[SailfishDevel] When does Jolla give us an API?

[Attila Csipa]

On 12/02/14 12:36, Timur Kristóf wrote:
>
> I posted the stuff to together so we can continue the discussion online:
> https://together.jolla.com/question/27052/roundtable-discussion-jolla-harbour-apis/
>

My personal advice is - don't overthink it. The bottom line/driver is 
the user experience.

It's super-easy to overthink and overengineer in the hope that strong 
and restrictive policies will somehow protect you. In both my personal 
and professional experience, they largely won't, as at some point there 
will be a change of behaviour/policy even in those supposedly "stable" 
APIs or there will be that weird app that actually depended on a bug, 
and the framework fix broke it. Life of a platform vendor is hard.

The other thing I'd like to highlight for the cases WHEN YOU HAVE 
LIMITED REPOSITORY TESTING BANDWIDTH (yes, that's all caps), it IMHO 
shouldn't be the repository QA that tries to validate all versions and 
use-cases. There is a reason why in appstores it's the users who give 
the stars and comments, and not the repo QA. Repo QA is more about "will 
it start" and "will it burn your house down". If it breaks later on, 
annoys, users will one-star it and it will sink to the bottom of the 
store search. Tough luck, life of a app developer is hard, too. What's 
happening right now is the exact opposite - apps that have perfectly 
fine user experience are turned down because they link to verboten libs 
(even if the app would still work fine if the lib went away). At the 
same time you can publish the world's most inefficient and annoying app 
if it uses the "right" libs and services.

Finally, there is the segment about hackability and open development. 
The current *harbour* limits are IMO worse than what we had even in the 
Ovi days - the intent of why some parts of the system are off limits 
doesn't matter, if in the end that prevents people making/getting cool 
apps to people - remember Aegis? That was also a "tool" to guard 
platform, users and developers alike. If in the end all I can make is a 
Flappy bird or Doodle jump, your platform doesn't stick out the tiniest 
bit (on the contrary) from the others - at that point it's really 
tempting to just go full Android and say "your problem" if an APK 
doesn't work on a Jolla/Sailfish device.

I can take a one-star rating with pure profanity as the comment to my 
face a lot easier than hard-policies that prevent me from getting 
(hopefully cool) stuff to people.

Best regards,
Attila Csipa