> can't justify wasting that much time and stress on a platform that clearly is more concerned with meeting the needs of casual users and media professionals rather than developers
It’s because Apple prioritizes users over developers that they have so many users.
> because these companies don't want to put in the engineering hours to build and support an app on a niche platform
Like who would at this point till it's established? Look at all the time and effort wasted on Apple Watch apps, Apple TV apps for very little returns.
Apple needs to realize that expecting developers to write apps for 5 different operating systems to get coverage across their ecosystem is absurd in both engineering time and engineering team money.
End of the day the $3500 vision pro needs Netflix more than Netflix needs the vision pro, and they already had a VR app that Apple could have supported but chose to build something completely new and bespoke requiring all devs to write completely new code.
> their main focus will always be users instead of developers and that the latter will just have to suck it up if they want to get a piece of the lucrative Apple user base pie
Developers are users as well. In the early days of computing, both terms were actually synonymous. If Apple designed the user interface of its programming environment so that the software developer cannot find out what went wrong and why, Apple deserves all the hatred it gets.
Also, this "lucrative Apple pie" is the only reason anyone even cares about it. If money is removed from the equation, I have no doubt developers would rather invest their time on a Linux system that doesn't insult their intelligence.
> If Apple devoted their focus to products in proportion to their revenue, then they would be putting 12x as much effort into the iPhone than they would for the entire Mac lineup.
True. However, creators and developers (who, in my experience, almost always use a desktop) are important for the iOS platform. Someone has to write those native apps. Therefore it doesn't make sense to ignore them for too long.
> If Apple devoted their focus to products in proportion to their revenue, then they would be putting 12x as much effort into the iPhone than they would for the entire Mac lineup.
Consider:
- iPhones will suck if developers stop making software for them.
- You need XCode to make software for iPhones
- XCode only runs on MacOS
If developers start abandoning Mac en masse, that's going to hurt iOS a lot.
Also, if photographers, videographers, animators, designers, audio engineers, etc start championing Windows or Linux as their platform of choice, the average person will follow eventually. "All the pros I know use X" persuades a lot of average people.
And if people aren't using Mac, there's a lot less reason to use iPhone as opposed to Android.
I hate to use the word "synergy", but that seems to be what they're risking here.
> Why stipulate this unless they want to hobble reasonable use-cases or inflate usage arbitrarily.
It seems this is Apple's sole motivation when it comes to anything developer related, which seems odd considering their goal is to commodotize software to sell their hardware - you'd think they wouldn't keep making it harder to make software for their platforms
> Apple only cares about developers who are developing apps for their platforms
IDK, it often feels like they don't care much about them either. I mean you know because of the users they are kinda forced to feed up with apple anyway even if they don't like it.
I mean I work for a company developing a App (with web version) and if there is a target specific problem it's most times Apple:
- The first version(s) of our web version won't support Safari as it's technically simple impossible.
- We currently have to live with some dev annoyances for all targets due too apple taking to long to update their software stack (XCode/LLVM).
- The fact that (in difference to android) you can't just simply emulate iOS or install Safari on Linux/Windows can make testing harder (on CI we have do have Mac/iOs tests, so it's only harder instead of impossible).
- Even just some ad-hoc scripts around the dev workflow ran into problems because OS X lacking behind years (should we say over a decade by now?) when it comes to updating basic CLI/shell tools.
- Compared to windows documentation of some (especially new) things can be quite crappy in my experience.
- Long update cycles can mean you have to wait forever for bug fixes.
- ...
It often feels that when adding support for Windows/Linux/Android to a Linux/Windows/Android program written mostly with cross platform tooling would add 10% workload adding Apple support doubles the workload, or might not even be possible.
Oh and non of the problems we ran into had anything to do with privacy...
Except Web developers are the target audience here? As an end user, you're not supposed to be work around Apple's bugs or lack of support. Users don't care how hard it is, what gross hacks hold up the world, or that Apple has a 30% rake; they only care whether the thing works as expected.
> Apple has more money than they can spend, but you can only get so much done within a given timespan.
This applies to attempts to do things that take around six months and can't be compressed into one second by hiring 16 million programmers for one second, not attempts to do things that take around six months in around six months.
> Plus, they probably don't want to add the necessary API. The law says to treat other apps equally, not to provide the user with a good experience.
This is the actual reason, and thereby the criticism.
I disagree. I mean, I know we're not the only target audience. But we're clearly an important one. They literally announce their new software releases at their developer's conference. macOS is also the only platform you can develop iOS apps on. So if nothing else, macOS has to be nice to developers for iOS's sake.
For me, the core things that makes macOS great for development haven't changed. All they've really done is make iOS and macOS work together more cohesively.
> App developers seem to stick with apple regardless of what they are being subjected to.
Because the alternatives aren’t preferable. The indies who have been exclusively using and developing for Apple platforms for years know that Windows and Linux aren’t better¹, just a different set of annoying trade offs. Apple platforms aren’t perfect, but they are the least bad option in that context. They also used to be better in many regards, which makes the situation frustrating due to the wasted potential.
¹ At a personal preference level. There’s no judgement either way, you do you and use whatever you like best.
> I hope everyone has noticed the shift in macOS to be something more like iOS. That’s good for most users, but not really for software engineers.
I've been saying this for a long time. I find it funny so many developers use and love macOS. You are clearly not the target audience and in fact, lots of decisions Apple makes go against making macOS a nice development environment.
How is that exactly? A huge majority of developers in your situation go out and buy a Mac; another hardware purchase in their pocket. This is part of their business strategy: developers are forced to participate, and by and large they do just that.
It hurts you far more than it does Apple by refusing to participate. If you believe you're "hurting Apple" by not developing for their platform, think again. Even if your software is free to download, it's not Apple that suffers - it's your (potential) users; and they will blame you, not Apple, for the lack of support.
Apple wins this battle every time. Welcome to the ecosystem. :)
It’s because Apple prioritizes users over developers that they have so many users.
reply