Why are there so few open source weather apps for iOS, compared to the very many that are on Android?
Why are there so few open source weather apps for iOS, compared to the very many that are on Android?
iirc, it costs $99 a year to be able to upload apps on the apple app store rather than a one-time $25 on android. Also, apple test flight or whatever has a limited amount of people who can use it, rather than just installing an apk on android. Apple's ecosystem makes it much harder for open source or small apps to exist for iOS devices.
Also android has FDroid, which is free, and libre.
I believe the tools for iOS development are only available on Mac.
Not completely true. The best by far is xcode, but swift is open source so if you develop your own toolkit instead of SwiftUI and replace all other proprietary *Kit then any old computer can do it. You can also use (usually cross platform) frameworks which have already done all of this like react native which makes it really easy to do in other OSes, however you will still only get the best experience using native libraries which can only be built from Xcode on a Mac. Maybe darling will open the doors to running that on Linux one day though!
Sometimes when people put their hard work into building an app for free, they don’t also want to pay $99 a year so that some bullshit company can profit off of the app developers hard work.
iOS developers are REQUIRED to own a mac and are REQUIRED to pay apple $99 a year. That means it is more costly to develop open source for iOS or any apple product. That’s why apple is terrible.
I generally like Android from the perspective of more availability to the ecosystem. I think there’s even an environment to run android apps easily on desktop too or any environment for that matter.
In general open source solutions can simply reach more people, which is why there’s more projects that are Android based.
People say it's the price (to develop), but it's not IMO. It's the community. Lots of developers use iOS (in the US), but in my experience, power users who develop FOSS in their free time have a high propensity to be Android users. There's just so much more freedom in the platform.
Add this to the fact that outside of the US Android is more popular as the device costs are lower and there is less blind brand loyalty due to that, so developers in those countries focus on the platforms they use.
I believe the latter was the case with the current FOSS weather app I use (Breezy Weather).
Update: This is personal experience, but I've never met a free-time FOSS app creator (or contributer) that didn't develop for the device they use. And I've met a lot of them.
Final edit: Weather apps may be biased with age. With React Native and Flutter taking over new apps, platforn agnostic apps may slowly go away over time. But which FOSS dev wants to build a new weather app when there are so many (for Android) already?
iOS is kind of annoying to develop for. You kind of need to be entrenched in the Apple ecosystem to do it.
I also think there’s the niche part of it. Weather apps are kind of niche, if I’m going out I only care about the temps and whether or not it might rain, and iOS already has a great built in app for that. I love FOSS, but I’m not sure I care enough about my weather app to seek out a FOSS alternative to the default one.
Also I’m not sure Android has a weather app by default? I have a Pixel 6 as a work phone but don’t think I’ve ever checked for a weather app on it.
From the perspective of FOSS developer:
I simply don't want to pay €100 every single year to Tim Apple to make a free hobby app.
Android has more ways to distribute, and the "official" way is one time €25 fee and that's it.
One time €25 fee
Is it really a one time fee for the Play Store? I remember hearing it's a subscription, and while I don't do mobile app development (or any development currently), it was one of the things that turned me off from even considering mobile development. That might change if you're right, but I still have no app ideas, so it's unlikely I'll build any apps.
Yes, it is really a one time fee.
However if you sell apps (or in-app purchases) they'll take a 30% cut, just like Apple.
Yes its one time for android, if you're earning money with ads or purchases, google will take 1/3 of that amount, then you will have to figure out taxes on your own and there's also some special policies for selling online goods in India, but if you're just making apps - its one time fee to be able to upload them to google play store, or you can just distribute with froid/github for free, which is a great route as well
weatherBecause Apple damn sucks. Its useless to have FOSS apps on this platform if you ask me. Plus they go fully "license business" and dont allow many FOSS licenses that have "this software comes with no guarantees" in it, e.g. the GPL
Foss and Apple don't really go hand in hand. The foss apps that are currently on iOS though, I fully support and encourage more development of.
I think this goes for open source in general. I guess its just because of Apple and how locked down and restricted they make things. AOSP is open source and as a whole is pretty open with allowing things like sideloading and more freedom and control to developers and users in general, so I guess that encourages more FOSS developers to support it and the platform, over something like iOS for instance with its locked down ecosystem.
Apple is actively hostile to software freedom. Even if a particular iOS app is free, actually exercising the four freedoms is difficult given the barriers Apple puts up against developers.
This is not considering the culture of Apple users which is generally indifferent to software freedom, of course.
Apple does not like FOSS
This issue isn't limited to weather apps. iOS apps in general tend to be closed source.
Apple users use to pay a lot for their device. So they just continue on with theme.
Because Apple ships a great one with the OS, so the necessity to make an alternative is less. Compare this to the garbage that passes for e.g. the Samsung weather app.