Comment by titzer
4 hours ago
There's definitely a mismatch between expectations between what you inferred I meant and what I really mean. We agree that the majority of people are not going to suddenly stop being zombies if the platform were more open for development. It's a complex societal issue that's driven by the media atmosphere and the attention economy and affects all platforms. But smartphones are the platform that seems to be the most extremely affected and it definitely is accelerated by the locked down, content-consuming, ad-laden nature of everything the platform drives them to do. Nothing about the interaction mode of a touchscreen phone lends itself to being able to do deep work particularly well, but then on top of that all the platforms' incentives push away from it again.
> If you're so blinded by hate because there are hoops (which there absolutely are), and you refuse to jump at all
It's not necessary to bring that energy to HN and I'm going to nope right on at the point you accuse me of not being technical enough.
It's not a question of being technical enough. It's actually a question of being too technical. You're here, which for me garners youa base level of respect if only because I've had the creators of certain subjects of discussion have responded directly to me grousing here.
Because you're technical, the iOS restriction that code must be signed seems insurmountable, because it is. But if you know less about computers, you'd find bitrig or swift playgrounds or Pythonista. And knowing even less, you get into building web apps. For what people want to do and create; they don't know frontend from backend and are just getting their feet wet, a phone does alright.
Could it better at it? Absolutely, no question about that! But so could everything else in life. It depends on where on the spectrum you exist, A laptop is better than a phone for writing code for a lot of reasons, but when we're looking at the bigger picture, a phone is better than nothing.