The distance between a personal project or MVP and a legit commercial product is VASTLY undersestimated by non technical people.

Senior SWE / consultant working remotely since 2020 here. Besides all the "control" aspects, the truth is there's been a lot of abuse - a lot of it coming from certain locales. Here in Europe remote roles still exist to a certain extent (though they are a lot more scarce), but it's not uncommon now to see restrictions such as "remote from the EU", "remote from the UK", etc. To sum up: a certain faction has broken the trust of their employer/client, and blown it for everybody else.

TBH I never had issue with that as long as they did their job. I mean, executives do that all the time, right? So everyone can do that. It’s also legal. I don’t complain if my colleagues can do their job. I myself never did that because I prefer more personal time.

Yea also there are places like r/overemployed where they actively encourage how to cheat your employer by working multiple remote full time jobs.

The trust is broken and even though there are plenty of great wfh people, employers wre not having it anymore.

One of the companies most disrupted by AI? Sorry, but that is nonsense. I have been using their products proferssionally for over 20 years, and still do to the same extent as ever. That's while being fully on the Agentic Coding bandwagon. Admittedly their attempts at integrating AI have been an abject failure, but who cares? My setup is Claude or OpenCode on one screen, Jetbrains (IDE mostly), both viewing and working on the same codebase, and that works great for me.

It's totally a thing in HK. Indonesia or the Philippines is where the maids come from.

Could you elaborate a bit on your tools / workflow? thanks

Bummer it is iOS only (?). Any plans for an Android port?

European freelance SWE here. I worked in Japan in your field for a number of years in the past decade. Your idea is utterly crazy. You are making 170K EUR in a low cost european locale=you are in a great position, especially in the current market conditions. Japan is like no.26 on the list of best-paying countries for IT skills. Meaning: Japan does NOT pay. Your expectations are simply unrealistic (and let's not get started on the value of JPY, which is at its lowest in decades), and you will need to be prepeared to take a MASSIVE pay cut. The fact that you are considering moving there with your family without doing the necessary due diligence is worrying, as it adds a whole extra layer of complexity that is not to be underestimated. Japan is welcoming to visitors. It is NOT welcoming to foreigners who come to stay. Japanese companies are also something else, and if you don't have experience with them, I would certainly not jump head-first. In short: as others have said, if you are interested in the "cultural aspects", travel there, do your freelance work remotely from there, but for the love of all that is good, don't move there with your wife and kids BEFORE you have tested out the waters exentisively. You will thank me later.