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> They are focused on the users - not the developers. I'm a former Mac dev--I think Apple likes to use this argument to justify a lot of their choices, but in
by tenacious_tuna 5y ago
> They are focused on the users - not the developers.
I'm a former Mac dev--I think Apple likes to use this argument to justify a lot of their choices, but in reality their design decisions often make life difficult for developers in ways that aren't beneficial to the customers.
My former company produced screen recording software, and since I started in 2018 to when I left at the end of 2020 each MacOS release required us to spend a good 3 months fixing our apps to run under the new OSes. Notarization required us to change how we signed our libraries and integrated them across the 3 applications we produced; the permissions paradigm for mic and webcam was beautiful, and easy to develop around, but when they added screen recording permissions it was truly awful, and they broke their own patterns. APIs would be deprecated with no replacement, documentation was sparse at best, with header files often being more useful than the examples provided on developer.apple.com....
My point being, we often spent more time bending our app to Apple's will than fixing bugs or adding much-requested features. Apple's argument was that these changes they forced us to make was net-beneficial for end users: less malware with notarization, better privacy controls with permissions--but when it really came down to it, they just want more control over distribution of apps and "special treatment" for their own tooling.