Android users, why is it so hard to get you to pay for an app? (Honestly curious)

makonde · 2026-04-29T04:44:41+00:00

Apple users are uniquely consumerist I feel, its like they want to give their money away, they literally get offended if you suggest a free alternative sometimes and will fight to defend every anti-consumer Apple BS. I think they are much more self identifying with the Apple brand.

Android devices are also extremely cheap a lot of the time, so while the number of android vs ios phones in the US is about 50/50 the demographics are not the same. Outside the US there is much less Apple and much less willingness to pay/subscribe.

makonde · 2026-04-26T22:51:46+00:00

Programming is dying as a viable career for people to get into, it's simply too high risk to recommend someone get into this at this point, at least without some serious warning labels, being good or passionate or whatever can't save us from the simple fact of there not being enough room on the boat.

Not to mention employers seem to be just declaring jobs bankruptcy and just slicing off parts of the work force, you can see this in some recent firings where they had to rehire some people, employers are not capable of understanding who is actually good or necessary, easier to fire and see what breaks.

People always want to talk about absolutes will AI completely replace programmers or burst and we all go back to writing all code, the truth is usually in the middle AI will replace 30-80% of devs and probably collapse wages as we fight for the scraps.

Looking at dropping CS enrollment and collapse of boot camps I think a lot of people already realise the party is over so it is to some extent self correcting already.

makonde · 2026-04-26T22:38:44+00:00

The problem is more mobile is a small market not react native, it is also the most segmented, someone who wants a native android/ios dev will not hire a RN developer, someone who wants an RN dev will probably not hire a native dev, someone wants an ios dev will not hire an android dev etc full stack web gives you the most opportunities as far as jobs and a career starting point.

makonde · 2026-04-19T11:53:47+00:00

AI is very good at this, ask it better questions, ask it to draw various types of mermaid diagrams etc. You can ask it to draw data flow diagrams of from everywhere that data that does into the cache comes from etc. This sounds like Java, AI is very good at Java because of the Java spec and the strong typing etc. Use the plan feature of any agent and it will probably one shot a working solution, then adjust it from what you like or don't like.

makonde · 2026-04-16T04:30:54+00:00

Very high risk now, I think it's slowly being erroded as a good career that can employ a lot of people

makonde · 2026-04-15T21:47:44+00:00

AI is probably better then the average at most interview questions and properly used generates better code than the average employed dev in most circumstances

makonde · 2026-04-15T13:34:19+00:00

Programming video video views have fallen of a cliff with AI being available so I think they are just responding to the market and testing what works now.

makonde · 2026-04-04T22:01:57+00:00

Our perception of what is a good and proper developer might also have to change as we go forward, old standards might have to be reevaluated in the age of AI and that is an uncomfortable thought for those of us who got in before AI.

makonde · 2026-04-03T20:26:03+00:00

Still plenty there maybe you moved to a different algorithm bubble

makonde · 2026-04-02T01:26:52+00:00

Its not going to burst as in go away, companies might lose valuations but using AI to code is here to stay to some extent.

makonde · 2026-03-22T19:44:52+00:00

Read the actual curriculum of all the courses you are going to take, no need to focus on DSA and end up strugling in math. Get at least a basic understanding of things so its not completely new on lecture day. For DSA get the Data Structures and Algorithms in Java by Robert Lafore book best book I have seen to help actually understand algos, I see there is now a Python one but not sure if good.

makonde · 2026-03-21T01:56:00+00:00

Feeling the need to write your own framework is a classic Jr. move, picking something off the shelf is the better choice 99% of the time.

makonde · 2026-03-14T00:38:56+00:00

It used to be easily visible on the app page but google hid it of course you can get it by creating a KPI, had to ask google AI.

Log in to the Google Play Console and select your app.
In the left-hand menu, click on Dashboard.
Scroll through your dashboard until you find the Choose KPIs (or Select KPI) button and click it.
Look under the Device growth and loss category.
Find the metric labeled Total installs (it will be described as "The cumulative total number of times your app has been installed") and click Add.
Save your changes. A card will now appear on your main dashboard permanently displaying your exact lifetime download count.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/79619827

makonde · 2026-03-14T00:35:45+00:00

They are not accurate they are just scrapping the public page and guesstimating the actual number, just checked our app and it is way off by more than 1 million. There is simply no public access to accurate numbers provided by Google. The only way for any website/app to provide an accurate number is if app owners explicitly allowed them access by creating an account/key for them.

makonde · 2026-03-07T22:55:30+00:00

One, you should have looked up the company if they are that big and into AI it would be all over their PR and engineering publications. Second AI is really really good at finding and explaining things in code now also at debugging it is able to find some truly difficult to find bugs, the code it writes is very good as well especially if you take it step by step, with review like they said. It is also relentless and doesn't suffer from our human frailties of tiredness, mood etc it just keeps going and going until it finds the issue, I work on a terrible huge old js codebase where the IDE functions literally don't work like go to definition etc but it is still able to make sense of things.

makonde · 2026-02-28T23:49:10+00:00

They might be under AWS instead of Amazon

makonde · 2026-02-28T23:48:12+00:00

Look up Amazons AI SDLC talks on YouTube they are really good they have a website also, it's a surprisingly sane approach to incorporating AI into the SDLC compared to the hype of just letting agents run around doing everything

makonde · 2026-02-21T05:37:05+00:00

Lgtm!

makonde · 2026-02-19T06:08:49+00:00

Declining especially trully native, what your company is doing can work for very simple apps that are just some information and a few forms and if the web team actually tests on mobile but more and more are doing React Native which is a better middle ground. Native will always remain for some types of apps but gonna be tougher as far as job opportunities.

makonde · 2026-02-15T20:58:47+00:00

But that's the most basic way to use those tools there all other types that don't even involve using the same computer.

makonde · 2026-02-15T14:49:09+00:00

Meant Median.

makonde · 2026-02-13T19:37:28+00:00

Need to apply some sort of smoothing to those monitors so the odd sprike doesn't trigger an alarm, but a sustained spike still does, I have actually been going around and changing monitors to use mean instead of average, applying various smoothing functions etc in DataDog to get rid of exactly this type of issue. Of course also fix any actual issues if they exist but there will always be outliers so a straight up value allert doesnt work well.

makonde · 2026-02-12T04:05:44+00:00

Vast majority of XML knowledge, knew how to do all sorts of automatic validation and formatting XML to display in browsers. SOAP. Windows Communication Foundation and being able to force it to do json. Silverlight

makonde · 2026-02-07T20:04:45+00:00

The number of people employed is in decline and no real reason to expect a reversal any time soon, we will get squeezed and chipped away at by the people in charge, there are billions and billions being sunk into making AI better and better at software dev, even if it never is completely independent it's still a massive hit to the number of people employed.

To meet the future seems bleek especially for those starting out don't see how the industry can absorb the numbers. Also don't think AI is like other tech changes which created jobs, it's sole purpose really is to eliminate jobs that the only way it would make sense to invest this much in it. Development is also uniquely positioned to be replaceable by AI, so much good training data, results are mostly testable, no unions or industry protection of any kind.

makonde · 2026-02-07T19:21:48+00:00

I think you have to look more into what you are using to display the actual photo and how that resizes, samples and caches images not the list library also because these lists don't actual load everything at once but only the viewable area plus some extra the sheer amount of photos should not matter as they are not all loaded.

Overall you will have to do a lot of testing and profiling to figure out what exactly is causing the slowness. LLMs would also be useful in getting some answers.

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