Hi webmasters, I would appreciate opinions on this, and no it's not a rant because by "difficult", I don't mean the opposite of "easy". The main reason I posted the question on this forum is because:
here people actually read, I'm confident on this, and years of interactions have proved this is the case most of the times.
There used to be a forum area for mobile development but it's gone, the amount of posts was minimal, it really didn't take off and it's probably because: this didn't get enough traction, most people here are absolutely ok with their websites/products/services already, most actually value their time, or mobile apps are plain "difficult", and also, because
(I think) this is not a place where serious content creators engage on creating the next trendy game in the hopes of making crazy money overnight, or... just displaying content on a webview (a simple browser turned into an "
app").
Years gone by and I still feel curious about it (about why this is difficult), and why webmasters here didn't show any interest, or at least any active interest. Today, things aren't too different as the way it used to be in order to create a mobile app:
1. Select a flavor/system, like WCC "Widget-Cross-Creator"
2. Download and install ARROW, because no, you can't install WCC directly, you have to first download an installer for that installer
3. Now download and install WCC
4. Download and install AWCC doctor to see if things actually worked, because yes, carefully following the steps doesn't always work
5. Ok is not running, go and download some obscure dependencies
6. Let's try again, don't forget to configure the ABC and SPEC or WTC compiler, yes the instructions won't make sense but try anyway
Did you check for enough space available? this will need about 5 gigabytes and will make your machine crawl, don't forget choosing the right profile when starting your project, and no, the profile names don't make much sense. Ok, now you just got WCC ready to create Android apps, oh you wanted cross mobile? iOS requires additional instructions, and you might surprise yourself that the whole thing doesn't with certain Windows specific versions, or unless you install certain frameworks in an very specific order. If what I posted sounds like a rant: trust me, it's not, I was just trying to create some realistic context for my favorite event:
Finished already? yes? guess what? the WCC has been abandoned, it's not the "next best thing" anymore, it doesn't work, it became open source and now maintained by some users who still had projects in process, and pretty sure there is a fork, so if you need help good luck figuring out where to go. Now the next best thing is something else.
During my first attempts many years ago I took a lot of time selecting the best rational option, downloaded tons of stuff, tried things out and finally made my selections, only to find out in about a year (sometimes less), those options were gone, bankrupt or bought by someone else and the software doesn't even work and then got abandoned. Even made a bet selecting INTEL mobile suite because they are serious, right? and should stay around, but in about 2 years IIRC it was also gone, so everything goes back, mostly to Android Studio and Xcode. Some other options exist (created by Google) but as usual: you don't own anything and things can (and will) change eventually breaking your projects.
The difference on posting this here vs another forum is, instead of focusing on why this is happening, people will jump right away to say "oh, it's WCC, that sucks, you should have used APC-Astrum" or some other stuff that anyway won't be around next year, the mobile community is very similar to the Linux community: most responses aren't actually (seriously) helpful.
I'm really curious, did any of you developed mobile apps? why yes or no?
what do you think of this whole thing? I can download things like MS Visual Studio and create desktop apps without the wind or some single digit on the app store breaking my ecosystem, but mobile? that's something else. Ok, if we consider the trendy big players we might talk about Flutter, but regardless of working or not, just the instructions (install) page is quite long, boring long. I'm not complaining because it's intimidating (no), it just sounds as more of the same, something that regardless of following instructions you have to run some utility to check if it worked. What?
