TLDR;
We want to get free users to move to paid plans sooner, by (a) relaxing sharing limits, and (b) reducing the amount of pages you can create to 3 unless you upgrade.
Existing work created prior to 21 April will be unaffected.
Catch all the users very early, grow quickly with VC capital, give the users whatever they want and then later force them to pay up by limiting access to the tools they love. - Silicon Valley VC Playbook.
As an employee (not of Figma I mean of VC backed companies in general) it's also frustrating because you join based on some vision and then you often end up hating the feature throttling for philosophical (empathy with users) or practical reasons (makes it harder to sell or market if that's your job)
Remember when products were getting better over time... now their value starts meh (MVP), becomes great (thanks to funding), and then reverts to meh (when finally focusing on unit economics)
I taught myself to code, started in 2010 after 10 years in IT infra/networking. I’m not a professional developer and it’s a hobby for me - I did a humanities degree with no comp/sci background.
Initially I built a simple crud app to track water changes for my aquarium. For a while there I had it online as a free SaaS app too. It was using Ruby on Rails, and I had no idea how to use JavaScript to make the UX better.
Fast forward a few years and I was getting fed up with voicemail, so I read up on APIs and figured out how to use GCPs transcription service, pointing to audio files in twilio (I diverted my mobile to twilio to act as my voicemail). Actually pretty simple even though it might sound complicated.
Fast forward to last year and I built a free directory to raise the profile of primary producers who were missing out on foot traffic as a result of COVID, closely followed by another project I’m close to launching. These last two projects were in nodejs as I figured I had better finally figure out JavaScript.
When I was completely stuck on something I did a lot of googleing and watching YouTube - that happened a lot, particularly when trying to get my head around promises.
Moral of the story, don’t be put off with CRUD apps, they are very rewarding. Just build stuff you enjoy when you have spare time (for me evenings after child in bed).
I started doing an MBA at a top Australian university. I won the top student award in digital marketing.
I found that I was spending most of my time carrying other students rather than actually learning something beyond what I could read in a book or already knew, at least at the conceptual level.
And believe me when I say I’m not smart in an academic sense.
Family issues came up and with a waning interest I dropped out while getting enough points for a Grad Cert.
Fast forward a decade later and I’ve filed a patent pending in AI and another one in video messaging.
The MBA was for the most part a waste of time, money and energy.
I really didn’t learn much, except to recognise getting an MBA is more to do with ones ability to persevere through an incredibly dry and uninteresting range of subjects for many years at a time.
Save your money, and spend it on something more useful. $40k gets you a lot of azure/aws/gcp credits plus lifetime accounts of Lynda.com training and pretty much any other online course aggregator you care to imagine.
Interesting. The deciding factor for our family when buying a Mac or Windows 10 device for my wife’s small business was actually my need to upload iOS apps for review by apple.
I’m an after hours hobby developer, and use a windows desktop. It’s powerful and has all the tooling I require. And it supports all the games I want to play from the steam store.
So - I think apple will lose a little bit of business from people like me with this announcement, as I’m sure we would not have purchased a Mac when we did only a few months ago.
The pricing makes this pointless for small businesses. $1/hour and minimum tenancy of 24 hours means each time you're updating your app you're spending $26. After 25 app updates you could own a brand new Mac Mini (assuming you never need to spend an extra day testing). Buying a used Mac makes even more sense.
MacStadium also already rents out Mac Minis starting at $59/mo.
I think the Amazon offering only makes sense for big corporations where (1) IT doesn't want to support macOS/exotic hardware on their network (2) it's easier to just charge to your your existing AWS billing than get a hardware purchase approved by your boss
Agree, but my needs are simple and I develop using expo.io. So once my app is published often minor changes can be pushed straight through to my app without App Store approvals. So it would be $26 per upload (ouch), but my “upload” may only be once every few months so I’d easily be ahead.
Alternatively, Apple might gain revenue from iOS and macOS builds becoming more accessible
Wishful thinking: resurrect the xserve. Give me that 1U Apple appliance so I can stop stacking up Mac Minis (we have an incredibly non-trivial amount of iOS development happening across multiple divisions. Current Mac Mini count: 8)
You only need it for compiling. There are plenty of cross platform frameworks that dont require to develop with xcode - and that's good in my opinion.
I built all my apps this way and faced the same problem as OP - so had to buy a Mac mini. It was the cheapest option ~8 years ago and I still use it today for the same purpose - just for compiling. I assume there are probably more of us.
My needs are simple enough that the standard inclusions in expo.io work without complication. I could imagine more complex apps need a more involved dev setup but not in my case.
Expo.io is good enough for my needs. Cross platform, just run it on my iPhone and and android simulator. Also, the way expo works is that not all updates need to go through the App Store approvals. I can quickly dev/test/release once I have the app container approved by the relevant store.
My only need for a Mac with expo is for the upload. The apk file is taken care of with the command above.
I have an iPhone I use for development and testing. Bonus points is that expo is cross platform, so I can publish to google play with the same single code base too.
I’m always developing without xcode. Using expo I can write apps in react native on my desktop and vscode. Mac only required for the upload to the App Store.
Yeah, I was about to buy an Apple laptop since I also have been doing more and more cross-platform app development. Didn't like borrowing others' laptops and doing the laborious process of switching to my icloud profile just to upload some apps to the app store.
I'm definitely out now. I was never the target audience for Apple products anyways so maybe they're not too worried about this
I really admire Google, but they have become notorious for their “fast fail” mentality and product sun setting.
No matter how good this may be I don’t trust google to not close this down or make major modifications that could cause issues in 1,3,5+ years from now.
So it’s a reluctant “no thanks” from me, as I really wish they would plan their product portfolio more long term than history so far demonstrates.
The job title “account manager” says it all. That is a 100% sales role. So don’t expect deep technical expertise. Any assistance rendered will be to grow the vendor footprint.
This is interesting - I couldn’t determine how they train them system to recognise all the products though.
Flavour variants, special promotional packaging etc make training hard due to the sheer size of images that need to be in a training dataset to yield accurate results.
Existing work created prior to 21 April will be unaffected.