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When I read this, all I'm really reading is, Apple's biggest cultural position on secrecy is also its biggest pain-point for external developers. Secrecy is so
by jarjoura 6y ago
When I read this, all I'm really reading is, Apple's biggest cultural position on secrecy is also its biggest pain-point for external developers.
Secrecy is so ingrained in that company, at all levels, that it will never/ever change without fundamentally changing what/who Apple is as a company.
External developers, since the launch of the App Store, have been expected to be thankful that Apple even lets them on to their precious marketplace. There's also no special treatment when at bigger companies either. The only thing I've experienced is that we were invited to port our product to iOS 7's new flat UI just to be featured 6 weeks ahead of their rumored keynote date. They didn't even give us an actual time to submit.
Bigger products I've worked on do get a developer relations support person who makes sure we're able to meet Apple's latest demands, but they are not connected to the engineering (R&D) teams, so feedback is mostly downward. For example, they would ask why haven't we ported things to Metal yet? If we inform them there is a bug or missing documentation, they will make sure they get engineering involved to fix the bug so we can continue porting to Metal.
Bugs are another huge pain point that developers complain about. Whenever there's an issue, we're told, file the bug and it magically goes off into a black void with no feedback until some point in the future when the OS release has shipped and then we get to find out whether they decided to fix the issue or to mark it "Works as expected."
It really sucks that the company that builds the best tech is also the most toxic to partner with. They add undue stress and expect too much from their developer community. Partnerships should work both ways! Developers bring new experiences that light up the hardware, and make the platform better as a whole. However, Apple has somehow found a way to make the partnerships mostly one-sided and that will never change.
The only way out is really for all the coolest new features to land on Android and to put software in maintenance mode on iOS. Yet, I cannot fathom how that would ever happen either as that's 50% of the population in the US you would make suffer for the cause.