5
points
Aulig
Joined 649 karma
janδwebtoapp.design
- Aulig parentIt's to fool primitive scrapers looking for e-mail addresses with the @ symbol. It's handled like that on the entire KIT website.
- Oh cool :) I've tried out cursor for a more AI driven development experience, but didn't end up making the switch from Pycharm. I'm just so used to the Jetbrains IDEs that the additional AI capabilities (over the Github copilot plugin) didn't make it worth it for me to switch. But I'm thinking that gap in capabilities may be widening, so I want to give it another shot.
- I publish lots of apps and don't have a great explanation either. I guess if you say that you just fixed some bugs, neither the app reviewers nor the users will pay too much attention and just approve/download the update, which is what you want as the app developer. Or it's just laziness. Or a communication disconnect between the person in charge of writing the changelog and the product/development team.
- Disclosure: I run https://webtoapp.design where I convert websites into mobile apps (and help publish them).
Basically, yes, wrap it in a WebView. I'd need to see your mobile website to judge it better, but if it looks like a website, Apple might reject it. Your website really needs to look like an app to have some certainty of getting it through if your app only consists of a WebView.
At webtoapp.design we usually include some native components in the apps. Although they might not add functionality (just replaces some website components), they help get the app published.
I guess you'll have to decide based on your hourly rate whether it's worth it to tinker with some self-built solution or if you are also open to going with a finished product. I don't want this to sound too much like an ad, just expanding on the time save (because often you don't think about all the things in advance): - If your client decides he wants push notifications: A finished solution should already have support for that - For Apple, you'll also need to set up your Xcode developer environment and manage all the certificates and provisioning profiles (personally, I found that complicated when I started out). With webtoapp.design we handle all of that automatically (we upload a finished build to your developer account) - not sure if some competitors do that too.
- I've been working on https://webtoapp.design for for 4 years now (in 10 days). It's my first business, so I've made plenty of mistakes. By now I have someone that handles the easier customer support inquiries and after all the other costs I can live off of it (not an appropriate software engineer salary for Europe, but it's enough).
It can be very frustrating, since I help my customers through the entire app creation and publishing process, so that includes dealing with Google and Apple.
I keep working on it because it's growing slowly but steadily and it provides me a lot of flexibility. I don't know which marketing channels to focus on to speed up growth though, at the moment it's pretty much all SEO.
- What a stupid requirement. I run an app builder and offer my users plenty of ways to test their app beforehand, but outside of Google Play, since their system is just cumbersome.
This will make it nearly impossible to get an app published as a small business, since who the hell has 20 users just waiting for your app? It's already a huge struggle to help people with publishing their app.
The road to hell is truly paved with good intentions. All the scam apps will have no problem cheating this system, but honest devs will struggle. I can only hope Google reconsiders this requirement, otherwise it might be worth it to push my users more towards alternative app stores. We already support the Amazon App Store and the Huawei App Gallery (which are a lot easier to publish apps in), but the user base is just not there unfortunately.
- These minimum SDK requirements have been known for a very long time. It's correct that the email only got sent recently, but the requirements are usually announced 2 years in advance in this manner:
After 0 days: New Android version comes out After 1 year: App Updates need to target the latest Android version After 2 years: Apps can't be downloaded on devices with the "new" Android version anymore unless they target the "new" Android version
So normally there should be plebty of time to prepare. However, if you're an indie developer or not actively maintaining the app, then it definitely is annoying, since usually the apps would work perfectly fine on the new Android version without updating the targetSdk version.
- I used to have high myopia and continuously increasing, which is also a large risk factor for retinal detachment. I think I originally learned about vision improvement through wearing weaker glasses on HN so I feel the obligation to share it since it has helped me manage (and even reduce) my myopia.
- I visited South Africa in February. You can tell crime is rampant by how every home has 2m walls with barbed wire or electric fencing on top.
Most of the country was still very beautiful, but man Johannesburg is really run down. My father was there 30 years ago and he couldn't get over how this once beautiful city could have come to this. Vacancies and broken windows everywhere right in the city center.
If you're just looking to go on vacation in the general region, Namibia is a better option in my opinion.