8 ms·

I'm going to make one of those unpopular opinions, but alas, it must be said: It is far easier to just drop Apple support entirely. Apple is an abusive relatio

I'm going to make one of those unpopular opinions, but alas, it must be said: It is far easier to just drop Apple support entirely. Apple is an abusive relationship that gaslights developers for "holding it wrong". Many of you have internalized this abuse. Supporting OSX and iOS does not really win you many users, and if you're big enough where this really is an issue, then you can just afford a stand alone Mac who's job is to compile and test your app. Apple does not care about small developers, and countless HN stories have spent their time on the front page detailing how Apple has shut apps off for not violating terms, and having zero recourse over this. By doing so, Apple has slandered many members of the HN community. I am not saying other companies are not also guilty of it (Google seems to have recently learned there are no penalties for this, largely because Apple has never been penalized), but more and more people really are just dropping Apple and never going back. If Apple truly cared about app development on their platform(s), they would just port their stuff to Windows and Linux, just like Microsoft did to OSX and Linux.

aiyodev 6y ago
Apple puts users before developers which is why they have such a large market share. If you can't reach their high standards, just develop for another platform. There's no need to whine on HN about it.
simonklitj 6y ago
With a 47% market share in the US, I can hardly agree that supporting iOS won’t win you a lot of users.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  Users != Money As far as I'm concerned, you can sell desktop enterprise software for $500+ per license, but good luck trying to sell a $5 iOS app. So even if it was 90% of the app market, it might still be financially better to ignore iOS and do desktop instead.
  - ajconway 6y ago
    iOS users = money
    - jhasse 6y ago
      = you can afford to buy a Mac
  - cageface 6y ago
    I would never try to build a business on either app store but even if you target the web you can't afford to ignore Apple, at least not in the U.S. On my last project Apple/iOS users made up half of our revenue. Unfortunately this means it's hard to be a web developer these days without owning Apple hardware.
    - jhasse 6y ago
      That's why he said: if you're big enough where this really is an issue, then you can just afford a stand alone Mac who's job is to compile and test your app.
      - cageface 6y ago
        A lot of us are working remote these days. That means everybody needs a Mac.
        jaxn 6y ago
        *everybody needs ACCESS TO a Mac.
        simonklitj 6y ago
        Exactly! Reason why websites such as https://virtualmacosx.com https://virtualmacosx.com are a thing.
  - justAnotherNET 6y ago
29athrowaway 6y ago
Pro: iOS users monetize more than Android. Con: Pushing updates to an iOS app is a pain (review process).
- 0x0 6y ago
  The review process on Google Play is worse than iOS these days, both in regards to waiting time and in dealing with clarifications
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  In my experience they monetize like 500% better than Android users. Not supporting iOS users is just baffling. They're rich people plain and simple. They can afford $800 iPhones or $1,800 phone + iPad combos, to people who need to buy $200 Android devices. Maybe I've been gaslit. But just don't push buggy updates. QA is not hard. Update all the time is a symptom of test-driven development, of affectless people who never use the software they make and look at their job description as, "cram algorithms questions, output git commits." The kind term for the right approach called "product oriented."
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jolux 6y ago
    Test-driven development is a weird thing to blame for low quality.
    - zdragnar 6y ago
      There is certainly a false sense of security in test-only approaches. You only have tests for what you expect to go wrong, so every wrong assumption you make becomes a bug. Dedicated QA can help catch these, and are practically a requirement if your customers aren't content with things randomly breaking. My previous job was just that... one QA person for a 50ish person team, focusing only on writing user acceptance tests. The leads thought that if we just had enough coverage, we could deploy continually without needing QA reviews, and were continually surprised at the number of bugs getting through. That isnt to say that automated testing is bad, but rather that it is easy to be over-confident in what it will do for you.
morphogenesis 6y ago
This is nuts. If we broke mobile safari for our app we'd lose 50% of our traffic
darau1 6y ago
I read once that developers should stop focusing heavily on making their own lives easier and think more about making the user's lives easier, and the businessman in me agrees, and I think Apple is in the same court. The sad part is Apple's market share is so great that to not support iOS is detrimental at best. Therefore Apple has us in a stranglehold: we're pretty much forced to support their platform, and they have no reason to make our lives any easier because we have no choice anyway. That being said, though, I will probably still refuse to deploy any app I built personally to the App Store.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  "You're holding it wrong" is not my version of making anyone's life easier, nor the slow but steady decline of their hardware. OTOH, my mom figured out how to use an iPad and MacBook after struggling for years with windows PCs, so they are doing something right (or resting on the laurels of previously decent decisions).
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    You mention it yourself: there are hundreds of millions of people who use Apple products because they make their lives easier. If your software makes people’s lives easier, but you don’t offer it on that platform, you are not making those specific people’s lives easier.
    - ekianjo 6y ago
      > who use Apple products because they make their lives easier. Cherry picking out of anecdotal evidence? I have read countless stories of Apple users who have had their beloved software broken by Apple updates. It goes both ways.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        It doesn’t matter how many ways it goes: as long as there are people who use Apple products, and you are not providing your software to them, you are failing to make their lives better. Now, deciding if that is moral or relevant or whatever is an entirely different question, but I directly answered the one of “how are you making people’s lives better by developing for this platform?”
bound008 6y ago
People frequently overlook how nice the nix experience is on macOS. I had a new mac user complain about iTunes opening when they hit the play button like its some kind of conspiracy against him. I asked if he tried `sudo chmod -x /Applications/iTunes.app`. We tried it, and I don't understand why he was so surprised that it worked, and remained a permanent solution to his issue. Your choices are the worlds most prevalent OS which is laden in telemetry and spyware by default, an OS that costs a fortune in hardware but comes backed by a company who has always stood behind their hardware mistakes (arguably after some period of denial each time), or to chose Linux. In this case, Linux means choosing from at least two variants* of distributions, and praying that everything works. I have an Intel NUC Hades Canyon that I run linux on, so that I always have a fallback if Apple significantly changes from their current course of treating users really well in exchange for a cash premium. First, my linux experience dates back to 1997/8 before the Linksys BEFSR41 ( the first hardware router under $300 ) became available, and installing a 56k modem or ethernet card meant re-compiling the kernel. Somehow, that was less painful than trying to get the amd gpu to work properly, and persist against breaking on updates and reboots. Yesterday, the author of i3, a window manager, shared a posting of his gear. I dug through his blog (cool stuff), and noticed on another of his posts that getting an amd gpu to work well on a debian distro was an issue for him as well. Again, I chose reference intel hardware expecting support for Ubuntu. Being opinionated about design is not 'gaslighting' developers. And sure Apple is not perfect, I for one refuse to by a touch bar mac. I can't stand it, its annoying, and you have to pay extra for someone that for my computing preferences is a giant regression. But of the top 10 companies in the world (by market cap), which ones actually care about end users. Apple was started to put the power of computing in the hands of users, and they were damn successful at it. Finally, in regards to Apple not caring about app development on their platform. Have you not used XCode? On the internet, you can find Steve Jobs demonstrating making a database driven application in 1989 using drag and drop components to design the UI. That is XCode, or its predecessor Project Builder. That is why Xcode Projects have files with the suffix pbxproj nestled within. Its all XML, and all of the build tools and chains are command line driven. You don't need to run XCode to develop an iOS app, but every year they add more and more of what developers want to it. Sometimes I wish that I could develop python inside of XCode, but I'm more than happy to stick with vim. Swift and Swift UI are the real love letters to developers however. Swift, is open source, and runs on linux. Swift UI, is basically the react pattern of UI development, and they built it to solve the pain points of developers who were struggling with outdated development patterns on something that didn't even have color when it was first invented (Project Builder). Sure, the iOS experience maybe too much of a "Disneyland" style experience of a great swath of the HN crowd. I for one love playing with Android phones that can run docker containers and X11 over USB-C. But at the end of the day, I am willing to pay extra money for a company that actually respects my privacy?
SergeAx 6y ago
If you are targeting US market with iPhone having 45% and increasing y2y, you cannot afford ignoring iOS and mobile Safari. What you can is not paying a dime for Apple hardware, though.
Tepix 6y ago
That's the developer perspective. As a user, macOS looks interesting due to the underlying UNIX, the consistent user interface and the high quality applications that are available. I've spend 200€ on Final Cut Pro X and it works very well. There'd have to be some really significant issues for me to switch. PS: I develop but not on macOS and not for iOS.
- eitland 6y ago
  > the consistent user interface Have they fixed the utterly inconsistent way of moving/selecting words/lines since Snow Leopard? Back then, depending on application I think you'd have to use ctrl-shift, cmd-shift, alt-shift or fn-shift to select words or lines of text depending on which application you used. And yes, this inconsistency included their own software. And yes, this is an honest question, I don't know the answer. I left Mac behind around 2012 because of a number of such things that kept wasting my time and my focus, but I enjoyed other parts of the experience and would be happy to pay (or get someone else to pay) for a premium non-Windows experience.
  - szhu 6y ago
    I think this part of macOS has always been consistent. - shift- anchors the selection as you move the cursor and can be combined with any of the below. - left/right jumps characters. (backspace/delete deletes characters.) up/down jumps lines. - opt-left/right jumps words. (opt-backspace/delete deletes words.) opt-up/down jumps paragraphs (unless the app overrides this). - cmd-left/right/up/down jumps to the edges of the document (unless the app overrides this). - fn- and ctrl- are not typically used when editing text. In particular, the fn key is specifically used to invoke keys that are only available the extended keyboards, like home, page up, and forward delete. (Extended keyboards don't have the fn key.) I think there was a point where ctrl- did the same thing same thing as opt- or cmd-, probably as a convenience to users coming from other platforms. Every single modern app has honored this in native text widgets since the first Mac OS X, I believe. If you remember it being inconsistent, it's possible that you were using apps that use non-Cocoa UI like GTK/Qt/X11 (and possibly Carbon too). It might have been an app from Microsoft or Adobe, who seem to use their own UI toolkits. Or you could have been using a terminal app or developer tool with custom keybindings that didn't conform to these conventions. (VSCode, Atom, and Sublime Text's default keybindings do conform to this, and in Terminal and iTerm, there is a setting you can turn on to make the opt- modifer also conform.) Which apps do you remember being inconsistent?
fearface 6y ago
Your opinion is popular and unfounded.
Mandatum 6y ago
Until another platform performs better, I'll enjoy this bath like the boiling frog I am.

aiyodev 6y ago

Apple puts users before developers which is why they have such a large market share. If you can't reach their high standards, just develop for another platform. There's no need to whine on HN about it.

simonklitj 6y ago

With a 47% market share in the US, I can hardly agree that supporting iOS won’t win you a lot of users.

fxtentacle 6y ago
Users != Money As far as I'm concerned, you can sell desktop enterprise software for $500+ per license, but good luck trying to sell a $5 iOS app. So even if it was 90% of the app market, it might still be financially better to ignore iOS and do desktop instead.
- ajconway 6y ago
  iOS users = money
  - jhasse 6y ago
    = you can afford to buy a Mac
- cageface 6y ago
  I would never try to build a business on either app store but even if you target the web you can't afford to ignore Apple, at least not in the U.S. On my last project Apple/iOS users made up half of our revenue. Unfortunately this means it's hard to be a web developer these days without owning Apple hardware.
  - jhasse 6y ago
    That's why he said: if you're big enough where this really is an issue, then you can just afford a stand alone Mac who's job is to compile and test your app.
    - cageface 6y ago
      A lot of us are working remote these days. That means everybody needs a Mac.
      - jaxn 6y ago
        *everybody needs ACCESS TO a Mac.
        simonklitj 6y ago
        Exactly! Reason why websites such as https://virtualmacosx.com https://virtualmacosx.com are a thing.
- justAnotherNET 6y ago

29athrowaway 6y ago

Pro: iOS users monetize more than Android. Con: Pushing updates to an iOS app is a pain (review process).

0x0 6y ago
The review process on Google Play is worse than iOS these days, both in regards to waiting time and in dealing with clarifications
an_opabinia 6y ago
In my experience they monetize like 500% better than Android users. Not supporting iOS users is just baffling. They're rich people plain and simple. They can afford $800 iPhones or $1,800 phone + iPad combos, to people who need to buy $200 Android devices. Maybe I've been gaslit. But just don't push buggy updates. QA is not hard. Update all the time is a symptom of test-driven development, of affectless people who never use the software they make and look at their job description as, "cram algorithms questions, output git commits." The kind term for the right approach called "product oriented."
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jolux 6y ago
  Test-driven development is a weird thing to blame for low quality.
  - zdragnar 6y ago
    There is certainly a false sense of security in test-only approaches. You only have tests for what you expect to go wrong, so every wrong assumption you make becomes a bug. Dedicated QA can help catch these, and are practically a requirement if your customers aren't content with things randomly breaking. My previous job was just that... one QA person for a 50ish person team, focusing only on writing user acceptance tests. The leads thought that if we just had enough coverage, we could deploy continually without needing QA reviews, and were continually surprised at the number of bugs getting through. That isnt to say that automated testing is bad, but rather that it is easy to be over-confident in what it will do for you.

morphogenesis 6y ago

This is nuts. If we broke mobile safari for our app we'd lose 50% of our traffic

darau1 6y ago

I read once that developers should stop focusing heavily on making their own lives easier and think more about making the user's lives easier, and the businessman in me agrees, and I think Apple is in the same court. The sad part is Apple's market share is so great that to not support iOS is detrimental at best. Therefore Apple has us in a stranglehold: we're pretty much forced to support their platform, and they have no reason to make our lives any easier because we have no choice anyway. That being said, though, I will probably still refuse to deploy any app I built personally to the App Store.

zdragnar 6y ago
"You're holding it wrong" is not my version of making anyone's life easier, nor the slow but steady decline of their hardware. OTOH, my mom figured out how to use an iPad and MacBook after struggling for years with windows PCs, so they are doing something right (or resting on the laurels of previously decent decisions).
- saagarjha 6y ago
  You mention it yourself: there are hundreds of millions of people who use Apple products because they make their lives easier. If your software makes people’s lives easier, but you don’t offer it on that platform, you are not making those specific people’s lives easier.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    > who use Apple products because they make their lives easier. Cherry picking out of anecdotal evidence? I have read countless stories of Apple users who have had their beloved software broken by Apple updates. It goes both ways.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      It doesn’t matter how many ways it goes: as long as there are people who use Apple products, and you are not providing your software to them, you are failing to make their lives better. Now, deciding if that is moral or relevant or whatever is an entirely different question, but I directly answered the one of “how are you making people’s lives better by developing for this platform?”

bound008 6y ago

People frequently overlook how nice the nix experience is on macOS. I had a new mac user complain about iTunes opening when they hit the play button like its some kind of conspiracy against him. I asked if he tried `sudo chmod -x /Applications/iTunes.app`. We tried it, and I don't understand why he was so surprised that it worked, and remained a permanent solution to his issue. Your choices are the worlds most prevalent OS which is laden in telemetry and spyware by default, an OS that costs a fortune in hardware but comes backed by a company who has always stood behind their hardware mistakes (arguably after some period of denial each time), or to chose Linux. In this case, Linux means choosing from at least two variants* of distributions, and praying that everything works. I have an Intel NUC Hades Canyon that I run linux on, so that I always have a fallback if Apple significantly changes from their current course of treating users really well in exchange for a cash premium. First, my linux experience dates back to 1997/8 before the Linksys BEFSR41 ( the first hardware router under $300 ) became available, and installing a 56k modem or ethernet card meant re-compiling the kernel. Somehow, that was less painful than trying to get the amd gpu to work properly, and persist against breaking on updates and reboots. Yesterday, the author of i3, a window manager, shared a posting of his gear. I dug through his blog (cool stuff), and noticed on another of his posts that getting an amd gpu to work well on a debian distro was an issue for him as well. Again, I chose reference intel hardware expecting support for Ubuntu. Being opinionated about design is not 'gaslighting' developers. And sure Apple is not perfect, I for one refuse to by a touch bar mac. I can't stand it, its annoying, and you have to pay extra for someone that for my computing preferences is a giant regression. But of the top 10 companies in the world (by market cap), which ones actually care about end users. Apple was started to put the power of computing in the hands of users, and they were damn successful at it. Finally, in regards to Apple not caring about app development on their platform. Have you not used XCode? On the internet, you can find Steve Jobs demonstrating making a database driven application in 1989 using drag and drop components to design the UI. That is XCode, or its predecessor Project Builder. That is why Xcode Projects have files with the suffix pbxproj nestled within. Its all XML, and all of the build tools and chains are command line driven. You don't need to run XCode to develop an iOS app, but every year they add more and more of what developers want to it. Sometimes I wish that I could develop python inside of XCode, but I'm more than happy to stick with vim. Swift and Swift UI are the real love letters to developers however. Swift, is open source, and runs on linux. Swift UI, is basically the react pattern of UI development, and they built it to solve the pain points of developers who were struggling with outdated development patterns on something that didn't even have color when it was first invented (Project Builder). Sure, the iOS experience maybe too much of a "Disneyland" style experience of a great swath of the HN crowd. I for one love playing with Android phones that can run docker containers and X11 over USB-C. But at the end of the day, I am willing to pay extra money for a company that actually respects my privacy?

SergeAx 6y ago

If you are targeting US market with iPhone having 45% and increasing y2y, you cannot afford ignoring iOS and mobile Safari. What you can is not paying a dime for Apple hardware, though.

Tepix 6y ago

That's the developer perspective. As a user, macOS looks interesting due to the underlying UNIX, the consistent user interface and the high quality applications that are available. I've spend 200€ on Final Cut Pro X and it works very well. There'd have to be some really significant issues for me to switch. PS: I develop but not on macOS and not for iOS.

eitland 6y ago
> the consistent user interface Have they fixed the utterly inconsistent way of moving/selecting words/lines since Snow Leopard? Back then, depending on application I think you'd have to use ctrl-shift, cmd-shift, alt-shift or fn-shift to select words or lines of text depending on which application you used. And yes, this inconsistency included their own software. And yes, this is an honest question, I don't know the answer. I left Mac behind around 2012 because of a number of such things that kept wasting my time and my focus, but I enjoyed other parts of the experience and would be happy to pay (or get someone else to pay) for a premium non-Windows experience.
- szhu 6y ago
  I think this part of macOS has always been consistent. - shift- anchors the selection as you move the cursor and can be combined with any of the below. - left/right jumps characters. (backspace/delete deletes characters.) up/down jumps lines. - opt-left/right jumps words. (opt-backspace/delete deletes words.) opt-up/down jumps paragraphs (unless the app overrides this). - cmd-left/right/up/down jumps to the edges of the document (unless the app overrides this). - fn- and ctrl- are not typically used when editing text. In particular, the fn key is specifically used to invoke keys that are only available the extended keyboards, like home, page up, and forward delete. (Extended keyboards don't have the fn key.) I think there was a point where ctrl- did the same thing same thing as opt- or cmd-, probably as a convenience to users coming from other platforms. Every single modern app has honored this in native text widgets since the first Mac OS X, I believe. If you remember it being inconsistent, it's possible that you were using apps that use non-Cocoa UI like GTK/Qt/X11 (and possibly Carbon too). It might have been an app from Microsoft or Adobe, who seem to use their own UI toolkits. Or you could have been using a terminal app or developer tool with custom keybindings that didn't conform to these conventions. (VSCode, Atom, and Sublime Text's default keybindings do conform to this, and in Terminal and iTerm, there is a setting you can turn on to make the opt- modifer also conform.) Which apps do you remember being inconsistent?

fearface 6y ago

Your opinion is popular and unfounded.

Mandatum 6y ago

Until another platform performs better, I'll enjoy this bath like the boiling frog I am.