I'll pick my poison thanks and choose Chinese surveillance.

Here it is if anyone is interested: https://dopewars-flutter.web.app/

Essentially been trying to make it modernised with updated events, skill sets, locations etc. Just to make it a bit more fun for me to play around with.

I also have no doubt there's bugs as this is very new and only put a few hours into it over the past few weeks.

- You make the claim that "official numbers on connection to water, electricity etc. are pretty much a joke" yet provide nothing to back that up? Why? I would say giving access to water and electricity to over 90% of the population in under 30 years is a win. And a case against the term "steady decline". No doubt drought ravaged regions like the North West, which if you'd been to, is understandable that consistent water cannot be provided. So does they fall into the 10% of non-connected water residents? I would assume so.

- You state that 10-15% of households are off-grid. I would make a claim that that show's progress in society and not decline. Despite the reasons, it means that there will actually end up in the long run being more electricity for the population overall. Let's also look at overall manufacturing and I will provide sources: PWC you may have heard of them forecast 5.7% growth in manufacturing over the next decade (despite short term decline of -0.4%) due to reforms in regulation and fixing of electricity supply. Here's the link: https://www.pwc.co.za/en/publications/manufacturing-analysis...

- Healthcare is impressive if you take in the fact of providing healthcare free of charge to 60 million people within less than 25 years, is not only a feat but something that is literally the definition of impressive. It's far far off where it should be, no one doubts that but you seem to have a blinkered view that everything must be of a first world standard within the shortest timeframe. We could have gotten closer if it weren't for years of corruption but the aim and the goal and ability to provide healthcare to the people is still impressive.

- If you don't think violent crime has anything to do with Apartheid's spatial planning, has nothing to do with the Apartheid government arming and supplying gangs with drugs, has nothing to do with purposefully underfunding education within townships, ensuring little public transport to working hubs, and the entire multi-faceted list of socio-economic destruction that took place. Then, my friend, you literally do not know what you are talking about, nor the socio-economic reasons for crime to occur. If you think Apartheid has nothing to do with the unemployment rate due to generational injustices, maybe you should take grade 10 history again.

- What makes me think there is less corruption now? Well yes the fact that more comes to light, the fact that we even had the Zondo commission and have the recommendations taken on board in part by parliament and the implementation of the Public Procurement Act of 2024 will have a positive long-standing affect.

- Let's talk foreign investment. I'll just paste links because foreign investment is up over 80% since 2013. "Down something like 29%" without providing any links, or facts is nebulous at best. Mostly due to the fact of the vast increase post-covid caused a huge spike in FDI which if you look at without that context you'd think it is down, which is statistically a misnomer due to the societal causes of a sudden huge increase in investment when economies opened up.

Here is Lloyds banks analysis: https://www.lloydsbanktrade.com/en/market-potential/south-af...

The IDC backs SA as Africa's top investment destination: https://www.idc.co.za/sa-is-africas-top-investment-destinati...

FDI has increased in Southern Africa over the past year: https://unctad.org/news/africa-foreign-investment-hit-record...

So yeah I fucking hate the ANC. I hate the corruption. But I can see the bigger picture of the 30 year positive change, you can take a microscopic view as you have done - but this conversation is around "steady decline" and you have proven nothing to indicate that it is.

What is also hilarious is ad hominem trying to call me a communist (which I am not), and shouldn't matter either way. But what is funny is how you decry the state of things currently, which is happening under capitalism, yet the extent of your criticism of the society can't reach to the system within which it exists. However you create a nebulous hypothetical in trying to plaster me with an insult that another system would be so much worse, when according to you the state of how things is bad as it is.

So where is your critique of capitalism?

- Loadshedding is no more.

- The tax issue is precisely the problem that needs redressing and is primarily because of past injustices. You're almost there.

- I have been treated in public hospitals and while not perfect the access to healthcare is impressive.

- I agree with the race laws. Your basis that SA has more race laws is gaslighting due to the fact of the homeland act. But let's not let facts get in the way.

- Violent crime rate is because why? Apartheid spatial planning. Read up and learn all about why this has re-enforced violent crime.

- Unemployment is high, yes. Doesn't mean the country is in decline.

- Corruption has hit its peak and on the way down post-Zuma years.

I have a close friend who owns a huge furniture company, and builds everything in house and grows year on year very well. So your anecdote is countered by mine.

It's really simple, we as white people have been given - historically and now - just about every advantage a minority can have. If a white person or their parents couldn't make the most of that well then that's ok, because equality and equity are the goals. And just because a PoC are succeeding more now, does not mean white people are suffering in the least.

What is your indication of decline? Some facts and figures:

- Less than 30% of the population having access to water has increased to near 100%.

- Electricity had less than 30% access and now sits around 90%

- Access to education (The matric pass rate more than doubled from 53.4 in 1995 to 82.9 in 2023) to taking that to near 100% in 29 years is pretty incredible.

- Taking 8 million people out of poverty and lower class into the middle class in that time is pretty great.

- Access to free healthcare for the entire country.

- The freedom of not being discriminated towards due to skin colour.

Yes the ANC has had an opportunity to do much greater good, but if you take in the bigger picture and understand that the white population still holds over 70% of the wealth while being 10% of the population - this is an enforced inequality that needs to be righted.

If you look at the freedoms of South Africa, it has possibly the best constitution in the world. Sure, the enforcement of the laws are not as good as the laws themselves - but the rate of improvement in my lifetime has been staggering. Even despite the setback of the Zuma years.

Even now, we have gone from an ANC dominated political landscape to a Government of National Unity, which forces different political factions to work together. Another huge milestone in the burgeoning democracy of a young country.

It is so far from perfect but if you really have spent any significant time in SA and still think it is a country in decline, then I am more inclined to think you're one of the types of expats who love to shit on something that you have no bond to, and not because your arguments are bound by facts. We must interrogate the long standing consequences of white monopoly capitals violent subjugation of South Africans in both the past and the present to paint a fair picture of the country.

Your quote " a country that is in steady decline." certainly does not paint a fair picture.

Really funny, that you probably consider yourself highly educated, and yet have zero ability to see why iOS is actually not the primary choice for engineers in the global south. Your two cases are beyond laughable.

I'm really sorry I'm being rude, but I highly doubt you have ever built a mobile app yourself if these are your hot takes.

You missed the end of that sentence "... in the first world". The ignorance or arrogance to assume all businesses that are started are aiming for first world markets. You think entrepreneurs in Africa, South and Central America, Asia are all aiming to expand into Europe and the US? That Third World business problems don't exist and solely cater for Third World needs?

It never fails to amaze me at the absolute arrogance of these assumptions, as if the Global South isn't relevant in technology or entrepreneurship. Truly astounding.

To me this presents as something a business person with very little knowledge of app development will be drawn to. But the long term drawbacks of this approach far outweigh the short term gains from trying to quickly port an existing iOS app to Android.

Sure there's more money in the Western app ecosystem for iOS apps, but that doesn't mean your app should inherently cater for iOS first. In fact that's a very first world and reductive approach, when there's billion's of people that don't interact in the same way.

I get the benefit of being able to share business logic. That's not the issue at stake here. If it was, this wouldn't be a company in the first place as there's multiple frameworks that enable this and do this better - at zero cost.

I don't believe performance issues is a relevant metric anymore, having dealt with them on RN, KMP, Flutter. Non-native UI, is also quite irrelevant these days. Perhaps if we were having this conversation 2-3 years ago I would agree with you. But with how RN/Flutter UI's are now, and the native aspect of KMP it's a non-issue.

> Skip solves all of these problems, and because it uses your code as-is on iOS and generates native code on Android, you can trivially and directly mix in platform-specific code wherever you need to, without any bridging.

I will believe it when I see it. You say "Skip solves all of these problems", when Kotlin multi-platform was essentially doing the same thing in reverse, but with far larger backing and it took years before it was production ready. It is not trivial to keep up with ever changing Android ecosystem, multiple API levels that need to be catered for, differing UX interactions, different native API's e.g databases, push notifications, permissions etc. Again you say trivial, not sure what is trivial about this.

I feel like you've either never tried cross platform work on a (large) production project? This is solving an aspect of mobile development that personally I don't see a need for. But if it's for you go for it, in my experience across languages and platforms, I would recommend against this option unless you solely only have iOS Engineers, no ability to cater for a native Android experience and hadn't thought of having an Android app before starting development. Then sure, use it. Any project I plan would be both platforms and wouldn't require this level of abstraction.

That said the cost is also something that is odd, when you have free alternatives that provide far more mature ecosystem.

In terms of getting deep with existing tools, what is the difference here when using XCode as to Android Studio or VSCode? The tools aren't difficult to use, at least any more so than XCode. If you're not a developer then sure, but if you are then AS or VSCode should be a breeze. We're far removed from the days of Eclipse and Notepad++ where you didn't have the tooling, online resources or automatic fixes that these tools come with today.

So yeah maybe my experience doesn't see the need for this, which is exactly the issue here. Who is making the majority of the apps we use today? Who is paying to use tools that speed up development? Engineers like myself.

Whereas the rest of the world is Android dominant, and there is no real reason to do this when there's multiple better frameworks for cross platform development. Flutter, React Native and Kotlin MP are and always will be miles ahead. Let alone those framework's being free whereas here there is a cost for professional development.

As someone that has written various projects in Kotlin (including multiplatform), Swift, Dart/Flutter for over a decade I don't see the point. And I would be exactly the target market for this kind of product. The transpiling is the big issue for me, you will have to tap into every single Android API, write code to transpile those and then maintain across every Android version going forward.

Let alone the denigrating of cross platform frameworks and promotion of yours due to "animations, accessibility, and future-proof evolution alongside OS updates" doesn't sound like much of a win, when the quality of these in cross platform is already at a very high level. Secondly "And there's a GitHub ecosystem of open-source modules supporting popular frameworks, including SQLite, Firebase, Lottie, and many other common building blocks of modern apps." all of which exist in cross platform and kotlin multi platform.

I'm sorry to the developers and team to knock it, but just my 2 cents coming from a more third world perspective.

Please let me know if someone has a mirror/alternate link.