Three short sour remarks … with a conclusion
When you fight a framework API to get decent features working, which are standard under other platforms, you are spinning the wheels in the shadow of a company which is not there to promote better engineering practices but to cut a piece of the market with half-thought strategies. When you find holes and patches all over the framework or other companies are stepping up to sew cracks in the software then you understand the maturity and the sense where the priorities are for the not-named software company. Frustration is an understatement and you will forever try to avoid dealing with the software released from the not-named company.
Did you go through those phases, when in the middle of the development, suddenly you realize the whole documentation is a huge web full of compromises and patches which will catch you sooner than later? That is when the technical vision is handled without the maturity of a real software engineering company.
There is a also a reverse, when a long-in-tooth framework is still used just because the effort to replace it is too much of a headache, or the replacements are still in infancy.
And the last but not least when XRocipter Inc. bought a darling of the software pioneers and with a big knife raised the taxes for usage in all past and future developments (like in pharma, but not that outrageous). Suddenly the basic functionality you used to have is mangled in updates and not working anymore, because the “always-free” becomes “partially-free” or “ads-ridden” and the basic tools are going back to square one.
As a consequence of those remarks we decided for the whole line of apps to take a different road than used until now:
- we will drop the ads from all apps and create only two kinds: limited versions and subscriptions
- we will use as much open source solutions internally and on the back-end, even if the cost is higher but there are other benefits we will discuss in other posts
- we will slowly join open-source projects where our interests are leading us