An app can be a home-cooked meal
I remember the fantasy that more and more people would be able to develop simple basic apps for their own very personal customized needs. It was a vision of a more accessible and democratic compute infrastructure, where we&#x27;d all be &#x27;makers&#x27; creating the compute environment we lived in. Things like hypercard were part of this vision.<p>Those days are gone. The article doesn&#x27;t explicitly mention the fact we all know: Very few people have the capacity to create a &#x27;home-cooked meal&#x27; like the OP, for their own use.<p>In fact much fewer than could create a little hypercard app.  It&#x27;s a world where there are pretty large barriers to most people being software &#x27;makers&#x27;, and instead we are just consumers who can choose from what is offered to us by various companies trying to figure out how to monetize our needs and desires.<p>Part of it is the increased complexity of app development. Part of it is the walled gardens of our suppliers.<p>&gt; I distributed the app to my family using TestFlight, and in TestFlight it shall remain forever: a cozy, eternal beta.<p>Indeed. Because the very infrastruture ignores the needs of one-off &quot;home cooked meal&quot; apps, it assumes they don&#x27;t exist, you have to pretend it is some kind of &quot;beta&quot; of a mass market commodified product instead (and be glad our suppliers still let you do that for &#x27;free&#x27;). Our computers (increasingly the phone&#x2F;device is people&#x27;s primary computer) are no longer ours to do with as we will.<p>It is sad. If those who created the computing revolution 30 years ago (including prior versions of us) could see where it wound up.... the level of technological sophisitication of our pocket audio-video-geolocated-self-surveilling-communicating devices is astounding; the lack of &#x27;empowerment&#x27; or control we have over them is utterly depressing.