iOS imposes substantial limitations to compel app purchases through its app store or through its iTunes stores.
I just wanted to listen to music I already have played from my phone while I do dishes.
In my case I just wanted to have a media player that could play MP3s and feature a playlist dynamically populated from either the local device file system or, more ideally, from a shared network location. Restricted. There were some media apps that kind of, in a really shitty way, figured this out. Most of those apps, even when shitty, cost money from the app store.
Fuck that stupidity.
I wrote my own solution in JavaScript that executes in the browser and it does almost everything I want. The playlist data must be statically written into the browser page and cannot be dynamically populated from any file system because Apple disables that part of the browser's FileSystem API in browsers on iOS, though it executes correctly on desktop Safari. I then host the page from a shared network location so that I can access the same content in the same way on any device with access to the network. I adapted this home grown media player to execute video as well, but it can only play videos from codecs/containers already supported in the browser.
feels like the solution to your problem is just to use android which while still being a loaned-not-owned device like iphones, you at least are allowed to run a true webbrowser when you install firefox from the fdroid store (not from play store)
I just wanted to listen to music I already have played from my phone while I do dishes.
In my case I just wanted to have a media player that could play MP3s and feature a playlist dynamically populated from either the local device file system or, more ideally, from a shared network location. Restricted. There were some media apps that kind of, in a really shitty way, figured this out. Most of those apps, even when shitty, cost money from the app store.
Fuck that stupidity.
I wrote my own solution in JavaScript that executes in the browser and it does almost everything I want. The playlist data must be statically written into the browser page and cannot be dynamically populated from any file system because Apple disables that part of the browser's FileSystem API in browsers on iOS, though it executes correctly on desktop Safari. I then host the page from a shared network location so that I can access the same content in the same way on any device with access to the network. I adapted this home grown media player to execute video as well, but it can only play videos from codecs/containers already supported in the browser.