Spider

Apple and Google’s 30% not only hits the base price, but every single transaction that happens inside apps as well. Imagine a toll bridge in front of your nearest supermarket where the people working the toll booth inspect every bag of grocery you bought and then charged you toll based on what you bought there.

Apps arent entirely like video games. If you wanted to open a non-subscription based music store or book store or whatever, you’d find it economically impossible to pay the publishers their cut, apple their cut, your server host their cut, and have anything left over for yourself without charging your customers their arms and legs. This is why all those kinds of apps are subscription based. You can cleverly batch and bundle stuff in a monthly subscription fee which gives you room to dance around google and apples high fees and have enough money to keep your lights on.

Beds really changed the whole game.

Building a base didn’t just mean a place to put your chests, it also had to be a place worth spending the whole night in. I cared a lot about making the interior a nice place to be. And the exterior of the base had to be a good fort too because you couldnt skip all the monster spawns at night.

Back then I took minecraft to be like a fort building game. Explore by day and craft by night. The first night I spent huddled in a small dark grave i dug for myself in a wall. It taught me that a good base was important.

I think beds were added in the halloween update if i remember right. I was blown away how they skipped monster spawning. That’s when I felt the game changed direction the hardest, because you no longer needed a base to survive.

A lot of the time its impatient management who want the fastest solution right now, demanding their jenga tower built from hollowing out the middle and never allowing time to fill in the gaps with any new blocks.

But i’ve also seen just plain inexperience from devs who have never seen a project become technically bankrupt. Some people just carry the expectations for a short lived app into a constantly iterated long lived app, not realizing that is the way to crunch and missed deadlines.

Compounding the inexperience issue is the use of bad architecture. Architecture is a bigger picture thing, not something to bang together a bunch of use cases and a bunch of factories. The purpose of architecture is to keep development easy and smooth for now and the future. If it doesnt feel nice to work in, it’s not doing its job. If devs keep trying to cheat it, its time to add convienience tools to encourage them to do it right.

Clean Architecture for example is very nice, it really shines in projects intended to be iterated continuously on for over 5 years and many more. It mitigates the pain of replacing and upgrading old obsolete stuff. Using it for one marketing campaign app that’s going to live for only 3 months is overkill though. For very short projects, you can see how its the wrong tool for the job.

Selecting the right architecture involves understanding the patterns used and knowing what problems those patterns were meant to solve. Thats the way to know if those problems are relevant to your project.