But I understand that they have really ambitious plans for Swift Playgrounds for iPad, and not just “released and forgotten.” Just a couple of months ago, they signed a contract, thanks to which now it is from iPad to Swift that you can write for many robots and drones. I think this is the dream of many children.
– At WWDC, among other things, Apple announced how much money all iOS developers received in total, and compared to last year, the amount has increased dramatically. And how much does what you see in the community confirm these beautiful numbers? Does it feel like there’s more money in iOS development?
– It depends on what to talk about. If about personal projects – in my opinion, it really has become more. My friend released a text quest with two screens. A text quest is when some text is written on the screen, the player has several options to choose from, he selects and sees the next text. This was popular in the 90s, and even now, among prominent representatives of Lifeline …. The plot was written by a non-professional and rather quickly. It is clear that technically such an application is written in a couple of hours. And in the end, with advertising costs of about $ 600, there was a profit of $ 10,000 per month.
This is the market situation. Because of this, many people think whether to go to work in some company for 200,000 rubles a month, when you can try small projects, and in six months the fifth, sixth, seventh will be able to bring money. In this regard, money really becomes more. And the new advertising formats that Facebook now provides help – now messengers have been introduced, while none of my friends have tried it, but potentially this allows you to earn more.
If we are talking about companies, then, in my opinion, the demand for iOS developers is slowly starting to fall. Because the mobile device market has already slowed down, something new is becoming popular, while no one knows where the next boom will be, but investments are already going somewhere towards machine learning or blockchain projects. And in this regard, the market becomes a little less profitable.
– In your opinion, in what direction is the iOS developer community changing now – both in the world in general, and specifically in Moscow?
– There is a mixture of professionalism and conservatism. People began to think more about architecture, complex approaches, different testing methods, more complex interfaces. If you look at what applications looked like five years ago and how they look now, you can see the difference.
But at the same time, the market is becoming more conservative. Five years ago it was relatively new, people came here who wanted to try themselves in something new, ready to get involved in an adventure. Now many of them have been on the market for 5-6 years and do not really accept any new products. For them, the same machine learning or augmented reality look like something risky and “twisted”. Although at one time, when they came to the mobile market, it was the same for the previous ones, as ML is now. It’s a generation gap, you might say.
Specifically, Moscow is now one of the most active markets. It’s hard for me to compare with San Francisco, I don’t fully understand about it, but if we compare it with Germany or Italy, it turns out that our market in Moscow is many times more active. From just one of the areas, it turned into something incredible, with a bunch of materials, communication, various solutions. This makes me happy.
And it saddens that at the same time the market becomes a little more aggressive and a little more hype. Someone elevates one technology like a fanatic, someone else starts to hate. There is a herd feeling when someone has expressed an opinion (often wrong), and the rest begin to blindly repeat. This is observed in so many areas, but in iOS until some point this was not the case. The developers did not argue so among themselves, they did not discriminate against different kinds of groups, there were no wars between the developers of different companies. And now there is such a trend, and it has a destructive effect.
– To the fact that the Moscow market has grown: how are CocoaHeads meetings developing against this background?
– Previously, it was like this: we hold at the same venue, the speakers speak without any run-through of the speech in advance, and people communicate. It was an interesting format, but in the current realities this is not enough, because the community is developing, many other meetups have appeared, and the requirements have increased.
And as a result, we try new platforms, try new formats: a round table, a quiz, a blitz, discussions… We started collecting feedback and analyzing it. We started preparing speakers, sometimes we listen to them more than once, so that the quality of the reports is high. We have new requirements for the site: be sure to broadcast, video, to have something to eat, so that the quizzes were with prizes. In general, the requirements have increased, the level has risen, and it turns out that CocoaHeads is already like a mini-conference, not a meetup. In addition, we want to hold not in one city, but in several: earlier meetings in St. Petersburg were infrequent, but now they will be on a regular basis, because we have found a person who is ready to do this.
