> Instead, what I think has drastically changed over the past 40 years or so is the ability of a solopreneur to make real money.
Hard disagree.
As the article notes, I think if you concentrate on a real business, not a scam-y 'get rich quick scheme' business then, especially with the internet, its never been easier to run a solo business at scale.
For myself, I wrote an app as a side hobby, which then took off, so I started working on it part-time, then moved to full-time when the revenue justified.
It's now growing to where it exceeds what I would have made working for someone else.
Note this took 7+ years of constant work, improvements and care.
It's the type of dedication that makes you competitive with even larger organisations.
And the time required to be a 'success' ensures that you won't have any competitors who just want to make a quick buck or get to "passive income" within a year or two.
Most existing iOS apps are likely to use a suite of Apple platform frameworks beyond simply pure Swift and SwiftUI.
For those cases, Skip's approach seems to be a range of Skip* frameworks that are minimal implementations of the Apple or Android versions. This will likely grow over time, but for most apps it would likely be very limiting at this stage.
For instance in my iOS app I use StoreKit, WebKit, SafariServices, UserNotifications and CryptoKit amongst others that have no current implementation when using Skip.
So was Maps, but Apple committed the time, resources and focus to make it happen. In 2024, I would say the Maps initiative has been an overwhelming success.
As per the article, Apple already has a search solution in Spotlight, which though it hasn't been battle tested as a general web search solution, seems to be a great basis to improve and make better.
My concern is that due to their addiction to the Google partnership money, Apple don't even seem to be contemplating their own Search approach.
This is how we end up with monopolies in product areas as the big tech players, in effect, collude to not compete in core areas of business due to partnership agreements.
Last week, as part of the US Department of Justice investigation, documents were released that showed Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to retain the search partnership.
This is almost 20% of Apple’s total operating profit for the year.
It’s never a good idea for a company to be so reliant on a single partnership or client.
It distorts incentives, is high risk and sometimes, as in Apple’s case leaves a company blind to other opportunities it could be pursuing.
On top of it all, Apple’s search partnership with Google trades their customer’s privacy for search $ kickbacks.
Based upon all this, it should be time for Apple to end this partnership and pursue their own search solution.
Appreciate the feedback. We'll take it on board for improvements in the future.
We recently moved to a paid app model with a 30-day free trial available (from a freemium app model).
Understand that this is not as appealing as a free-forever product. We found that we had hundreds of thousands of free users and not enough paid users. After developing the app for many years under this model, we had to make some changes so that we could continue to fund the ongoing app development and updates.
The notification prompt can also be declined in the alert that appears; though we could make this more obvious with a clear 'Skip' button.
I develop a popular iOS and macOS ad blocker that block almost all ads[1] including all YouTube ads.
Will be interested to hear if you've tried it out and what may have been missing?
The only things we don't block at the moment is some non-English content and Adult sites. With a small team these haven't been the primary focus for the time being. Other than those though we should stop pretty much everything else.
As a Namecheap customer who has nothing to do with Russia or the Ukraine, this type of selective political censoring rubs me the wrong way.
I don't want to use a utility or service provider who thinks they have some special virtuous ability to evaluate and judge the ethical behaviour or appropriateness of their customers.
If customers are breaking the law or laws are passed that mean that you can't provide service to customers in certain countries or regions, then fine kick them off your service. Otherwise provide the service that you operate.
This type of response makes me less likely to continuing to use Namecheap in the future.
Hard disagree.
As the article notes, I think if you concentrate on a real business, not a scam-y 'get rich quick scheme' business then, especially with the internet, its never been easier to run a solo business at scale.
For myself, I wrote an app as a side hobby, which then took off, so I started working on it part-time, then moved to full-time when the revenue justified.
It's now growing to where it exceeds what I would have made working for someone else.
Note this took 7+ years of constant work, improvements and care.
It's the type of dedication that makes you competitive with even larger organisations.
And the time required to be a 'success' ensures that you won't have any competitors who just want to make a quick buck or get to "passive income" within a year or two.