Same - my new team doesn’t do any scrum or story points and it’s an amazing breath of fresh air - don’t miss those days just yelling random numbers at the zoom call for hours.
The truth is on most teams one or two people who are closest to the task have enough context to estimate, and probably only after they spent some time starting or prototyping the task.
Those people can give a reasonable estimate, in time not some strange point system.
Sometimes the estimate is wrong and that’s ok.
It’s fine to have a meeting catching everyone else up on the context but those pther people still likely don’t have enough to give an accurate estimate and shouldn’t be involved in estimation
Virtual credit card numbers are a great way to combat this.
For example, the Wall Street journal pricing is pretty wild (8 dollars a month for the first 3 months then jumps to much higher) so I use a virtual card which expires right before the planned price hike.
For other services I like to either use a virtual card with a single transaction limit, or just buy the service and cancel right away which typically is equivalent to just paying for a month
The key word here is “theoretically”. These cross platform solutions are great in theory - who wouldn’t want to share code across all platforms? It’s a great sell, especially to the folks holding the purse.
The reality though is it doesn’t work well. The tooling, performance, debugging, library stability and observability are all substantially worse. Your team might save a ton of time spinning up a React Native app, but lose it all right back once you keep hitting gnarly Android performance issues.
In the future, once we have a proper cross platform development kit officially supported by Android and Apple, code sharing will be great. But today it doesn’t exist. And that’s why none of (the good) apps you use are written in a cross platform way.
Ive been an iOS dev for 10 years now and every few years a new cross platform framework comes along. They all suck. Either the development experience is awful, or the user experience is awful. Actually, it's usually both.
The thing is that its easy to get 90% there with these things. But getting that last 10% is often a huge hurdle, erasing most of the efficiency gains you just made.
Then, when a new hot framework comes along, the old hottness you bet your project on quickly becomes deprecated, and you have to rewrite your whole project under duress.
I tried the new hotness recently - Kotlin Multiplatform. Sharing code was great, debugging sort of worked but not really, and it wasn't long before I was pen pals with an overseas developer - no documentation on the bleeding edge! Ive been developing iOS for 10 years and my all-native workflow never relied on the mercy of a kind Bulgarian...
How long before people give up on that and move on to the next thing?
Hiring is really tough as well. With cross platform, at the end of the day, when you get that crazy memory issue or app crash, you need native expertise. So to be an effective cross platform engineer, you have to be an expert in iOS, Android, and whatever hot framework you bet on.
If you need to get to market very quickly and are OK with throwing it all away in a few years, cross platform is a great choice. But if you want your app to stand the test of time, the best thing you can do is to write it in the only framework which is officially supported by the platform - all native.
The truth is on most teams one or two people who are closest to the task have enough context to estimate, and probably only after they spent some time starting or prototyping the task.
Those people can give a reasonable estimate, in time not some strange point system.
Sometimes the estimate is wrong and that’s ok.
It’s fine to have a meeting catching everyone else up on the context but those pther people still likely don’t have enough to give an accurate estimate and shouldn’t be involved in estimation