A Gripe with Apple

This might be an old gripe that everyone has already gotten over by now, but I just discovered it unfortunately 😭

I've had twitter/X deleted off my phone for a long time now. But ever since I deleted it I've felt an acute lack of cute art in my life which sucks, it's always been a staple in the list of things I really enjoy. I recently decided to dip my toes back into twitter for the sake of art.

My friend Nathan told me about this cool plugin Control Panel for Twitter that modifies how X looks/works. I'm terminally afraid of seeing a single internet hot take, so I wanted to fork this project and add some functionality to hide all tweets that don't include a photo in hopes of lessening the chance I lay eyes on a A Take, and only see art.

I only really do internet-enjoyment things on my phone, I'm never on my laptop outside of work hours, so I'm really only interested in the iOS Safari browser extension version of Control Panel.

HOWEVER

There's only been one merged PR in the last year on this project, so I could open a PR but I figured forking and deploying on my local device would be faster. I thought that I could modify this project and deploy it onto just my phone using TestFlight. Turns out you have to pay $99/year to use TestFlight. It's not a huge amount of money, but enough to be annoying. Really lame.

BUT EVEN MORE LAME....

I thought maybe I could just deploy the code directly onto my device using a USB or something since TestFlight is really more for applications that are built to be distributed to multiple devices for QA, and to then put up on the App Store.

You can deploy a project to your device using a wired connection...but it's only valid for 7 days. I'd have to redeploy my project every 7 days in order to use it.

I thought half the reason to learn how to code was to be able to do things that people who don't know how to code can't do or have to pay for. Late stage capitalism subscription services get us all in the end I suppose.