Ask HN: Seeking advice in how to deal with frustration against big corps as dev

5 points by _nhh 167 days ago | 4 comments

I am working with technologies provided by big corps like apple, microsoft and google.

Especially painful is the iOS Development from the perspective as a freelancer. (I do stuff for my customers given I use my own personal account and they need to give me the right permissions to do stuff)

Everything in apple seems to not work, is purposly complicated and just plain evil against everyone that uses their portals.

I am at really bad place mentally and dont know how to cope with this. Deadlines are stressing me out because seemingly small things like creating a new app in an existing account causes me to call five people googling forums what errors messages from apple could mean.

This is so frustrating because it is so far away from code and I dont want to deal with it.

Every year it gets worse and worse and I wonder how others stay sane with this?

austin-cheney 167 days ago |

Apple is a walled garden with the intention to force use of their tools and platform at all stages. It is unintentionally hostile to the maximum to keep the world Apple.

You can work around this to a very limited extent by making web applications that work in the browser. There are still limitations in that Apple disables some browser APIs for iOS, for example some parts of the file system API. There are also some artificial memory limitations in the browser that will prevent processing large data in one step.

In my case these limitations exist so that people use the App Store and if Apple blocks solutions from the App Store then they want you to use iTunes. Here is what I had to do to build something that works on an iPhone that Apple goes way out of the way to block.

I was wanting something like WinAmp for playing music from files I have locally from a large playlist. Even solutions that cost money from the App Store were garbage with regard to playlists and were often filled with ads and spyware. So I wrote a local web page that solved this problem.

Because Apple blocks some use of the file system API the playlist has to be dynamically assembled on the server. Because it’s to large to parse in a single step the browser has to request the playlist data from the server in 9 different requests. It works well allowing the playing of audio in MP3 format directly from the browser in the way I want without paying Apple or streaming from the internet.

That is the level you have to go to for working around the Apple profit garden.

jon_north 166 days ago |

There are a set of careers that simply come with this kind of burden as part of the deal. Sales, freelancing, and in general owning your own business is at the core of those, because you also receive all the profit from your labor, rather than passing the burden to someone who agrees to shoulder it for you (taking a portion of your efforts in exchange).

By striking out on your own, you take on the moral and emotional weight of figuring out how to get it done anyway, despite an often cruel and uncaring world.

The only answer is inner strength. Find it, or find another line of work. Sorry to have to put it so starkly, but that's the truth.

aristofun 166 days ago |

Accept the brutal truth - developer is never the customer the whole infra is optimized for. Nobody (including other developers) gives a single f. how easy or hard your life is.

This is where every big corporation ends up inevitably.

benoau 166 days ago |

No good answers. You can either find someone who's more experienced at that side to handle it for you, accrue that experience yourself the hard way, or skip iOS jobs.