Comment by psanford
7 months ago
It sucks that the ongoing maintenance cost for the native mobile platforms is so high. Who wants to develop on top of a platform that is constantly changing out from under you?
It really makes me nostalgic for the vision of webOS (although not the implementation of webOS from 14 years ago).
But that's Scott's point. If the OS devs had thought through this from the beginning, app devs wouldn't have to keep dealing with breakage. iOS devs have other issues, but not these.
Apple and Google approached the mobile OS from opposite sides. Apple locked everything down and has gradually been adding access/features. Google left the barn door open, and is now trying to shut it. I know which OS/API I'd rather program against.
Heh, I never worked on iOS but based on what I heard from our iOS team at the time, I don't think iOS was any better. Though a lot of the frustrations back then were largely app review issues rather than API stability, like trying to push out a big feature release or bug fix and getting rejected because the reviewer found a new way to follow 20 links to get from the help center website to a page allowing you to sign up for a subscription outside the app store...
Web might be a better counter example - it started super locked down, but has slowly gained useful functionality like notifications, USB, serial, GPU, etc within the sandbox model. It just encourages more investment over time as new functionality is added, rather than annoying devs as useful functionality (documented or undocumented) is taken away.
iOS doesn't regularly break these mainstay APIs.. but when they do break APIs, they never backport them, unlike Google.
One example of an API where we lost power in exchange for security was UIWebView -> WKWebView.
It can end up being far more annoying than usual, even for smaller APIs, because you must maintain both versions of APIs until you get the green light to raise the minimum permitted iOS version.