Like everyone else, I have a hacker news client, which is "universal" (in the Apple sense), and is made around how I use the site. I might even release this one, one day.
I wonder what the fallout of this will be, it seems a lot worse than the maps launch that's given as the reason for Scott Forstall leaving the company.
The quality of their software has declined significantly in the past 15 years. That said, it's still pretty good and this is probably down to reducing scope.
Apple's software only runs on their hardware, they regularly exclude recent and capable devices from running the latest versions and they deprecate and ignore insustry standards liberally (OpenGL, Vulkan, Nvidia GPUs). This makes their software much simpler to write. Compare that to Android, which runs on anything, or Windows, which I hear can do crazy stuff like run apps from the 3.X days.
It doesn't even have to be this convoluted. They can just do what they did with email. Step one, wait until they have the vast majority of users, then due to spam/'problematic' content, algorithmically block the vast majority of other instances from interacting with theirs.
I saw the announcement yesterday for 'Substack Notes', which is clearly inspired by Twitter, and thought to myself that these companies are going to clash sometime in the future. Pretty outrageous reaction, lol.
The problem here is that the vast majority of "social" activity has migrated from thousands of little silos into 3 websites (Reddit, Facebook and Twitter).
This creates a massive attack surface for would-be spammers, as well as a situation where "Xbox fans" have to share a space with "Playstation fans" and are expected to get along i.e. fertile ground for trolls.
The only solution I can see for this, is a return to the world we had in 2005, forum.xbox-fanatics.foo and forum.ps-fanatics.bar
I'm primarily a mobile dev, so I generally don't have much choice in the matter of what languages I use (Swift, Java, Kotlin).
Occasionally, for a side project, I'll need some sort of back-end. This usually means I need to get some data from somewhere, process it a bit, store it and then ask for it at a later date. JS (Typescript in my case) is more than adequate for this, and if I add Redis and Nginx I can get away with paying very little for a VPS to run it on quite reliably.
The JS landscape has lots of problems, but I don't wade too deep into it so I'm mostly content.
Like everyone else, I have a hacker news client, which is "universal" (in the Apple sense), and is made around how I use the site. I might even release this one, one day.