Writing Mac and iOS Apps Shouldn't Be So Difficult

As someone who generally wants to write some pretty simple stuff to solve everyday problems for myself, I’m a big fan of scripting languages.

I’ve wanted to write some stuff for my Mac or phone for quite some time, but with my day job being in a whole different realm of development, I don’t have the bandwidth after work and on the weekends to sit down and learn Xcode; I’ve started so many times I’ve lost count. I’d love to have a simple solution, without so many hoops to jump through, that I could pickup in a day or over a long weekend. Currently, I tend to opt for basic webpages to fill the void.

Last time I tried Xcode wasn’t all that long ago, and there was a lot of friction to get going. The most annoying was that I couldn’t even start making something that used iCloud to save the app data without paying $99/year. I thought (from years back) that the payment was only needed to publish in the App Store. Now it asks up front if you want to use iCloud, and if you say yes, you’re met with a bunch of cryptic errors, and then ChatGPT tells you to disable iCloud if you didn’t pay.

It makes me think their tactic is to make app development annoying enough where only people getting paid to do it full time will put up with the friction.

It’s not just with Apple. I’m finding more and more dev environments are assuming everyone is looking to launch a company with delusions of being the next Facebook, and is moving further away from something that may appeal to a hobbyist or someone just looking to make something simple to solve the little annoying problems in their life.