I'm surprised nobody has mentioned airvpn yet. They're run by hacktivists and they're great. Mullvad is the other one with a good reputation, but everyone's mentioned that already.
Yeah, it does, to developers only. They're not the target market.
I used to lobby for my employer to care about the latest iOS feature or fight over what the HIG advises is best practice.
Unfortunately, most business would be perfectly happy if they could have a designer draw a pretty looking app and have it magically pop into existence. Platform features are an afterthought, if a thought at all. I'm not thrilled with the state of the app industry, but it is what it is.
The really elegant solution is to have a passionate team of platform-specific developers pushing the boundaries of what's possible on a mobile device, constantly using the latest features and profiling for battery usage and network usage. Ideally a team that does this would be so proud of the code that it becomes open source to serve as an exemplary model of software engineering actualized.
I know what's "right", but I also know what the market wants. The market wants me to churn out cross-platform CRUD apps as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Thanks. I've had pretty good luck so far. I would not want to be managing 3x the team size with 3 different repos to build my crappy CRUD app.
Keep in mind that I'm not trying to do anything revolutionary here. I just work for a company that needs apps on the major platforms with the least effort and expense possible.
I've only had to dive into the native code a handful of times, but I do basically make an ugly CRUD app. Most apps are ugly CRUD apps though. I haven't used the Shopify app, but it probably falls into that category too.
> What do you do when there are native build errors?
I periodically do suffer through xcode upgrades, bad RN module linking, gradle issues, etc, but it's a couple of days of work every few months to say current. The JS devs don't really have to think about this stuff for the daily work. I think it's totally possible to get away with one person that knows how to do the hard technical stuff when it crops up.
That said, I don't build the most technically sophisticated product. The vast majority of changes we make are for design/marketing or for features that build on what we already have. I think that's true of most apps.
It's not for everything, and I'm glad Firefox (for example) does do native Android development. I couldn't imagine that working with React Native. But look at the apps on any random phone and the ones that couldn't be made in RN is pretty small.
My point is that it's not a problem. I can take someone fresh out of bootcamp with a basic understanding of react components and css and get them churning out code that works on 3 platforms.
I build an app with React Native Web and we produce Android/iOS/web from the same code base with 3 developers.
No, it's not perfect. Yes, JS can be awkward and confusing. Yes, a truly native app built by expert platform-specific developers would be better.
But I'm able to ship this product with less than half the team size I would need for native development. JavaScript developers are cheap to hire, and they don't need to know any objc/swift/java/kotlin to build the product.
Our product is consistent, because it's the same code across platforms. The business people paying us to build the app are thrilled at how quickly we can turn around features.
We've been shipping this way for 2 years and I would strongly recommend it to everyone.
Also, before people jump in with "But RN is slow and bloated!", it's actually not. The performance is just as good as truly native and the binary is small. The real downside is having the app not feel native, but only developers seem to notice. Pragmatically, most apps are so bad that if your Android app has an iOS look-and-feel nobody seems to care.
I'd love to filter the internet by "content that can give you insights right now that would otherwise take years of study in a specific discipline to even know exists".
A quick google for "3blue1brown awesome github" (my usual strategy for finding good similar content) landed me here: https://github.com/rossant/awesome-math
The awesome lists are pretty good starting points for finding good content, but there's a ton of them of variable quality, so you end up with stuff like this: https://github.com/jonatasbaldin/awesome-awesome-awesome (which has 68 forks...)
If you want to skip straight to the piracy, here's an open source package for you, complete with keys, hosted ironically on Microsoft servers, that uses vlmcsd: https://github.com/ekistece/vlmcsd-autokms
It's a pretty clever hack. It runs the KMS emulator locally and fakes the network connection with a TAP device from OpenVPN. Works perfectly.
> Everything I do in social interactions, in order to fit in, is a learned behavior that I didn't pick up until my university years.
You might be improperly socialized or have Aspergers, or you might be a sociopath (I don't mean this in a derogatory way, some people are just not capable of emotion, often due to past trauma), or you might have anxiety, or it might be ADHD.
My advice would be to try more drugs to try and get a better perspective of why you feel the things that you feel. If it's ADHD, Ritalin or Adderall will cause a positive change. If it's anxiety, Xanax/Klonopin/Ativan/Valium might help. If it's an empathy thing, there aren't many legal pharmaceuticals for that, but you could try weed or MDMA or a traditional psychedelic. IMO the relatively low risk of trying a few chemicals a few times is well worth the gain in perspective, so you have a better sense of what you're trying to change and what levers can be pulled.
I'd rather ride with a stoned driver than a drunk driver any day. I'd also prefer a stoned driver over an elderly driver or a sleep deprived driver. And if I had the choice between a totally sober driver or a driver on stimulants, I'd take the stimulant driver.
If this was really about reducing risk on the road, we should somehow incentivize people like OP to work on the self-driving car problem, rather than come up with a device to catch stoned drivers. Think how much brain power and law enforcement time is going to be taken up dealing with stoned drivers. The rational thing to do would be to let people drive stoned, arrest those who are visibly impaired and can't perform a field sobriety test, and focus our efforts on getting AI to replace all human drivers.
I think the more likely explanation is that it's a way for people who own crypto to borrow and lend.
It's probably one of the first things to be built because there's a lot of people with crypto and banks don't want to accept it as collateral.