HN user
I’m for this. China cannot be trusted to let TikTok simply be a business running an app. This can and will be weaponized against the US whenever it benefits China. Which is to say likely right now.
I suspect there is a strong element of “it depends”. If your company needs to grow rapidly to capitalize on an opportunity, having a process that makes hiring this slow doesn’t work. If on the other hand playing the long game is viable, like maybe with a lifestyle type company, this approach is far better. The problem with the pandemic was that it suggested there was a new and big opportunity that made it hard for companies to distinguish the right approach.
I haven’t seen my class of app discussed here. In my case, a mobile app is useful for a subset of features of my web app, but it would never replace to full experience. Very few customers would ever think to look for my app in the App Store. Nonetheless Apple wanted to force me to offer the subscription through the App and then take a 30% cut forever. I ended up just releasing an Android version as they were more lax about not including any payment option. I could see this opening up the option for a lot of business apps that augment functionality elsewhere.
Integration - IFTTT, Zapier, Boomi, Jitterbit, Workato, and on and on.
Marketing Automation - Marketo, Klaviyo, Mailchimp as a few examples.
Airtable is another that has low-code automation built in
Some strange comments in here about Low Code, as if they weren’t already successful. There are easily hundreds of apps successfully making use of Low Code to solve problems for people. Some Marketing Automation tools have had them for 10+ Years. Integration tools are also often Low Code.
I run a one-person SaaS company supporting three products. One is an iOS and Android all-local storage app so that costs me nothing to run. I have two projects running on Django sharing the same RDS DB. I can support two apps with just a single EC2 each. One runs docker containers. The other I did not dockerize yet. For me, the total costs are about $40/month. I have looked at Netlify and other “easy options” but they double or more my costs due to their costly basic tiers.
The beta was good timing for me. I installed an LE cert on Ubuntu running Apache and it's working fine. The instructions were a bit unclear about whether the "auto" option works yet for that setup (it doesn't). Also, I had an issue with permissions on the cert directory - I use a group for my server permissions (instead of running at root), so had to add that group to the cert directory. But the process is still better than what I've experienced implementing a comodo cert.