2
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jclardy
Joined 1,409 karma
- jclardyIn this case you are spot on, the landing page is AI generated, just because I've never enjoyed doing front-end web development myself. That plus this app is very deeply rooted in Apple's platforms (Essentially requiring an Apple Watch to be effective), the majority of users are coming from app store search directly, rather than through the landing page.
- Thanks! I'm looking into Vitamin D estimation for a future version, the main issue is there are a ton of factors that need to be considered, the main one is simply how much skin you have exposed when you are outdoors. A simple question but it requires a dedicated user to update the app with their wardrobe every day.
- My portfolio of iOS apps ends up at an average of $500/mo.
Most are older, still functional but rarely updated. A few of the newer ones include:
https://daylightgoals.com - Time in daylight tracker, using Apple Watch/HealthKit as the data source.
https://airlauncher.app - App launcher for visionOS - was much bigger last year before Apple added the ability to organize your apps.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ibuzz/id304684758?ls=1&mt=8 - iBuzz - I built this app in a day 15 years ago, it still makes about $100/mo from ads and removing ads. Just a simple buzzer soundboard app.
- Which "user" are you referring to? Cloudflare users or end product users?
End product users have no power, they can complain to support and maybe get a free month of service, but the 0.1% of customers that do that aren't going to turn the tide and have anything change.
Engineering teams using these services also get "covered" by them - they can finger point and say "everyone else was down too."
- > I don't understand how anyone can use LLMs and not see this instantly
Because people in general are not thorough. I've been playing around with Claude Code and before that, Cursor. And both are great tools when targeted correctly. But I've also tried "Vibe" coding with them and it is obvious where people get fooled - it will build a really nice looking shell of a product that appears to be working, but then you step into using it past the surface layer and issues start to show. Most people don't look past the surface layer, and instead keep digging in having the agent build on the crappy foundation, until some time later it all falls apart (And since a lot of these people aren't developers, they have also never heard of source control.)
- I find a similar thing with budgeting apps. Manually tracking requires effort and for you to think twice before every purchase, whereas automatic transaction syncing with your bank means you can just not think about it.
In the case of dieting/calorie counting - I don't think you can get away with not thinking about it, especially with inaccurate estimates.
- I've used the AI features in Lose It and was pretty impressed, not for the caloric estimate, but when given a picture of a breakfast burrito it accurately split it out into the component parts, from there I could manually adjust amounts easily for food I make without having to manually search out every ingredient manually. As an additional tool it is great.
The issue of course is these new apps built with a sole focus of AI images for tracking. With a photo of restaurant food you can't see a sauce and the 5-10g of additional sugar content, can't get accurate guesses of what is in breads/pastas and figuring out general volumes of foods is not possible unless you have some kind of standard size reference in the frame.
- Google is making money hosting these videos, and users are freely uploading them. A competitor would have to scrape/download them, store them, process them all at their own cost, along with having much less metadata available (Which videos are most viewed, which segments, what do people repeat, what do people skip, what do people watch after this video, which video generates the most ad revenue, etc.)
- I don't get the whole "all-in" mentality around LLMs. I'm an iOS dev by trade, I continue to do that as I always have. The difference now is I'll use an LLM to quickly generate a one-off view based on a design. This isn't a core view of an app, the core functionality, or really anything of importance. It's a view that promotes a new feature, or how to install widgets, or random things. This would normally take me 30-60 min to implement depending on complexity, now it takes 5.
I also use it for building things like app landing pages. I hate web development, and LLMs are pretty good at it because I'd guess that is 90% of their training data related to software development. For that I make larger changes, review them manually, and commit them to git, like any other project. It's crazy to me that people will just go completely off the rails for multiple hours and run into a major issue, then just start over when instead you can use a measured approach and always continue forward momentum.
- They should really make it open as a dialog attached to the system preferences window, and within that include what app/service is requesting permissions. Having the free floating window isn’t good for anyone, and duplicating the settings app would at least make it slightly more difficult to fake.
- A problem I have, and I'd guess a lot of people now have, is organization. We have the ability to easily capture content, and even easier now organize it via albums. But you have to build your own "system" of organization. And now we use our camera for mundane things, like screenshots, reminders, documentation, etc. so the amount of new data is just ever increasing.
My parents had a camcorder that was out for special occasions. The organization is automatically chronological, everything is a highlight because there are (relatively) way fewer videos, and if you sit down to watch them, you get a multi-month span, with multiple events on a single tape.
Apple/Google Photos attempt to recreate some of this by grouping & generating videos, but for me it doesn't have quite the same feeling, they are usually too specific like "Trip to NY" rather than "November/December 1997".
- This is my ideal setup. And I'd have it switch to macOS mode just with keyboard/mouse, so inside the magic keyboard it is just the most slick 11" macbook air ever built. Pop it out and you are dropped back into iOS.
I'd easily pay $3k for a top end version of such a device. I think this is Apple's main holdup - if the iPad can run macOS in this dual mode setup, the MacBook Air becomes pretty boring and a pretty bad deal. And they can no longer sell people two devices that accomplish the same task, only differentiated by one having a touchscreen.
- I just bought a Surface Pro 11 and love it. I've jumped from mac into the surface line every few years and I totally agree with you - the fans on the old models were spinning just by having a few chrome tabs opened.
But...if you can live with Windows on Arm (Which has improved greatly in the past year) the SP11 has been great. Battery life is incredible.
For me I was never looking to fully replace my actual laptop, but more to replace my iPad with something that is actually capable of doing any sort of development work if needed. The iPad is a much better tablet, hands down, but even just updating a static website on an iPad is an absolute chore and requires multiple apps to function.
- Honestly I'd just want an iPad as it is today + a built in, sandboxed VM running macOS. So I can run macOS apps when needed (Basically Xcode/terminal/slack for me) and for everything else, I'd use iPadOS. Plug it into a monitor/keyboard and it just runs the macOS VM.
- Okay, lets take a simple example.
Indie app A, owned by a developer, Joe. Company B buys A outright, including employing Joe. They keep the brand around for name recognition.
How does the app store know this? None of this has to be public info if A & B aren't public. The company registration hasn't changed. At best, maybe the bank account number changed.
- Same for me. I just launched my first full stack side project (I'm a mobile dev by day.) I was always technically capable of it...but using LLM's I basically was able to skip the "how do I do X in node" steps and significantly speed up the backend side of things, while I still learned a ton in the process.
Now it feels like I have these incredible capabilities to apply LLMs in novel ways. I've had a personal project (an expense tracking app) where now I can see a path to easily do things like scanning receipts accurately, automatically categorizing CSV imports, etc. They were always within the realm of possibility - but would have taken so much more time to build as a one man shop. And we are just at the tip of the iceberg right now.
- Neat idea, but at $140, being phone specific, and just the ergonomics of holding the phone from the bottom when it is now an extra 2 inches taller all sound pretty bad.
Also concerning that no where in the landing page does it specify how it connects, or show an example of how "easy" it is to put on and take off (On second glance - it is shown in passing 2 minutes into the 10 minute long intro video.)
Not to mention being called "clicks" but no audio demo of what the keys actually sound like?
- I think the problem likely goes deeper - most of the parents are likely smartphone addicted already, so they see no issue with it. Or they may see the issue with their child's usage of a phone, but they justify their own constant need for using a phone with it being "for work" or what have you and the child is just following in their example as they constantly see them pulling out their phone.
I'm not a parent yet, and I don't have any answers..but as a 90's kid I can't imagine what it is like now growing up with access to all the world's information in your pocket.
- From my experience in 15 years of mobile development - there are developers out there who are more interested in building great software rather than building great products. The framework that they work in is the highest order of priority, and everything else is secondary to that.
If a new requirement comes in, they will pass it off as "impossible" or give it an incredibly high estimate, when in reality, it just needs a little creativity and doesn't work in their self-imposed limitations of the application.
Not to say these developers aren't useful - they are great at cleaning up and organizing messy codebases, but it can easily be taken to an extreme, at the detriment of the actual goal of the project.
But again - I don't think this even applies only to developers - it is all industries. There are people who optimize things for a better end-user experience, and people who optimize things for their own personal/team work experience. Ultimately you want both once your team grows beyond a handful of people.