Comment by jimbokun
2 years ago
> In our actual world, I built it in about a week, and roughly half of that time was spent wrestling with different flavors of code-signing and identity provisioning and I don’t even know what. I burned some incense and threw some stones and the gods of Xcode allowed me to pass.
This resonated with me.
This is a major source of friction to "scratching your own itch" in modern software development. Makes it extremely painful to get started. And runs against an engineering mindset, as it's not understanding principles of computing or composing components in a sensible way to build a useful new thing. It's just banging your head spamming incantations found through Google until something finally works.
Indeed. The #1 thing I need from my platforms is that I don't need to get anyone else's permission to develop and install any programs on it that I wish. That basically rules out Apple and Microsoft.
I say this as a Linux user
What do you mean by ruling out Microsoft? You can install and run your own software on Windows?
I've run into lots of issues running my programs on Windows. Sometimes it will even delete the executables outright if it decides they are dangerous. This was mostly with networked and virtualization apps.
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Unless it's a driver. Windows wants those signed by Microsoft. There are ways to get around that, but they're not wonderful.
This bit me a month or so ago at work. I don't use Windows at home.
I've made several home-brewed apps for ios. I just make them webpages, host them for free with Github Pages, and on my phone I make that url into a home screen app and voila. No app store interaction needed.
> It's just banging your head spamming incantations found through Google until something finally works.
Yea, all the while hoping you don't mess up something even worse!
I feel like Apple has made some strides in this area - having Xcode manage a bunch of profiles + key signing and whatever else it does when I click "Yes, make it easier for me". But it also randomly forgets settings and breaks etc. which is fun to re-troubleshoot.
It's spectacular how awful Apple's signing/certs/profiles dev UX is.
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This is where a pi web server along with cloudflare tunnel and a website really shine. You don't need to ask anyone to run that service. I'm running a custom todo app off my pi without exposing my router. It's incredibly freeing.
Another way could be host it on a Tailscale network, then it can only be accessed by your own devices.
We need something that goes one level beyond Tailscale. It should be built on a simple open OAuth2 protocol for establishing tunnels/VPNs so you can choose different providers. Then developers can implement tunneled networking directly into their apps.
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