Saturday, December 31, 2011

State of the App

Hey everyone, there's a few things that I want to write about. For today, we're going to talk about the app for iOS that I've made several posts on.

A few months ago my developer account expired and I decided not to renew it at this time. My reasoning is pretty simple: I don't want to be directly supporting a company like Apple who is trying to poison the personal computing industry. I'm tired of the system lockouts, the constant injunctions against competitors' products. The fact that you must develop for iOS on an Apple computer (or in a VM) also annoys me.

On top of that, it's expensive and time consuming for someone casually working on it to keep up with the entire system. My iPhone 3G is still running iOS 3.1.3 to keep it from getting bogged down. My VM is running an older version of OSX, so I can't install the latest dev tools. If I wanted to do things the "proper" and "right" way (according to Apple) I would need to spend around $1000 just to bring my tools (computer and iphone/ipod) up to date!

Setting aside my stance against the company, the iOS app market is highly competitive. Sure, I was working on something in a less competitive subsection, but is it really worth my time? Maybe yes, maybe no, but what I do know is that I'd rather be spending the time working on my electronics projects than grinding out more PDFs for the app.

So since I'm not renewing my account, it goes hand-in-hand that I won't be finishing this app in the near future. Maybe someday I'll come back to it and finish it off. Apple currently falls in with a small list of companies that I choose not to financially support (Sony and Ubisoft are the others). If they manage to pull their self-righteous head out of the sand, then I'll rethink my position.