People will literally build their own music apps instead of switching to Android. Is it just for the blue bubbles, or because of how everything "just works" (unless you want to play offline music)?

You really would move to a different country just because they have better bread?

What's the problem with baking your own?

I made a prototype of a music player for iOS, since the VLC app cannot reliably parse metadata of FLACs stored on my file server. I cannot store my whole music collection on my device, due to storage limitations.

My app is a prototype in the sense that I want more features, but the app has just enough functionality that I lack motivation to implement more features. Currently has audio playback, remote file access, and FLAC metadata parsing. Similar to the author, I originally wanted to use React Native because I have experience with it and already maintain a few React Native applications. However, I am not interested in targetting (or debugging) other platforms. So I decided to try using SwiftUI and used a special tool[1] to get something resembling hot reloading. (It's kind of a gross hack that requires supplying custom linker flags in Xcode, but it works just enough for me to not miss the DX of TypeScript and React Native).

[1] https://github.com/johnno1962/InjectionIII

People will literally write code to avoid Android

Foobar2000 has been on the App Store for ages…

Actually, I think it is a bit odd that the author didn’t find a free music app they liked. But I also think you don’t really need an excuse to go make something anyway, so… I dunno, it think maybe that was just a framing narrative to get the story started.

I’m on iOS and I use navidrome/substreamer app combo - it work great and I can keep selected music on device too.