Are you an app developer, small business owner, or just someone looking to lead a more free and fulfilling life not working for yourself? If so, we may be kindred spirits. My Name is Eric and I make apps! Welcome to my RU-vid channel. I started out in software development over 20 years ago and spent a lot of time working in corporate environments. I thought that was the life I wanted, but then found I wanted more. Around 6 years ago, I got into apps. And it wasn't as easy as most people think. I am the owner of Overpass Apps - a small app development firm in the UK. We have had over 10 million app downloads across the Apple App Store and Google Play and continue to make decent daily revenue. But we also do work for clients. On this channel, I post a daily video where we talk about all kinds of topics ranging from app store optimization to running your own company to trying to lead a more free life. I'm glad you found me. Please join us and subscribe.
This is true. I'm currently suffering with the Xamarin Forms to Maui upgrade on a few projects. Now that XCode has upgraded to 16, it's become urgent. But Maui still has some issues.
Just use assembly and C with just C lib and you’ll never hear the word deprecated 😉 I have software and the hardware I developed in 1993 and to my amazement 19 of the 27 devices running on Antarctica it’s still running as well as the 23 year old energy trading platform.
Yeah. I get that. It's because we have started relying on frameworks for servers and distribution that we have these problems now. I've never been a C guy. Maybe I should have.
In all seriousness though, I went through this exact issue with a client of mine. Their regular developer was proving to be frustratingly slow to action fixes and their notifications system had fallen apart. Alright, easy fix for sure? Not quite. To fix it on the back-end, I had to also fix it on the front-end, which meant pushing out new versions of both mobile apps... which meant targeting the newest APIs... which meant refactoring a lot of legacy code in languages I don't even know, something which was a total non-issue when it was just a straightforward logic tweak... I had wildly, wildly mispriced that job. Never again.
This is exactly the kind of stuff I'm dealing with. I had to turn down some upgrades because they wouldn't compile anymore. And the price I had to quote was just stupidly high. But I had others where I ate the cost and I resented every second of it.
And then you're looking for how to use an API. You find a good stack overflow post or explainer video that demystifies it, only for a strikethrough to appear when you type it into your editor, and you're back to square one
I am working on a SDK where one of the projects had a dependency that was deprecated before we started using it. No further development or fixes were planned. We had no choice. The replacement for it was in another language which required a huge amount of work to port it into a format we can use. That was done by someone else and has been ready for about 3 months now. I had to go and add a bunch of fixes for various issues to that before I could use it. All of these projects are completely open source and the dependencies I use in this case are maintained by large corporations. I am just an amateur dev contributing to a project that I like. I completed the PR close to a month ago. The kicker is I need to get it reviewed before it can get pushed to main. The issue with that is I had to rewrite nearly 80 percent of the project to make it compatible with new API. So thousands of lines of code. Finding volunteers with actual authority to review it is I find the hardest part of the whole process. I have push authority. But pushing my own work as the lowest guy on the totem pole to a major project without review is kind of frowned upon. I can understand that. I have no intentions of doing that. But it can be hugely frustrating to spend months of work and then wait 3 to 6 months for someone to feel like reviewing it.
Wow. I have to admit... I've never actually contributed to an open-source project. I rely on so many of them, I should have given back at some point. But I never have. I think I would have the same concern as you if I did.
That's one of the main reasons I appreciate the Perl ecosystem and absolutely hate web frontend development, where frameworks deprecate at the speed of light.
I use to be reluctant of frameworks. It took a while ot accept JQuery (I'm old) but was glad I finally did. But we got to a point where a new framework was coming out every day it seemed. And the people who write them got bored with them and stopped maintaining them. But I can't believe Google and Microsoft and other huge companies would abandon devs at the rate they are.
Whenever I hear "legacy" or "deprecated" I think about my house, my car, my hobbies, my livelihood. 25 years ago I joined a team, where I was mainly involved in two pieces of software, which were already running strong when I came. One was based on an environment(database and client), which was based on windows NT, and some oracle product. We could get it run on win2k and winxp, after that around 2008 all support phased out. Even the functionality we use cannot be bought anymore. We run completely virtualized by now. The other was based on DOS from the 90-s, later redeployed onto unix before Y2K. When unix support began to phase out, the company bought several machines with a support contract to ensure future support for decades to come. I introduced python. 2.4, later upgraded to 2.7. That was my technological addition to the project. These pieces of software still run, still compile, we make changes to them every month. The company sells things on the market, money comes and goes... The operational costs are so low, they are beating every industry standard. Every 5 year the company is bound by law to do IT audit. That is when we charge big time. We make plans to the management, how to replace this mess with a modern infrastructure. They see the price tag, then they make up a plan, how the company will cease to exist in three years, and ask authorities for derogation. In five years we have a new management, and the cycle repeats. We are getting older, 2 from the developer/support team has passed away by now, third of them already receiving pension. The average age is around 60, no fluctuation. For a couple of years some of us worked for other companies parallel, but they never really left. We have an ongoing bet on who will turn off the lights.
Literally as I am building my app I run into this all the time now especially with Android, it literally change as I am working. Something to note Android 9 to Android 13 for example it is almost day and night now depending on what you are trying to do. My Gradle broke twice in 1 hour trying to get everything going. I don't even want to look at my manifest right now it is a mess I will clean it up later today but man yea i think things are going to get harder.
Yeah, going to Android 13 and all the permission changes were a pain. I have so much conditional code in my apps checking for the version that it interferes with code readability. And the benefits don't seem to be that great.
Always like your videos. As an open source developer really can't stand depreciation as it costs me so much of my *free* time. At some point the GTK codebase started to not be updated/changed in a strange way. The move to QT cost a lot of time.
Hey Eric! RU-vid algorithms just popped this video, I haven't seen you for maybe a couple of years, glad to see you again! It's so cool that you keep doing your work and sharing your journey all the way. And cool that your intro hasn't changed since 😁
Haha. I'm not a foodie. I think the ability to throw the laptop in a bag and work from a new location is one of the beautiful things about being a coder in the post-pandemic era.
Watching your videos from many years, watched your experience working with Indian team. I'm a native iOS and flutter developer let me know if you have any work for me.
You need a portable monitor lol And you definitely have a west coast vibe, even after years in London! I immediately thought you were a SoCal guy. I’m a New Yorker but also lived in San Diego until I realized I didn’t have $1 million for a single family home 😅
Do they have portable monitors? Yeah. So, this week, I'm in Istanbul. Yeah, I used to dream of moving back to San Diego, but it's way way way too expensive and crowded. I don't intend on living in England forever but I haven't decided where I'd like to end up. I love living by the sea, but it's just so expensive.
I am going to have my placement activities the next year . And I don't know how to deal with general asked coding problem I am scared that tomorrow I may end up jobless and a disgrace to my parents. I regret my past decisions and now I am in serious stress that what would I do in the movement. I don't have any special experience and skills that could land me a job tomorrow.
my developer account is suspended due to Client app .. which is violating the policy .. I think google give a warning to remove the app or update your policy instead directly remove the Google Play Console account
CGI hahahahah I feel old!!!!!! Started my carreer one year earlier we probably around the same age!!!!!And yes think about that everyday and that's why I'm here... I can't loose the opportunity... instead of complain that AI gonna steal your job... just jump and use it!
Thank you for sharing your story. My account was terminated too last week. They say for Falling Slots Puzzle, which trailer you can see on my channel. Just a puzzle game on slots thematic. No links, no SDKs, no nothing. Same bot-answer on appeals. 5 years of hard work and 4 big games with 100.000+ players - all just destroyed by bot. Thank you Gooooogle! To all developers - Stay AWAY from Google Play.
I have already made a simple app with html, css, JS codes but I am missing a notification system. Can you help me please adding a notification system to my mobile phone app?
Just my opinion, but professionals that can code, and i means heavy experience, and at the same time, that professional is also deep into the business analyst part - to know the use cases, the business side on how such software is needed - thats the person that will get the most out of AI. Because if you are connected to a chatgpt service, you need to ask chatgpt to code in such a way as to properly understand the requirements of the end user - having chatgpt generate a ton of code, isn't good enough. All this assumes you have no BRDs done... All this assumes you have no wireframes or DB schemas - this assumes you will sit with chatgpt and rattle from notes some hypothetical MVP. So people who are very sr in development (coding) but worked with end clients - us old farts, embrace chatgpt. ChatGpt is perfect for us grey hair innovators. Sure, its harder to teach an old dog new tricks, but this tool is the answers for experienced people. If you are the type of person that meets a new client, and then requests a "brain storming session", and if you know how to pull out of the clients head, all of their problems, their pain points, the part of their business that is expensive and needs automation - if you do that in those technical sales meetings, and then go back to your silo and code - consider chatgpt as your side kick in those brain storming sessions.
I've been playing with Gemini for a couple of months now and I totally agree. Somehow you can just see where the AI is disappearing down a rabbit hole. But when I just can't remember something, or just want a 2nd opinion (I normally get this by pushing a question into search and comparing answers on Stack to my code) Pushing the same question into Gemini is much faster and usually has a more thorough response. But I need to know the right question to ask.
There are certain patterns to life. Look at chess for history re AI. An AI app will beat a human. But an AI/human team will stomp a mere AI. An experienced human with vision augmented with chess AI apps grunting out possible patterns will not lose unless playing against another human/AI team. I strongly suspect LLM AI will be similar for programming.
