•  fmstrat   ( @fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ) 
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    1 year ago

    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?

  • weather

    Because 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

  • 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 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.