Thread · HN Continuity

Mobile software belongs to the platform because that is where the money is. Apple does not make most of its money from selling phones. It makes money on things like iTunes, AppStore, mobile advertising, and other transactions. Apple is willing to cripple its product to strengthen the reliance of their users on these software platforms.

For example I just wanted a WinAmp like experience to play MP3 files using my phone while doing dishes. These MP3 files are on a home file server. I looked at the applications on the app store and they were all shit, even the ones that cost money. I suspect the reasoning is because these applications are crippled in favor of Apple preferred, or in house, solutions.

So, I wrote my own music app. Its just a web page that I can run in a web browser. This allows me to completely bypass iTunes and the app store. Here are the steps I had to jump through to get this to work:

1. The playlist must be static and assembled in advance. There is a JavaScript file system API to get a file list from a directory. It works in desktop Safari but is disabled in iOS Safari. So, I wrote a Node.js app that does this and outputs a JSON with the necessary data.

2. iOS Safari will not load JSON files beyond a certain trivial size. It claims to be a memory issue, which is stupid, because I can bypass this too by using multiple JSON files each containing only 500 records of data. So, my Node.js app has a "split" option to produce multiple data files and my static webpage app requests the local JSON files one by one.