There can be nice people who are bad at tech, just like there's racist technologists

Just because a group of nice well meaning Lemmy users is willing to suffer the pain of a poorly built app doesn't mean they should /have/ to suffer through it

It's sometimes nice to make nice things. Don't be too much of an HOA, they're new, it's not the end of the world.

Just because I'm not afraid of biking with cars, doesn't mean I don't recognize that American biking infrastructure is hostile. We could do more to make biking safer and easier. They'll struggle but they'll get the hang of it.

So too, with making nice apps to free the lay people from their digital walled gardens.

Mastodon nowawdays is absurdly easy to sign up for, too. The official app (the way most newbies will find it) defaults to mastodon.social, and users never have to deal with anything involving Federation. From the user's perspective the "Mastodon" app is identical to the official Twitter or Reddit app etc.

It absolutely boggles my mind how there are still real live technology journalists that claim it's "too confusing". Like yes "instances" and Federation is def weird, but not knowing how the technical backend stuff works doesn't detract from the experience in the slightest.

What kind of mentality is this? Don't we all want the Fediverse to grow and succeed? Don't you want more apps for the Fediverse to spur adoption? And what is so wrong with it being exclusive to iOS? What do you say about Android exclusive apps then? Fuck them too? Aight listen, I'm a GrapheneOS user. I have been on Android exclusively for the last decades and I'm so sick of this attitude. You Android elitists are so utterly anhedonic. You tire me out. Grow the f up up and let people enjoy what they want geez.

The whole article exists in Apple-land. Like a tacky stereotype of Apple users, the author never acknowledges it, treating everything Apple as the "default."

I don't have time for articles that consider the 3.5 billion android users to be "outliers." C'mon, it's 2023.

There’s a lot of that I think with mastodon apps.

I suspect it’s devs who want to get paid at some point, which on one hand is fair but also raises interesting concerns about how open/FOSS software dev needs to work with respect to money.

Beyond that, there was some speculation I saw that the iOS dev space is just more interested in designing social media apps. No idea how true that is.

They said they are open sourcing their app so hope ahead

If you don't like the yearly/monthly subscription, you can grab the source code and compile the app yourself. Just patch out this line with a return true. You could also remove the check here and get access to a few settings that way.

To run your own software on iOS you may need to work around Apple's fuckery (reinstalling the app every week) but I think there are automated tools that'll help with that.

Unfortunately you can't publish your app to the app store (the app is licensed as AGPL and Apple's app store procedures make it incompatible with most GPL-like licenses, and only the original copyright author had the legal right to relicense the code to allow Apple's proprietary additions) but perhaps AltStore will accept your fork.

Why wouldn’t you like developers to make a living? Do you expect to get a high quality app for free? Grow up.

I use a Lemmy app with IAP (Sync)

It's great. I literally moved to Lemmy because of Sync.