this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Memmy - An iOS client for Lemmy
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It's doubly laudable when you consider that he's paying $100 for a developer license so we can have Memmy for free. He might have had the license already for other projects, but still, I'm humbled by the generosity, both in time, effort, and money.
Push notifications are an ongoing cost as well.
True but for iOS developers this can be seen also as an investment, as any employer will hire you after seeing you maintain an app like Memmy. It’s the best kind of portfolio you can have.
Not really, IMO. I maintained a large open source project for a few years and the amount of time suck and mental drain is hard to overstate. Most employers seemed to barely look at it even though they could have clearly seen how I programmed, interacted with users, etc. And, if you decide to stop maintaining it, all those happy users are going to be unhappy users. Given that even bad developers have not much trouble getting steady work, and that all that time could have been invested in a project that earned or had the potential to earn money, it’s sort of hard to justify outside of personal passion. Just my experience, anyway…
Sad to know, and it’s partly the reason I don’t work on a open source iOS app currently: I’d rather work on something that solves a problem people are willing to pay.
I worked on apps that are used by the general public before (not mine, a company’s app) and the amount of users who are willing to shit on something without trying to understand that their issue isn’t common and we’d need more information to fix it are very high.
I think it’s better to have an app that makes a small niche happy than having a general popular app that will attract many toxic people.