, a much larger number of users are left frustrated by the UI.

This is just speculation. Without data to back it up, I can say the reverse is true too.

Since there isn't a large number of users that are posting about how terrible the UI is(on the Calibre forum), it's probably functional enough and people can navigate it.

I can't speak towards his attitude toward security flaws, but I think his reaction to not wanting Calibre updated is reasonable.

Anytime a UI is updated, you're going to completely modify the behavior or of the people that are using it. So any change someone else is making that isn't as closely tied with the product as he is, is probably going to be suboptimal. Not only from a user experience perspective, but also from his ability to answer questions on the forum as people are asking him questions about how to achieve certain things.

This means that he'll HAVE to be closely tied with a redesign. Which is probably not where he wants to be spending a significant amount of his time.

There's also the added complexity of legacy users that are just book people, that are quite used to the design as it is, so any migration over the new one, no matter how gradual, is probably going to make the product harder for them to use.

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with him, but his reasoning is valid. This isn't a project where you just hand off to someone completely new and let them do what they want. That's how you end up with a broken product.

That's a pretty poor strawman.

There are multiple stores that you can try and get your product on. If Walmart doesn't work, then you could try Target, or Aldi, or Amazon.

You have literally one option to go with on iOS. You can't even "drive to a new store", as switching to Android costs hundreds of dollars, and not everyone is in a financial situation to purchase a new phone on a whim.

I won't argue about the specifics of this, Epic paid lawyers millions of dollars to draft a court document about the monopolization of the iOS app distribution store. I'd urge you to read the document first before drawing pretty poor parallels.

We're on Hacker News, so the amount of people that are comfortable with sideloading apps on iOS is definitely going to be skewed.

I don't think that it's a good argument to make that anyone can do it, because it does require _some_ technical knowledge in order to do it. I'd make the argument that if it's not accessible to everyone, then I don't think it's a viable replacement for an app store.

To lean on F-droid as an example on the Android side, outside of the initial installation of F-droid(which can be done from your phone), you can easily browse F-droid and install apps.

I don't think it's as easy to sideload apps on iOS. I haven't done it in years(since my jailbreak days), but I remember that you needed to be on a Mac and needed xcode to do it. It's probably updated now to make it a bit easier, but from a quick Google it looks like you need to download a separate program in order to do it. It looks like other ways to sideload apps requires some abuse of developer certificates to make it work.