Sometimes when people put their hard work into building an app for free, they don’t also want to pay $99 a year so that some bullshit company can profit off of the app developers hard work.
iOS developers are REQUIRED to own a mac and are REQUIRED to pay apple $99 a year. That means it is more costly to develop open source for iOS or any apple product. That’s why apple is terrible.
I generally like Android from the perspective of more availability to the ecosystem. I think there’s even an environment to run android apps easily on desktop too or any environment for that matter.
In general open source solutions can simply reach more people, which is why there’s more projects that are Android based.
Apple does not like FOSS
Apple is actively hostile to software freedom. Even if a particular iOS app is free, actually exercising the four freedoms is difficult given the barriers Apple puts up against developers.
This is not considering the culture of Apple users which is generally indifferent to software freedom, of course.
People say it’s the price (to develop), but it’s not IMO. It’s the community. Lots of developers use iOS (in the US), but in my experience, power users who develop FOSS in their free time have a high propensity to be Android users. There’s just so much more freedom in the platform.
Add this to the fact that outside of the US Android is more popular as the device costs are lower and there is less blind brand loyalty due to that, so developers in those countries focus on the platforms they use.
I believe the latter was the case with the current FOSS weather app I use (Breezy Weather).
Update: This is personal experience, but I’ve never met a free-time FOSS app creator (or contributer) that didn’t develop for the device they use. And I’ve met a lot of them.
Final edit: Weather apps may be biased with age. With React Native and Flutter taking over new apps, platforn agnostic apps may slowly go away over time. But which FOSS dev wants to build a new weather app when there are so many (for Android) already?
I think this goes for open source in general. I guess its just because of Apple and how locked down and restricted they make things. AOSP is open source and as a whole is pretty open with allowing things like sideloading and more freedom and control to developers and users in general, so I guess that encourages more FOSS developers to support it and the platform, over something like iOS for instance with its locked down ecosystem.
Apple users use to pay a lot for their device. So they just continue on with theme.
Because it cosys money to offer an app on iOS.
weatherBecause Apple damn sucks. Its useless to have FOSS apps on this platform if you ask me. Plus they go fully “license business” and dont allow many FOSS licenses that have “this software comes with no guarantees” in it, e.g. the GPL
Foss and Apple don’t really go hand in hand. The foss apps that are currently on iOS though, I fully support and encourage more development of.
This issue isn’t limited to weather apps. iOS apps in general tend to be closed source.
Don’t you have to pay a monthly fee to be listed ln the App Store?
deleted by creator
Update –
Ok, I get it. I shouldn’t have mentioned this post was duplicated in multiple communities at the same time. Sorry.
Original Post –
This question was already asked and answered on !foss@beehaw.org
If you wanted to be useful, you should’ve linked the actual post.
Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.ml
Oh I didn’t know! Just trying to prevent duplicate work for people when the question was cross posted without links to multiple places at the same time.
Really? Why? There were so many communities on there that I was subscribed to.
This is not stackoverflow
While I’m a subscriber there as well, this member asked the community they belong to a question. Nothing wrong with that, its the point of federation.
