This person successfully managed to trade a bunch of irritating issues for a different set of irritating issues: that generally makes one feel happier, as working around new and thereby relatively exciting irritating issues as a vacation from the worn and tired ones we are now so sick of it makes us want to die, is all many of us can hope for in life.
You're right, but you're wrong too- they're different kinds of issues. One of the worst things about web development is that sneaking dread that you can't get there from here. The last 5% of evil performance bugs is particularly miserable in managed environments.
It's not exactly like that — there will always be issue, we know it, but some are more irritating than other. I can handle Xcode crashing, and needing some help to compile everything — I can live with that.
The debugging part otherwise, is subpar. It's (at least for me), a true hell. Appcelerator was the king of unusable error for example, that and a lack of GOOD (heck, even complete) doc were driving me mad.
So yes he has made a trade. I think a good one, but to each his own !
Context: I have been doing iOS app development, both native and with massive amounts of mixed in HTML (using a home-grown mechanism similar to, though I will personally claim nearly infinitely better than, PhoneGap) since early 2008 (yes: half a year before the SDK existed).
The day you realize that what version of Xcode you were using when you compiled the application (in addition to the version of the firmware installed on the device) affects the behavior of UI classes on deployed units, and that these effects are not documented (and are in some cases /insane/) is the day you realize that no: it is just different.
To describe this another way: yes... Apple seriously implemented a kind of "quirks mode" (I believe that is the most fair, accurate, and descriptive term to use to describe it, by analogy to web browsers) in the UIKit framework on the device; they will change the behavior of the library slightly, and then do runtime checks to determine "could you have known that we did that".
To be clear: this is not due to compiler bugs; they do it with a runtime function called UIApplicationLinkedOnOrAfter() (to be clear: which looks at the date of the UIKit library used, not the date of the link). I discovered this after spending an incomprehensible amount of time attempting to debug a serious UI issue that only occurred when /some/ of the developers working on my project compiled it: I sat around disassembling and tracing and then... "woah".
The places where I have seen this stuff used, while attempting to maintain an application not over the course of a few months but over the course of now over four years, has been sufficiently "wtf" that on iOS 4.1 I finally wrote a tool that disassembled UIKit, found all of the calls to that function, and attempted to document "for what version it is being compared".
(I intended to at some point even write a detailed blog post about this, with examples, and a chart of all of the usages, but I've never had time. I really wish I had more time to sit around writing blog posts, but the really good ones of those take days to put together, if not even longer ;P.)
In contrast, the stupid WebKit bugs in or changes to iframes and multi-touch that seem to get traded around in every version of iOS are actually tame in comparison: they simply have not caused the kind of debugging hell and frustration that the simpler native components have caused. I have only once been "I upgraded to the latest version of iOS and all of my content disappeared" with HTML (iframes with height=0 stopped auto-sizing: changed to height=1: irritating as now an iframe cannot autosize so small as to disappear), but it has happened four or five times with my native code.
So there: just another set of anecdote to throw in the pile of "irritating garbage" and "debugging hell" that people like to throw around about everything they do. Personally, I find that I'm happiest when I switch back/forth between doing Objective-C, HTML, Python (server), and assembly (reversing) a lot, so that no specific one set of irritating problems ever becomes so depressing that I throw up my arms and quit (which has totally happened a few times).
