You are not alone.

15 years ago I was thinking about switching my career to a different industry altogether, just didn't know what it would be. One thing I knew was that I was so tired of building web sites and backends. Boring, repetitive, uninspiring.

Then a friend asked me to write a simple iPhone app. I had no idea what development for Apple platforms would be like...

Fast forward to 2026, I'm 57 now, still in tech, building apps for Apple platforms, still enjoying it very much.

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gordon_freeman 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The durability of their products still surprises me. I still own and use iPhone 11 (still it is my first iPhone when I switched from Android). Still getting latest iOS updates and functioning very well and may last for 2 more years. What other phone could do this?

	▲	nativeit 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Typing this on an iPhone 11 as well. Still feeling zero pressure to upgrade.

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jondwillis 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’ve had the exact opposite journey. Native apps, disillusioned and frustrated with the backwards tooling, moved on to more open platforms (web apps and backends)

	▲	dcrazy 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I’m curious what you find “backwards” about native tooling. I know the sentiment is common, and there must be some truth to it. But my partner works in web infra and frequently laments her inability to trace a single request through her company’s monolith while trying to reconstruct a failure from logs, and I am baffled that there’s no equivalent to attaching a debugger and stepping through execution.