iOS Swift developer with an unhealthy amount of Android and Flutter thrown in. Cycling enthusiast. Admirer of TTRPGs, sometimes a player, often times a GM.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • It was originally meant as a better JavaScript and it was. It failed when none of the other browsers expressed interest in supporting it. It languished for a while and then was taken up by the Flutter team. At the time Flutter took it up it was somewhere around the level of Java 8 in features but not quite on par. Since then it’s seen some massive improvements to the type system and language. It’s completely null sound, not just null safe like Kotlin. It recently got records/tuples and one of the more capable pattern matching syntaxes I’ve ever seen in a functional imperative hybrid language. The next stable version of dart will introduce a compiler macro system that is very promising. The syntax isn’t always the prettiest due to it trying to not totally break old code. I do think that it offers a wide range of modern language features that competes heavily with Swift and Kotlin in the mobile space.







  • I’m going to sound very negative here and it isn’t because I don’t like open source software. I use it and contribute to it. The problem with OSS apps is that they get cloned by people who don’t care about the license and repackaged with predatory subscriptions or with malware. In the case of malware these lowlifes go out on sites like Fiver and offer to pay unsuspecting developers to distribute the app. If the app is downloaded even once, that developer now faces a lifetime ban from distributing Android apps. I suspect similar things happen on the App Store. It’s just more visible in the Android forums I follow than it is in the iOS ones.

    I have seen stories of oss apps being cloned and then Apple mistakenly not letting the original dev upload updates because the app has been flagged in their system as being a spam app or built from a template. This is usually correctable with enough email to support.

    My recommendation is to keep your app closed source on both platforms. If you want to contribute to the communities, release a library or contribute to one. If you want to show How to write an app, make something minimal and trivial like a todo list. You can also create a blog.








  • Recently I made an app using Flutter that I tried to distribute over the Windows Store. I was unable to get past the company verification process despite having whatever I needed. Their backend management site is pretty bad. Eventually I got stuck in some loop where the page would just keep refreshing endlessly. The tax form site which is separate wraps another site in an iframe. I decided to set it aside for a while because the app is also in the Amazon store. If I can conjure up the energy I’ll fight that beast again.