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Your comments about you not being as big as Instagram are the reason I really hate apple. I've noticed their push for only the top of the line apps or their own

Your comments about you not being as big as Instagram are the reason I really hate apple. I've noticed their push for only the top of the line apps or their own stuff for years and it has completely soured me of them. They only cater to people with money. Apple crushes innovation worse than government regulation right now. All the apps I see on the app store are major corporations. There is hardly anything by indie or single devs anymore. Android it kinda exists but Google takes the "promote the moneymakers more" approach. I just wish apple would stop being a SAAS model company and return to making great hardware again. The simple fact alone that it took them 5 years to remove butterfly keyboards from the market along with 3 years to even acknowledge they were broken and offer free repairs shows they don't care about their users at all.

clairity 7y ago
> "All the apps I see on the app store are major corporations. There is hardly anything by indie or single devs anymore." not discounting apple's hand in all this, but that's mostly an instance of the caveat emptor problem (and paradox of choice too)--how do you know who to trust in a market? not that it's always right, but apple and many consumers use size as a proxy for quality, a good enough, but probably not optimal, result in most cases. conversely, it's hard to evaluate small developers with no reputation. then you bring in reviews and review sites, and the additional trust issues around that. any curation is bound to be imperfect (because humans and our systems are imperfect) but no curation at all is often even worse (paradox of choice and all). the path to a better system is not trying to get it exactly right the first time but having swift and visible procedures when it's wrong.
- willis936 7y ago
  One example that is burning in my mind the past week: VNC Viewer iOS 3.9.0. A VNC client is so trivial to make, there is no good reason that the app store shouldn’t be flooded with free, or at least low cost, good solutions. When I look, all I see is VNC Viewer, bad choices, and expensive choices. Real VNC decided to make VNC Viewer iOS require the user to watch an ad prior to connecting to a non-Real VNC server. How did we get here? Because Apple assumed the big players will behave better. But they won’t. We don’t expect them to because they have weight to throw around. Apple’s strategy is not trying to maximize the user experience. It’s not even trying to keep the user experience acceptable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22770196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22770196
  - clairity 7y ago
    i doubt apple is intentionally stifling competition there, but rather, there's not enough market opportunity to drive costs down via competition. as a result, real vnc is acting like a monopolist in their little corner of the market. it was that way for windows desktops 10+ years ago, when i last really used a vnc client.
    - bionoid 7y ago
      Ahem well, random story time, I also used VNC about 10+ years ago. I was visiting a friend, and somehow we ended up wondering how many open VNC servers were still out on the Internet. Fast forward some hours, we had put together a scanner (Perl) that connected to default VNC port and saved the bitmap to disk... and let it loose. That was amusing; ran it for weeks. There were a few desktops and such, but the majority was camera monitoring systems from shops, kiosks, office buildings, streets and what not, some manufacturer clearly didn't do their due diligence... Found a whole bunch of industrial equipment HMI systems, although we could never figure out what it was, something with hot pipes... Some stuff looked like astronomy, some like fishing, a lot we just had no clue. I wonder what it would look like if repeated today... ?
      - fapjacks 7y ago
        This will not be shocking to you in the slightest, but: It'll look exactly the same!
        walterbell 7y ago
        The next person who does this: please report the config problem to the camera vendor, then make the issue public after 90 days (or other reasonable timeline) if the vendor does not respond. This lowers the chance of future adversaries scraping images of the public from default-open camera feeds.
  - mrpippy 7y ago
    I’ve always heard good things about Screens on iOS, it’s $20 https://edovia.com/en/screens-ios/ https://edovia.com/en/screens-ios/
- DeathArrow 7y ago
  What about not doing any curation at all? It works for desktop software where users know what is the best software for their particular needs. I don't need to be told what should I use. I am doing that research myself, because I know my needs better than anyone else.
scarface74 7y ago
So if Apple is “crushing innovation” where are all of the successful Android only apps? All the apps I see on the app store are major corporations. There is hardly anything by indie or single devs anymore. Overcast is the most popular third party podcast player on iOS and it is written by one person. David Smith has made a living on the App Store for years as a solo developer. But how is the power law that you see in the App Store any different than in music, books, podcasts or on the web?
- m4rtink 7y ago
  >So if Apple is “crushing innovation” where are all of the successful Android only apps? Like Firefox and other proper browsers (not just Safari reskins)? ;-) And other stuff like emulators and on-device development environments, software under GPLv3 and others.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I wouldn’t call Firefox “innovative” it’s just another web browser. It’s not exactly winning over hearts and minds on the other platforms where it’s available - Windows, Macs, or Android. And “successful” as in “makes decent money”. It’s the authors choice to use a license that’s its incompatible with Apple’s policies. You are free to have open source software and publish it on github and run it on iOS. Also if you are the legal rights holder of the emulated system, you are free to distribute your emulator with games - see Sega.
    - Iolaum 7y ago
      Firefox is doing a lot of innovation in the privacy sector. One extreme example is the TOR browser.
    - izacus 7y ago
      > I wouldn’t call Firefox “innovative” it’s just another web browser. So basically you'll just be moving the goalposts until you prove Apple is the only innovative company around? Right.
m_ke 7y ago
Yeah and their new curated app store makes it impossible for people to find anything that they're not promoting. I have a health app and it takes me 5-10 minutes to find the health and fitness section now to see what the top apps are.
- scarface74 7y ago
  So exactly how should Apple make it easy to find your app over the other 5 million apps? It’s the app developers responsibility to gain an audience and market themselves. It’s that way on any platform or the “open web”.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    I think the point is that they claim they deserve their 30% because they promote you, but if they aren't actually doing that, why do they deserve their 30%? If you have to market the whole thing on your own and find your own audience, what value are they providing? Hosting the infrastructure? Fine, let me pay a per download price or a monthly hosting fee. Or better yet, let me host it on my own infrastructure. Verifying the security of the app? The customers should be paying for that, not the developers. That's the issue here. They want you to pay a ransom but they don't actually provide any value for that ransom.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps? Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access. Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products?
      - jedberg 7y ago
        > How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps? I don't know, in theory that's why they get 30%, to figure that out. > Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access. From their website [0]: "the all-new Mac App Store beautifully showcases your apps and makes them even easier to find." > Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products? They most certainly do. If you've ever worked in retail you'd be familiar with the daily restocking sheet, where we had to move certain products to the eye level shelf and other ones down. Look at your supermarket. The end caps change all the time. This is a combination of those brands paying for those placements and the store putting high margin popular items up front. But the point is that stores accept different payments from different vendors for different levels of promotion. [0] https://developer.apple.com/distribute/ https://developer.apple.com/distribute/
lancesells 7y ago
I don't feel the app store promotes only major corporations. I don't check it all that often but those editorials seem to have plenty of independent apps.
- LeoTinnitus 7y ago
  To which someone got paid for somewhere along the line to go "hey lets curate this!"
rexf 7y ago
Constantly seeing Apple Arcade (their paid service) at the top of the App Store app is annoying, unfair, and unnecessary. They even have a 'sign up for Apple TV+' at the top of the Settings app IIRC. Apple already controls/owns the ecosystem. There's no reason they need to spam the system with ads for their own apps/services.
- LeoTinnitus 7y ago
  Yeah seriously. Also they've messed with the podcast app so much I can't use it anymore. They only promote those that pay them basically. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find "new" podcasts? It's virtually non-existent on their app. 7 years ago, you could filter by new and you had a larger variety of categories. Now, if they aren't doing an ad ready 10 times per 1 hour episode, it's not at the top page.
thelittleone 7y ago
I was an Apple fanboy for 15 years. But they seem to be doing their level best to alienate pro customers. Over the last five years I’ve endured a comedic run of Apple Hardware failures (a catastrophic failure at least every 6 months). The response from Apple suggests this is nothing exceptional or that they simply just don’t care. I believe it’s the latter, I mean they’ve got billions of other customers. This arrogance that inevitably festers when a company is on top for so long. But history has shown companies like this fall from grace once a critical mass of once devoted customers go elsewhere. I hope I’m wrong and Apple wakes up before this happens. I thought there was no alternative to the Apple ecosystem that wouldn’t drive me crazy (Windows) or cost me in productivity. But with my 2017 MacBook Pro dead (again) and no access to Apple service due to Pandemic, I took out an old Thinkpad T420 and installed Linux Mint. It installed perfectly, the keyboard is epic compared to MBP and I’m productive. Now I’m happy because I have an effective alternative to Apple. Once my MBP is fixed I will sell it. And wave goodbye to Apple.
- indemnity 7y ago
  Apart from their phones, they make little I want any more. I built a Ryzen desktop a while ago, since there was no way I was paying what they want for an iMac Pro or Mac Pro, and I needed a decent GPU, lots of cores and memory and no thermal throttling. Switched to Linux with a tiling WM (bspwm), since I’m a backend engineer (Go/Rust), not iOS. I also have Windows 10 installed, and honestly, it’s fine as well with WSL2. Apple needs to realise Swift is not going anywhere except for the iOS/macOS niche, and consider general developers again, but so far Microsoft is doing a much better job of that, and I don’t hold out much hope, Apple have missed their window and are returning to their closed off locked down comfort zone. Not really sure they left, but it seemed like it for a while. My MacBook Pro is gathering dust.
  - 9oijrefw 7y ago
    Apple has a history of changing its name multiple times. At some point in the near future it will only be logical to rebrand as iPhone.
  - DeathArrow 7y ago
tim333 7y ago
Kind of ironic given their past "Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes..." messaging, though I'm not sure that was ever real.
voicedYoda 7y ago
My mbp is 9 years old and still doing relatively well, however it's nearing it's end of life and my replacement of choice is system 76. MS is an ok alternative, but unnecessary. And osx no longer innovates. They just hoard and protect their own interests.

clairity 7y ago

> "All the apps I see on the app store are major corporations. There is hardly anything by indie or single devs anymore." not discounting apple's hand in all this, but that's mostly an instance of the caveat emptor problem (and paradox of choice too)--how do you know who to trust in a market? not that it's always right, but apple and many consumers use size as a proxy for quality, a good enough, but probably not optimal, result in most cases. conversely, it's hard to evaluate small developers with no reputation. then you bring in reviews and review sites, and the additional trust issues around that. any curation is bound to be imperfect (because humans and our systems are imperfect) but no curation at all is often even worse (paradox of choice and all). the path to a better system is not trying to get it exactly right the first time but having swift and visible procedures when it's wrong.

willis936 7y ago
One example that is burning in my mind the past week: VNC Viewer iOS 3.9.0. A VNC client is so trivial to make, there is no good reason that the app store shouldn’t be flooded with free, or at least low cost, good solutions. When I look, all I see is VNC Viewer, bad choices, and expensive choices. Real VNC decided to make VNC Viewer iOS require the user to watch an ad prior to connecting to a non-Real VNC server. How did we get here? Because Apple assumed the big players will behave better. But they won’t. We don’t expect them to because they have weight to throw around. Apple’s strategy is not trying to maximize the user experience. It’s not even trying to keep the user experience acceptable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22770196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22770196
- clairity 7y ago
  i doubt apple is intentionally stifling competition there, but rather, there's not enough market opportunity to drive costs down via competition. as a result, real vnc is acting like a monopolist in their little corner of the market. it was that way for windows desktops 10+ years ago, when i last really used a vnc client.
  - bionoid 7y ago
    Ahem well, random story time, I also used VNC about 10+ years ago. I was visiting a friend, and somehow we ended up wondering how many open VNC servers were still out on the Internet. Fast forward some hours, we had put together a scanner (Perl) that connected to default VNC port and saved the bitmap to disk... and let it loose. That was amusing; ran it for weeks. There were a few desktops and such, but the majority was camera monitoring systems from shops, kiosks, office buildings, streets and what not, some manufacturer clearly didn't do their due diligence... Found a whole bunch of industrial equipment HMI systems, although we could never figure out what it was, something with hot pipes... Some stuff looked like astronomy, some like fishing, a lot we just had no clue. I wonder what it would look like if repeated today... ?
    - fapjacks 7y ago
      This will not be shocking to you in the slightest, but: It'll look exactly the same!
      - walterbell 7y ago
        The next person who does this: please report the config problem to the camera vendor, then make the issue public after 90 days (or other reasonable timeline) if the vendor does not respond. This lowers the chance of future adversaries scraping images of the public from default-open camera feeds.
- mrpippy 7y ago
  I’ve always heard good things about Screens on iOS, it’s $20 https://edovia.com/en/screens-ios/ https://edovia.com/en/screens-ios/
DeathArrow 7y ago
What about not doing any curation at all? It works for desktop software where users know what is the best software for their particular needs. I don't need to be told what should I use. I am doing that research myself, because I know my needs better than anyone else.

scarface74 7y ago

So if Apple is “crushing innovation” where are all of the successful Android only apps? All the apps I see on the app store are major corporations. There is hardly anything by indie or single devs anymore. Overcast is the most popular third party podcast player on iOS and it is written by one person. David Smith has made a living on the App Store for years as a solo developer. But how is the power law that you see in the App Store any different than in music, books, podcasts or on the web?

m4rtink 7y ago
>So if Apple is “crushing innovation” where are all of the successful Android only apps? Like Firefox and other proper browsers (not just Safari reskins)? ;-) And other stuff like emulators and on-device development environments, software under GPLv3 and others.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I wouldn’t call Firefox “innovative” it’s just another web browser. It’s not exactly winning over hearts and minds on the other platforms where it’s available - Windows, Macs, or Android. And “successful” as in “makes decent money”. It’s the authors choice to use a license that’s its incompatible with Apple’s policies. You are free to have open source software and publish it on github and run it on iOS. Also if you are the legal rights holder of the emulated system, you are free to distribute your emulator with games - see Sega.
  - Iolaum 7y ago
    Firefox is doing a lot of innovation in the privacy sector. One extreme example is the TOR browser.
  - izacus 7y ago
    > I wouldn’t call Firefox “innovative” it’s just another web browser. So basically you'll just be moving the goalposts until you prove Apple is the only innovative company around? Right.

m_ke 7y ago

Yeah and their new curated app store makes it impossible for people to find anything that they're not promoting. I have a health app and it takes me 5-10 minutes to find the health and fitness section now to see what the top apps are.

scarface74 7y ago
So exactly how should Apple make it easy to find your app over the other 5 million apps? It’s the app developers responsibility to gain an audience and market themselves. It’s that way on any platform or the “open web”.
- jedberg 7y ago
  I think the point is that they claim they deserve their 30% because they promote you, but if they aren't actually doing that, why do they deserve their 30%? If you have to market the whole thing on your own and find your own audience, what value are they providing? Hosting the infrastructure? Fine, let me pay a per download price or a monthly hosting fee. Or better yet, let me host it on my own infrastructure. Verifying the security of the app? The customers should be paying for that, not the developers. That's the issue here. They want you to pay a ransom but they don't actually provide any value for that ransom.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps? Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access. Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products?
    - jedberg 7y ago
      > How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps? I don't know, in theory that's why they get 30%, to figure that out. > Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access. From their website [0]: "the all-new Mac App Store beautifully showcases your apps and makes them even easier to find." > Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products? They most certainly do. If you've ever worked in retail you'd be familiar with the daily restocking sheet, where we had to move certain products to the eye level shelf and other ones down. Look at your supermarket. The end caps change all the time. This is a combination of those brands paying for those placements and the store putting high margin popular items up front. But the point is that stores accept different payments from different vendors for different levels of promotion. [0] https://developer.apple.com/distribute/ https://developer.apple.com/distribute/

lancesells 7y ago

I don't feel the app store promotes only major corporations. I don't check it all that often but those editorials seem to have plenty of independent apps.

LeoTinnitus 7y ago
To which someone got paid for somewhere along the line to go "hey lets curate this!"

rexf 7y ago

Constantly seeing Apple Arcade (their paid service) at the top of the App Store app is annoying, unfair, and unnecessary. They even have a 'sign up for Apple TV+' at the top of the Settings app IIRC. Apple already controls/owns the ecosystem. There's no reason they need to spam the system with ads for their own apps/services.

LeoTinnitus 7y ago
Yeah seriously. Also they've messed with the podcast app so much I can't use it anymore. They only promote those that pay them basically. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find "new" podcasts? It's virtually non-existent on their app. 7 years ago, you could filter by new and you had a larger variety of categories. Now, if they aren't doing an ad ready 10 times per 1 hour episode, it's not at the top page.

thelittleone 7y ago

I was an Apple fanboy for 15 years. But they seem to be doing their level best to alienate pro customers. Over the last five years I’ve endured a comedic run of Apple Hardware failures (a catastrophic failure at least every 6 months). The response from Apple suggests this is nothing exceptional or that they simply just don’t care. I believe it’s the latter, I mean they’ve got billions of other customers. This arrogance that inevitably festers when a company is on top for so long. But history has shown companies like this fall from grace once a critical mass of once devoted customers go elsewhere. I hope I’m wrong and Apple wakes up before this happens. I thought there was no alternative to the Apple ecosystem that wouldn’t drive me crazy (Windows) or cost me in productivity. But with my 2017 MacBook Pro dead (again) and no access to Apple service due to Pandemic, I took out an old Thinkpad T420 and installed Linux Mint. It installed perfectly, the keyboard is epic compared to MBP and I’m productive. Now I’m happy because I have an effective alternative to Apple. Once my MBP is fixed I will sell it. And wave goodbye to Apple.

indemnity 7y ago
Apart from their phones, they make little I want any more. I built a Ryzen desktop a while ago, since there was no way I was paying what they want for an iMac Pro or Mac Pro, and I needed a decent GPU, lots of cores and memory and no thermal throttling. Switched to Linux with a tiling WM (bspwm), since I’m a backend engineer (Go/Rust), not iOS. I also have Windows 10 installed, and honestly, it’s fine as well with WSL2. Apple needs to realise Swift is not going anywhere except for the iOS/macOS niche, and consider general developers again, but so far Microsoft is doing a much better job of that, and I don’t hold out much hope, Apple have missed their window and are returning to their closed off locked down comfort zone. Not really sure they left, but it seemed like it for a while. My MacBook Pro is gathering dust.
- 9oijrefw 7y ago
  Apple has a history of changing its name multiple times. At some point in the near future it will only be logical to rebrand as iPhone.
- DeathArrow 7y ago

tim333 7y ago

Kind of ironic given their past "Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes..." messaging, though I'm not sure that was ever real.

voicedYoda 7y ago

My mbp is 9 years old and still doing relatively well, however it's nearing it's end of life and my replacement of choice is system 76. MS is an ok alternative, but unnecessary. And osx no longer innovates. They just hoard and protect their own interests.