Apple seems like they are willing to double down on SwiftUI/UiKit with Catalyst.
It's getting less simple for new APIs/features but at least Apple's docs have straightforward hierarchy, even with two separate languages. Duplicate APIs usually get deprecated, like the old ALAssets photo library API.
Try building an app in .NET. There are dozens of different breadcrumbs you can follow on the MS docs for varying versions of .NET, Windows, and frameworks with radically different feature parity and UI systems. Virtually everything you google when building a .NET app has to suffixed with a bunch of identifying information for which libraries and versions you are targeting.
Open source has a serious advantage in this regard because communities tend to congregate around project and documentation styles that are consistent with similar projects, so you already have an intuition for how to navigate a new repo. I find React Native documentation especially easy to parse, although sometimes missing features or examples.
OSs have it tough because their docs aren't tailored specifically to each framework and domain space. But maybe they should be. I think if engineers felt more like they owned their product's documentation, layout, and structure like at smaller companies, they'd be more inclined to make it just right. The SwiftUI specific tutorials are great.
For me, a large part of React Native's appeal is the docs giving me a clear path to make stuff and a fairly public development process. Sure it is also an extra layer of trouble, but I prefer the trouble I can engage with (RN) over the risk of being stranded in the unknowable (Apple).
True, and I do like this a lot. There's a great ecosystem, and the examples are usually pretty good.
But it's also just as easy to get stranded with missing features or features that aren't on both Android and iOS. I did a bunch of geolocation and mapping a while back and I had to write my own support for things like heatmaps. This was eventually merged into the react native maps library, but it is something that can happen if you're doing anything slightly exotic.
Is it really an asset to not have documentation for old frameworks or versions? Some people have customers on old hardware and legacy code using old APIs that they might need to integrate with, it's useful to be able to find out how that stuff behaves.
That's the thing, it's all still there, but it's abundantly clear based on the pages and the list of supported OSs/platforms whether you can use it, and what the new API is.
It's getting less simple for new APIs/features but at least Apple's docs have straightforward hierarchy, even with two separate languages. Duplicate APIs usually get deprecated, like the old ALAssets photo library API.
Try building an app in .NET. There are dozens of different breadcrumbs you can follow on the MS docs for varying versions of .NET, Windows, and frameworks with radically different feature parity and UI systems. Virtually everything you google when building a .NET app has to suffixed with a bunch of identifying information for which libraries and versions you are targeting.
Open source has a serious advantage in this regard because communities tend to congregate around project and documentation styles that are consistent with similar projects, so you already have an intuition for how to navigate a new repo. I find React Native documentation especially easy to parse, although sometimes missing features or examples.
OSs have it tough because their docs aren't tailored specifically to each framework and domain space. But maybe they should be. I think if engineers felt more like they owned their product's documentation, layout, and structure like at smaller companies, they'd be more inclined to make it just right. The SwiftUI specific tutorials are great.