I am quite sure that the author of this post doesn't mean it bad, however, I don't want this post to give people the wrong impression that the money asked is not worth it. Far far far from the truth.
I am learning Swift/swiftUI (as a backend guy with little previous experience with frontend/UI programs, okay) and building apps for OSX can be very painful. Starting from outdated docs (basically no books about OSX development since ... 10-15 years? or more?) to the new fancy ways of doing things with SwiftUI (that sells the promise that "you do it once,..." and it will work exactly as they planned to when you sell *Hello World* apps).
It's not the use case itself to be hard, but the fact you need to support multiple operating systems (which as you might know, Apple produces every year a brand new model, so imagine the fun), or that maybe the specific API you rely on (from Apple, not some random guy out there) has some weird memory leak because it's written in C++ or Obj-C, who knows last time someone touched it. And Apple is updating everything but that specific thing, so you need to build something around it. I don't even want to start on the lack of libraries for Swift - a lot of open source libs are outdated, bugged, last commits 1-2 years ago, which means you either have to fork and fix, or well, you do it yourself from scratch.
Nowadays selling software for OSX has basically nothing to do anymore with the idea or use case itself but all the toil that the poor developer has to put with up. I learnt that most apps on the App Store deserves some money (sometimes they ask for a lot, nothing to say, but that's their business model).
I definitely feel your pain. I get flashbacks of interminable weeks of work where a bug that’s clearly not caused by my code is suddenly affecting a number of users.
Reverse engineering skills have greatly improved the way I develop things on macOS nowadays. Having access to any process memory and variables and being able to alter it using Frida makes it less painful to navigate obscure macOS APIs.
Although if it’s a problem in internal SwiftUI code, I’m afraid nothing can help you.
Me too. I’ve made some small Mac apps back in the day that solve some real problems, and I’ve probably only made a thousand dollars or so off of them. (The vast majority from donations for an open source utility, actually.)
