Supporting iOS is super hard for us. The Apple market is heavily controlled and supervised. We have had apps rejected because we included links to the Android equivalent in the description (same price, so no big reason to switch platforms when you are already on our iTunes page, and no way anyone can install an Android app on an iPhone anyway). Apple used to offer a more or less standard set of phones, resolutions, and architecture. But that has diversified more in the last years. For Android and Linux, we have it much easier to build tools, to handle dependencies, and generally to deploy. Actually, all development happens on Linux, simply because it's a much better and more comfortable platform. When we need to deploy for iOS, we boot the mac computer (which we had to pay for), re-compile the game, try it on the iPhone (which we also had to pay for), upload, and turn it off. Additionally, and I don't have all the details on this myself, Google apparently has also made it much easier for us than Apple to operate when it comes to taxes and banking.
We normally have to sell thousands of units per month to "make
it" (and we don't). For Android, the fees are low enough to justify keeping things open even if we don't sell much one month.
In a wider perspective, we operate in a market with lots of apps and games being offered for free, really high fees and standards set by the major stores, and continuous pressure from the community, our competitors (of course!) and ourselves to release more of our work as open source. Essentially, the combination is crushing, and Apple's move does not help :(
For what is worth, we recently launched "safe2play" (https://keera.co.uk/2020/06/17/safe2play-caring-for-privacy-...), which is an idea meant to make both people safer and the pricing model more transparent. It would probably align with Apple's desires better too, although that's an unintended side-effect.
So as a minimal example, yes, that is short. But it mixes model and view which, in very large applications, may produce codebases that are really hard to maintain. Are there examples that are much bigger, for example, with at least a few hundred widgets?
By the way, the library used in that blog post is also truly native and cross-platform. Keera has apps and games that work on Windows/Mac/Linux/Web/iOS/Android, all from the same code.
Supporting iOS is super hard for us. The Apple market is heavily controlled and supervised. We have had apps rejected because we included links to the Android equivalent in the description (same price, so no big reason to switch platforms when you are already on our iTunes page, and no way anyone can install an Android app on an iPhone anyway). Apple used to offer a more or less standard set of phones, resolutions, and architecture. But that has diversified more in the last years. For Android and Linux, we have it much easier to build tools, to handle dependencies, and generally to deploy. Actually, all development happens on Linux, simply because it's a much better and more comfortable platform. When we need to deploy for iOS, we boot the mac computer (which we had to pay for), re-compile the game, try it on the iPhone (which we also had to pay for), upload, and turn it off. Additionally, and I don't have all the details on this myself, Google apparently has also made it much easier for us than Apple to operate when it comes to taxes and banking.
We normally have to sell thousands of units per month to "make it" (and we don't). For Android, the fees are low enough to justify keeping things open even if we don't sell much one month.
In a wider perspective, we operate in a market with lots of apps and games being offered for free, really high fees and standards set by the major stores, and continuous pressure from the community, our competitors (of course!) and ourselves to release more of our work as open source. Essentially, the combination is crushing, and Apple's move does not help :(
For what is worth, we recently launched "safe2play" (https://keera.co.uk/2020/06/17/safe2play-caring-for-privacy-...), which is an idea meant to make both people safer and the pricing model more transparent. It would probably align with Apple's desires better too, although that's an unintended side-effect.