[SailfishDevel] When does Jolla give us an API?

[timur.kristof at gmail.com]

Attila, you are totally right (in my opinion at least). Can you please post your opinion to the together thread so that those of us who don't read mailing lists can find it too? :) 

On Wed Feb 12 2014 14:06:16 GMT+0100 (CET), Attila Csipa wrote:
>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
>
>
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-- 
Timur

Sent from my Jolla