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0 pointsaksss3y ago0 comments

Visual Studio Community Edition is free and quite capable for the individual hobby developer, same with VSC. Compared to developing for iPhone, which requires me to still have macOS (and legally Mac hardware) at my disposal somewhere to even get the app built completely, right? That would be the proper comparison between their approach to enabling developers on the tooling side, not the App Store fee. What’s the barrier to entry for the Windows App Store? I think it’s like $25 bucks and $99 for an org, or something very similar.

Obviously the glaring difference is that you can side load apps on Windows without using the app store at all. The day that becomes a serious barrier is definitely a line too far in the history of computing. But Apple has always been a very closed off ecosystem - going back to the nineties they were never very friendly to developers or third party hardware. To me this is just Apple doing Apple - their phone, IMO, is still miles ahead of anything else, though.

> few hobbies are as cheap as this

Quite true.

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flohofwoe3y ago

> that you can side load apps on Windows without using the app store at all

It's unfortunately not that simple anymore on Windows either with the SmartScreen popup getting in the way and the "Run anyway" button hard to find (not as bad as on macOS but still...).

Your executable needs a big enough "reputation score" for SmartScreen to remain silent, even when properly code-signed (unless it's signed with an expensive EV-certificiate apparently).

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