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points by jadar 4 days ago | 0 comments

In my experience this is only partially true. Apple has come a long way and their code signing experience is leaps and bounds better than Android at this point. Their UI testing is actually pretty solid, and Swift is a wonderful language to program in. The IDE part is partially true, but to be fair they are opening things up to coding agents (they're using Claude Code themselves) so I feel like this is only going to get better from here.

[–] well_ackshually 4 days ago

> their code signing experience is leaps and bounds better than Android at this point.

In which universe ? You generate a signing key, its password, configure the alias, the alias password and then just modify your gradle build script to say signingConfig.set(file("file/path.jks"))

Hell, if you want to go even further, give up on signing, use the debug signing certificate and let google sign for you with their own keys.

I've stopped counting how many issues you get on trying to build iOS apps because "whoops, sorry, xcodebuild just farted and can't sign"

[–] georgel 4 days ago

Back in the early/mid 2010's when I was still a native iOS dev, I remember interviewers would ask how do you code sign an app.

And when they started trying to "automate" the process, it was a roll of the dice if it would work.

I have been out of that game for last 5 years, but I occasionally still open Xcode and it _seems_ it works most of the time.

[–] solyin 4 days ago

I understand the technical difference between signing, stapling and notarization, but c'mon man, what the hell‽

[–] plqbfbv 4 days ago

> Apple has come a long way and their code signing experience is leaps and bounds better than Android at this point

"Apple has come a long way and has made a very inconvenient and complex process only slightly less inconvenient, and people somehow are happy and pretend Android sucks."

We moved off GL/GH CI for iOS apps and switched to XCode Cloud only because of the pain that Apple is w.r.t. to signing. This is the other way, and luckily we have LLMs now: https://docs.fastlane.tools/actions/match/

Whatever we pay in runner-minutes/month is the price of our sanity so we don't have to deal with the nightmare that is their signing/release process, and their stupid CLI/XCode tools. Not to mention that even XCode Cloud seems to have been coded and shipped without any kind of second pair of eyes (QA nowhere to be found), and the XCode UI and Web UI behave in totally different ways for the same input. Of course without any kind of proper explanation for any errors, as in Apple's fashion.

[–] klausa 4 days ago

Fastlane has existed for more than a decade; this has nothing to do with LLMs.