19 ms·

Apple’s Mistake (2009)

177 points by keleftheriou 5y ago

striking 5y ago
(2009)
- dang 5y ago
  Added. Thanks!
draw_down 5y ago
znq 5y ago
Article is from 2009. Nevertheless interesting to go back in time and see what has changed. Or hasn't.
TillE 5y ago
> Their reputation with programmers used to be great. Maybe in a vague secondhand sense? Mac developers have pretty much always been a tiny, tiny niche, and I've heard plenty of complaints from them.
api 5y ago
I've dealt with the IRS and with the Apple App Store. The former has far better customer service and is much more transparent.
- splitstud 5y ago
  It's actually surprising how good it is
- fatnoah 5y ago
  Not gonna lie, my one and only call with the IRS required waiting about 60 minutes on hold, but once I got to talk to someone, they were friendly, knowledgable, and completely took care of my problem. In my interactions with app store review, it's usually resulted in a terse response that required some guessing to fully understand. In some cases, we simply gave up because it was too hard to get real answers from someone.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    my one and only call with the IRS required waiting about 60 minutes on hold Recently I learned that Waiting-on-Hold-as-a-Service is a thing. According to the newspaper (I forget which one — lots of dead trees around my apartment), there are companies that hire people to do nothing but wait on hold on customer service lines. When the person on hold is next in line, if the company has a paying customer, they switch the call over to them. If not, the person who's been waiting on hold all that time drops the call and dials in again, sort of reserving a spot for the next paying customer. The rate to get straight through to the IRS is $1,000 to $5,000. I think it's a monthly subscription. A bargain for lawyers and accountants and such.
    - ValentineC 5y ago
      I'm surprised few others are creating agnostic competitors to Google Pixel's Hold for Me feature: https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/10071878?hl=en https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/10071878?hl=en
    - howinteresting 5y ago
      Accountants and such have specialized needs, but for ordinary people, you can just get that for free with a Google Pixel.
      - reaperducer 5y ago
        It's not the same thing. The Google thing waits on hold for you. But you still wait. These services connect you immediately because they have people who have already done the waiting.
        howinteresting 5y ago
        Ahh, I see. That's pretty cool!
- mdorazio 5y ago
  If you can actually contact the IRS at all. I called multiple times last year and wasn’t even able to be put on hold, just “sorry we have too many people trying to contact us, try later”. If you do actually get a hold of someone, IRS is helpful but also outdated (I had to sign up for a fax service to send documentation to them). Apple’s responses often leave a lot to be desired, but at least you can use support forums and emails with a good response rate. Note that I don’t think this is the fault of the IRS at all - they are woefully underfunded and understaffed.
  - e4e78a06 5y ago
    I still find it baffling you need to _physically mail_ your stock brokerage transactions to the IRS in 2022. And you can only do it via USPS! My brokerage already reports all my gains/losses to the IRS, why do I need to mail another set of the same documents on top of that?
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Do you? I never have and I do not see any instructions on Schedule D to breakout individual transactions if they were already included in 1099-B.
  - Kye 5y ago
    Context! Remember, they were slammed with more filings than usual due to the stimulus on top of the backlog from the previous new filings for the previous stimulus. They had to deal with this using a reduced staff amid figuring out how to deal with a newly remote workforce.
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    The problem is at least partially that companies flood the IRS call center with spam calls, for the express purpose of "reserving a spot" for people who pay them for expedited access to the IRS call queue.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  It's the same in the UK, I've always had good service from HMRC. Mind you I suspect people who fiddle their taxes have a different opinion of them.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
While I agree with a lot of the sentiment in this blog post, it certainly didn't age well. I don't see "developer love" making a lick of difference for how successful the App Store has been (which is, phenomenally). At this point the only thing I see reigning in the power of the App Store (and Play Store, a point pg also got wrong in this post, but I think that was understandable in 2009) is regulation.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  > I don't see "developer love" making a lick of difference for how successful the App Store has been Therein we see the commodificafion or the mass consumerization or appification or whatever neologism of software, at least for smartphones.
- webmobdev 5y ago
  > I don't see "developer love" making a lick of difference for how successful the App Store has been Business history is replete with those whose products were once at the top and / or dominated the industry and yet are now irrelevant.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    This blog post is 13 years old, and was written before App Store had its meteoric rise. A successful "cautionary tale of premature hubris" it ain't.
- btown 5y ago
  There's an old diagram (now a meme) of the points where WWII bombers were hit and survived to have those hits recorded; the underlying theme is that it's the places where hits weren't recorded that were actually fatal. Looking at whether the App Store was sufficient in its "developer love," and looking at what applications were rejected... paints over what applications might have surfaced if its policies were different, but instead were discouraged before they even began. One of the worst things about the App Store is that there are very few "labors of love" there - very few (if any) quality free-to-play games that don't try to aggressively monetize in-app transactions, very few "shareware" style apps that rival paid subscription apps in quality. There's no real way to quantify what might have existed, but we do know that there were many shareware developers in the early 2000s that wouldn't touch microtransactions with a ten foot pole - where did they go? I think, in part, all this is due to the App Store process being so wildly unpredictable and exhausting. If you develop something useful, it may be rejected on a whim; the only developers who aren't discouraged after that, are the ones whose investors pay them to not be discouraged, may reach out via backchannels to ensure that rejections are escalated, can fund a pivot if necessary, and in turn expect outsized returns. And so every app becomes optimized for monetary return - which, of course, makes Apple extremely profitable. It's a really sad situation.
kerblang 5y ago
Absolutely right, aaaaand... it doesn't matter. People will do whatever is necessary to get their app in the user's hands. But Apple doesn't have Steve Jobs anymore and that matters a lot. Anyhow, the question driving everything now is "Security?". How do you deliver non-dangerous software to innocent people? What is the (un)fashionably libertarian answer on this anyhow? Let them eat blackmail?
- splitstud 5y ago
  It only matters if Apple doesn't care how many people develop for their platform. You say 'People will do whatever...'. Sure, some will. Some won't. Some have to. Would you want your platform to be skewed in any way towards those that 'have to'? The libertarian and bog standard answers agree in this case = you don't need to know how, we don't need you to be the decision maker.
dudeinjapan 5y ago
I don't think Paul realizes how much it doesn't matter that Apple realizes how much it matters that it's broken. Or rather, that it doesn't matter that it's broken.
- stephc_int13 5y ago
  I believe you are wrong, and Paul is right, but early. It take times, years and sometimes decades, but developer love is critically important for a platform. Not matter how broken the App Store was at launch, it was much better than anything that was available at the time, smartphone business was really messy and completely unfair for devs.
  - tw600040 5y ago
    Being right and early is sometimes indistinguishable from being wrong..
    - stephc_int13 5y ago
      If you are betting on stock yes it might. But if you are talking long term, it can at least be discussed.
  - dudeinjapan 5y ago
    Apple owns the users (on the iOS platform), so there's no incentive for them to fix the developer experience in the store. If anything they are being overtly draconian and repeatedly making (petty) displays of the power they lord over devs.
bombcar 5y ago
If you can make something really nice for developers to use, they may use it - if there are some users to sell to (or, it's orthogonal to the released product). This is partially why Electon has spread so far I think - developers like working on Macs (because it's basically "linux with a nice gui" for all practical purposes) meaning that if Microsoft wants developers to use VSCode - and not get used to non-Microsoft products - they need to get to where the developers are. But in those case the devs are the users. A beautiful SDK won't save you, I've heard stores about how good the BeOS API was, or how wonderful development for various other failed devices/technologies was. But if you're trying to keep a dying platform alive, you need to reduce friction, and making a good SDK is a way. And Macs were dying for many years ...
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  I'm convinced that the UI and more importantly the touchpad is what really drives continued interest in MBPs as developer laptops. If another vendor makes a solid touchpad Apple might suffer a bit. I've yet to find one that comes close.
  - _0w8t 5y ago
    A touchpad on the latest ThinkPad X1 from Lenovo is much improved. While it still does not match Apple, a better keyboard more then offsets it. What is puzzling is the screen. Lenovo does not have high DPI mate screens and their non-mate screens are way more reflective compared to Apple offerings. Why cannot they order screens from the same vendor as Apple?
    - akvadrako 5y ago
      Matte screens are just a coating -- you can get the same effect buying an after market film.
      - _0w8t 5y ago
        It is not the same. I have used one 5 years ago on Dell XPS 13. It still reflected more then on ThinkPad X1. And the whole experience was worse then on MacBook Pro.
senko 5y ago
As @Apocryphon comments in a subthread, there's a commodification of app developers. With iOS, Apple has crossed the threshold of who needs who. Now app developers need Apple way more than Apple needs them. In many cases, one app to do thing X is mostly as good as another app for the same X. There's no bargaining power to be had unless you're a huge name. As a developer, you're not leaving the App Store unless you're leaving mobile app development entirely. It'd be commercial suicide (for most) to do that.
- BackBlast 5y ago
  This remains true for the moment. But discontent among developers are cracks in the foundation. The building can weather that for a time because it's mighty and huge. But those cracks are the beginning of the eventual end. If not cared for, will hasten its demise.
  - senko 5y ago
    Maybe. The level of control both Google and Apple have in their mobile OS' (only Safari engine being allowed on iOS is an example) makes it much harder for something else entirely to grow outside their ecosystem and them slam them from the left flank, like the web did to MS' dominance. I'm not entering into the debate whether such technical restrictions are have good (and benign) reasons, but they absolutely keep the control much tighter than it used to be the case on the desktop in Windows heyday.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Nah, you can build a PWA that more or less acts entirely like a mobile app and get out of the app store game entirely.
  - jmull 5y ago
    It will be interesting to see if that happens or not.
  - senko 5y ago
    Not as a counter-argument, but I would be curious to find out if there are any big commercial successes that targeted mobile niche but were implemented as a web app. I can't think of any.
jll29 5y ago
+1 for expressing the need for a “50% of the size of the MacBook Air“ machine. Oh, and with e-paper display, please.
stephc_int13 5y ago
This post was perfectly on point. I think it can be argued that Apple has never been developer friendly, but these days it is painfully difficult to ignore. And I think this is a huge mistake, I would not be surprised if Microsoft end-up eating their lunch again.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Microsoft bought an entire phone company and still failed in the mobile device market. It's hard to identify a future key differentiator that's going to be strong enough to overcome the iOS (status) and Android (widely deployable) ecosystems.
  - stephc_int13 5y ago
    Well, all big companies have their peak and then fail. It can be difficult to imagine but even IBM and Coca Cola are going do disappear into oblivion at some point. Apple is not dead from a financial standpoint. But I'd go as far as to call it an incredibly healthy zombie.
- setgree 5y ago
  An Apple share was worth a little under $7 when PG wrote this. Today, it hovers around $170, and Apple is the largest corporation in history (which also makes it, in some sense, the largest non-governmental institution in history). What do we think its value would be today if it had been more developer-friendly in the ensuing 12.25 years -- higher, lower, the same? I truly don't know. But either way, a "huge mistake," from Apple's POV, is something that appreciably affects the bottom line. And Apple's insane valuation is face value evidence that anything about its corporate strategy that we view as a huge mistake is probably not. Perhaps there's a case that what Apple has done is a huge ethical mistake, but we'd have to make the case for that very differently.
  - Kye 5y ago
    I'm sure many companies felt the same way at their peak. Microsoft certainly lived in its hubris before web and mobile forced it to bet the company on making an AWS for its existing contracts who hadn't yet moved everything to clouds.
blehn 5y ago
Developers have pretty much solved the launch-fast-and-iterate problem with server-side updates — they don't need to submit a new build to Apple for every update. I'd argue that Apple's app store policies have mostly resulted in higher quality, more secure apps than we would have otherwise (and Android apps are evidence of that), which resulted in more trust and faster adoption from users.
- madmax96 5y ago
  I think the real key is that Apple has recognized that App Store delays are a problem and has taken steps to quantifiably improve the situation. See https://appreviewtimes.com/ https://appreviewtimes.com/. Anecdotally, the first version of one of my Apps was approved in < 8 hours. On another, more gray area app, it took ~1.5 weeks. Gone are the days of 4 week update delays. I’ve found that Apple’s release process has identified useful problems in my apps too.
kmeisthax 5y ago
Well, as much as the business model is untenable, it lasted 13 years and counting. [0] The things that have changed aren't strictly upgrades or downgrades. Apple's approval process is much quicker than it was in 2009, but instead of sitting on a bug fix for four weeks, now they reject you with no explanation while 20 other apps doing the same thing Apple is angry about make millions on the store. >They get away with maltreating developers, in the short term, because they make such great hardware. I just bought a new 27" iMac a couple days ago. It's fabulous. The screen's too shiny, and the disk is surprisingly loud, but it's so beautiful that you can't make yourself care. I feel the exact same way with the 13" iPad Pro I bought last year. Amazing hardware, but it feels like computing in a straitjacket. Even jailbreaking it only goes so far to fix the underlying problem, which is that playing by Apple's rules is a genuine roadblock to a lot of pro app developers who are accustomed to selling direct-to-consumer. However, I don't think Apple actually cares. The iPad Pro exists for exactly one kind of customer, and one kind of customer only: professional artists. As far as they're concerned, people who want proper developer tools, the full Adobe or Autodesk suites, or what have you can just give up the touchscreen and cellular modem and buy a Mac. >With Apple that seems less the case. When you look at the famous 1984 ad now, it's easier to imagine Apple as the dictator on the screen than the woman with the hammer. ...Did Paul Graham consult with Tim Sweeney on #FreeFortnite? [0] Also, the submission title should probably have a (2009) in it...
- tharne 5y ago
  > Amazing hardware, but it feels like computing in a straitjacket. That's precisely what drove me away from apple laptops a few years back and back to linux for my home computing. I was running an (only somewhat) older machine and every update ate more hard drive space and hurt performance. And because apple made it, it was damn near impossible to upgrade either the hard drive or the memory. But, it is beautiful hardware...
- chaostheory 5y ago
  What pg couldn’t predict is that there are still no good alternatives to the Apple ecosystem. For normal people, there’s still only two viable alternatives: MS and Google. Both have their pros and cont, but neither is significantly better than Apple. Maybe with the coming XR paradigm shift, things will change?
jmull 5y ago
Focusing on iPhone users and and not iPhone developers probably was/is the right thing to do. iOS isn't a developer's platform and if it were, developers probably wouldn't be interested in it very much, since what developers want more than any API, tool or system is users. Not that they couldn't focus on users better, or couldn't support developers better w/o impacting users negatively. They could and should, IMO. Apple has pretty much fixed the issue this post is concerned with (very slow app review process)... but it took several years -- checking the internet, it looks like ~2016 was the general turning point, so around 7 years after this post. It shows just how little the developer experience matters to developers if you have users.
- _0w8t 5y ago
  This is even true on desktop with Apple deprecating and removing features with new OS releases. The assumption is that developers will take care about it. But for users of niche apps that are no longer supported by developers this is rather problematic and requires to stay at older MacOS versions.
  - wil421 5y ago
    Didn’t Apple used to let you run a VM of your laptop? I swear I used to run a VM of a 2011 laptop to use niche software.
    - _0w8t 5y ago
      One cannot run 32-bit Intel binary on Apple silicon even via VM. I suppose VM vendors may eventually support that via emulation, but it will take a while.
      - wil421 5y ago
        Yes you can. Here’s a link for Snow Leopard on an M1. I use parallels to run windows 7 on an M1. https://youtu.be/a6FdLON1Nlk https://youtu.be/a6FdLON1Nlk
      - CharlesW 5y ago
tharne 5y ago
> An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. Yup. That's more or less what's happening or Oracle right now. They'll profitability soldier on for a while due to the massive amount of legacy servers running Oracle databases at companies all over the world. But, every $BIG_CORP out there has on their roadmap a long-term plan to either drastically reduce their spend on Oracle products, or more often, eliminate it entirely.
- beachy 5y ago
  > But, every $BIG_CORP out there has on their roadmap a long-term plan to either drastically reduce their spend on Oracle products, or more often, eliminate it entirely. Hyperbole much? I guarantee there are plenty of companies doing giant transaction rates happily and stably on their big Oracle. And plenty of ERP customers who are resigned to staying on their Oracle platform for the foreseeable future, even if only because the competitors are just as greedy shark as Oracle.
  - tharne 5y ago
    It really isn't hyperbole. Ask 10 random CTO's about Oracle, and the majority will tell you they're looking for offramps. It's not just a matter of Oracle being greedy, it's that they are also bullying and difficult to work with. And their licensing rules are one of the circles of hell.
    - rconti 5y ago
      And that has been true for 15 years.
      - wizzwizz4 5y ago
        The alternatives have been getting better and better. With free software, you can just use an older version if it's better; with Oracle, the latest version is what gets supported, so it can get worse.
    - 5y ago
MattGaiser 5y ago
Developers really don't have a lot of leverage in anything we do, as much as we like to think so. Many of us work in such a way that we get summoned every morning at 9 to line up and answer "what did you do yesterday that justified 10% of your paycheck and what will you do today that justifies 10% of your paycheck? Turnover among executives is considered a crisis. Turnover among developers amounts to whining about our disloyalty and companies screaming at the government to increase immigration. We are a commodity. A valuable one and hard to obtain one to be sure, but that is it. Apple understood that and won and developers primarily build for Apple now.
d--b 5y ago
> They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. Yep, fast forward to now and it seems that they got it right. Nobody left. Not the users, not the developers. It turns out we really are like musicians
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I've been a developer long enough to have seen the whole industry change, multiple times — Apple may have played a part more recently but there have been other forces at work as well for a long time. Shareware rose, fell, rose again, fell again. Somewhere in the lulls there a developer could publish their software either through small ma-and-pa publishers (I have experience with Casey & Greene, Inc. if anyone in the Mac community remember them) or through AppStore/Steam, etc. At one time publishing meant boxes, floppies, ads in magazines, 15% royalties. A designer at that time, as an example, could sell a font for good money. Fonts though became commodities, the big players (Adobe) moved in and one thread of an era came to a close. CD's replaced floppies and this too had an impact on the industry as well. AOL and the masses coming on-line obviously had a huge impact (and shareware rose again then — ID Software). Again the big players moved in: LucasArts, etc. Quality games were expected to have cut scenes. Everquest and the world-building games that followed required teams of artists such that the indie developer once again was in descension. The iPhone made waves. The AppStore though quickly became a race to the bottom (in price) as a new generation of users came to expect software to be free (like their Facebook and SnapChat). So I don't know, I don't put a lot of blame on Apple in this regard. The industry has been a very dynamic one. One thing I have come to expect about the software development ride though is to never expect it to be the same ten years out.
  - d--b 5y ago
    Right I didn’t think about before the internet, but yeah at that time developers were even more subject to distributor’s approval (and cut)!
- treis 5y ago
  Because the other half of the duopoly treats you more or less the same.
gojomo 5y ago
I'm personally sympathetic to Graham's points in this 2009 piece. He was prescient about the "bummer" it is to be stuck in a monopolist's monoculture. But Apple's growth in market value since – from $175B at the end of November 2009, to $2.73T today – at least raises the possibility that Apple wasn't making a "mistake", from the perspective of Apple shareholders, managers, & employees. Maybe once you've reached a certain powerful 'commanding heights' via other strategy & technology, the optimal enterprise strategy is truly to bully developers, & take their lunch money for yourself. Still a drag on human progress & welfare, sure.
- draw_down 5y ago
- mattbrewsbytes 5y ago
  If we’re going to talk about “drag on human progress and welfare”, there are much bigger fish to fry in the Tech world than a 30% surcharge by an App Store. You could start with any social media company and in my opinion, they surpass anything Apple has done as far as a “drag on human progress & welfare”.
  - gojomo 5y ago
    Whataboutism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism) is pretty boring unless we were specifically trying to create a ranked list of the worst things. Also, without an explanation of why "in your opinion" "any social media company" is worse, you're just declaring a personal bias - and vaguely, too. (Is social media company Snapchat more destructive than Apple's App Store policies?) If you have some larger grudge against some specific social media companies, why not write it up, with reasoning & naming names, in an appropriate place? Why only allude to it, to make Apple's destructiveness seem smaller?
    - mattbrewsbytes 5y ago
      The parent commenter brought up “drag on human progress and welfare” and keeping the topic to Tech companies I was pointing out there are far worse. There are studies that show social media causing mental health issues and issues with spreading misinformation, many have shown up here on HN. I was stating my opinion which should be obvious, but maybe it’s not, every comment where you type into a comment text box is an opinion. I don’t have a grudge, just think the contributions to humanity by social media companies are far less than the problems they cause. The hypocrisy on HN is funny sometimes, many times articles/comments about startups are about monetizing and charging customers more, raising capital, etc. and then for large companies they charge too much and it’s a “drag on human progress and welfare”?
JKCalhoun 5y ago
> Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil. Not me (caveat: I worked at Apple). Clumsy is the word that comes to mind with regard to their handling of the AppStore. I see little or no evil intent > Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software. That's a bold statement. I'll be more nuanced. My impression is that Steve Jobs treated 3rd party software on "his devices" as a necessary inconvenience. He preferred the software he had a hand in, the software developed in house. To me that is enough to explain Apple's approach to the AppStore.
- mandeepj 5y ago
  > Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software. then in the same breathe, please tell me who understands it.
  - burnished 5y ago
    That is a direct quote from the article, mandeep, you're gonna have to hassle Paul Graham directly to get a proper answer.
    - mandeepj 5y ago
      I was pointing to PG himself with my comment, and not the poster.
      - burnished 5y ago
        Pardon if I misunderstood, but it looks like you replied to a specific person. I believe the etiquette for arguing with the author is to issue a top level response.
        mandeepj 5y ago
        I will keep that in mind, going forward. Thank you
- 5y ago
dang 5y ago
Related: Apple's Mistake (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7344783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7344783 - March 2014 (56 comments) Apple's Mistake (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6329991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6329991 - Sept 2013 (8 comments) Apple's Mistake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1081514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1081514 - Jan 2010 (25 comments) Apple's Mistake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950751 - Nov 2009 (269 comments)
pier25 5y ago
When this was written I was an Apple fanboy. These days, as a dev, I really don't trust Apple at all. I would never even think of making a product for any of the Apple platforms. As a freelancer I've stopped taking any iOS/macOS projects too. It's not the 30% but Apple's attitude of controlling their turf like the mafia under pretended moral superiority. As a user I'm as cynical as I've ever been. I use macOS and Windows on a daily basis, and for dev work I generally prefer macOS over Windows. But I'm always running at least a major macOS version behind and never buy any 1st gen Apple product. I simply expect their stuff to fail in one way or another. I've been bitten way too many times to trust them. Nvidiagate, Radeongate, Yosemite, iPad 3, iPhone 4, etc, the list is very long. Just weeks ago, my wife's Macbook Air (a 4 year old machine) started having issues with the keyboard and trackpad disconnecting. Apple's authorized repair services* say they want to replace almost all the parts (pretty much excluding the screen) and the repair cost is almost as much as buying a new Air. * Apple Mexico doesn't really do repairs here like in the US so you're forced to go through one of those services. Or right now, the Apple TV has been suffering issues with Atmos for the past couple of months. There's a thread in Apple's forums with 14 pages of users complaining which keeps growing even though posts are deleted by the mods constantly. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253168177 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253168177
- wil421 5y ago
  Apple in the US kinda stopped doing repairs. They used to replace screens but now they just give you a new iPhone or iPad.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I assume at some point, technology becomes so integrated and tiny that it no longer makes sense to do repairs.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      By which you mean it makes them more money to sell you a new thing than to make repairs possible. I had a Mac 512K, and later a Mac SE/30, where I ran A/UX. I would never, ever buy any Apple product, today, under any circumstance.
terracatta 5y ago
I think it's easy to read this post, then look at Apple's market cap and conclude that Paul got this one wrong. I don't think he did. As an entrepreneur, when I held the iPhone 4s in my hand ~10 years ago, I saw only possibilities. In 2022 when I hold my iPhone 13 in my hand, I see a known quantity with all the use-cases permanently ossified. I don't dare to dream about what is possible. Only Apple can truly move this platform forward. I'll be a passive observer. This is not how I feel about the Mac, and I think Paul's post accounts for the difference. I really feel if I have a great idea and execute I can meaningfully impact the trajectory of the platform. There is no doubt the iPhone and the iPad will continue to be commercially successful products. But now, 14 years after the launch of the App Store, that feels like such a poor measurement of their net-new impact on society. The magic is gone.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  We’re just getting old. I used to think the same thing. Then I watched a designer effectively scan my home into a 3D model with her phone and return it from her assistant’s iPad with proposed changes reflected within thirty minutes. That wouldn’t have been possible only a few years ago. That’s a pretty vain example, but there are a lot of opportunities opened by having a sensor that can create 3D models of nearby surfaces in everyone’s pocket. And that’s just one sensor Apple has added to their phones over the years.
  - etchalon 5y ago
    Completely agree. The difference between then and now is that EVERY use case was changing. As smart phones have "mastered" to the common ones, the real change is happening at the edges and it's crazy what other industries are doing with the platforms.
  - vincentmarle 5y ago
    > Then I watched a designer effectively scan my home into a 3D model with her phone and return it from her assistant’s iPad with proposed changes reflected within thirty minutes. Curious to know which app she used for that?
renewiltord 5y ago
Interesting. Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory is more predictive of Apple’s domination of mobile applications than this. Perhaps this is just porn for developers because it makes us feel powerful. The truth, though, is that the developers go where the demand goes.
mdoms 5y ago
You all still buy their goofy aluminium laptops and publish on their store so I guess Apple wins.
mlang23 5y ago
pornel 5y ago
The part about lost goodwill sounds very true. I used to love Cocoa, and did my best to write quality apps for it, despite Mac's small market share. But App Store ham-fisted rules made me distrust and resent Apple. I've stopped using Apple-only languages and frameworks as much as I could, and as a user I'm looking to leave the platform entirely (which unfortunately after a over a decade of using, I'm locked into and resent that too).
sebastien_b 5y ago
Favorite passage: How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?
luckyorlame 5y ago
Yawn
mileskaos 5y ago
This article doesn't hold up so well since Apple has a market cap > $1T. Please tell us how they're gonna fail now, Paul. This is like Ted Dziuba trying to convince the world in '09 that NOSQL was useless and would die soon. Pure genius
- sebastien_b 5y ago
  It reflects that Apple is a de facto monopoly on app distribution for phone apps.
Koraza 5y ago
thenthenthen 5y ago
I dunno, getting you app approved on the (jailbreak) cydia store, via like big boss back in the days was equally hard as the official appstore. This both frustrated and satisfied me; actual people reviewing the work and giving cryptic feedback haha. Is/was(?) the bigboss process inherited from the apple appstore?
josephwegner 5y ago
Sidebar: am I seeing this wrong, or is PG's website really showing a bad SSL cert? Looks like it is serving some cert for Yahoo domains? It also isn't auto-upgrading to HTTPS, which is a smaller issue, but just kind of surprising for someone with PG's tech stature.
musesum 5y ago
> Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil. Well, not until 2016 when Apple began to offer ads in the AppStore -- as though that was a good thing for indy developers. And a couple years later, when Spotify keeps getting pushed down the list: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/09/technology/apple-app-store-competition.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/09/technology/ap... This is why we're going to develop for Spotify's API first.
organicpotato 5y ago
As other commenters have already mentioned, it doesn’t really matter how “broken” the App Store is as long as Apple owns the user relationship. Developers follow the user base, which is dependent on Apple’s hardware and overall ecosystem. Although Paul provides a few ad-hoc conversations with frustrated developers, it doesn’t seem like any of the issues mentioned impact the supply of developers for both Apple and its App Store in a meaningful way. Paul suggests that Apple is “evil”, as if the company is immoral and intentionally aiming to harm a group of people (in this case, the App Store developers). I don’t see any “evil” intent here, and think that Apple intended to develop a feedback loop to incentivize App Store developers to improve quality control. It’d be difficult to obtain, but what would be interesting to see is a graph of the following data points: - The frequency of moderate to high-severity client-side bugs released for the same app to Google's Play Store and Apple's App Store. - If there were ever times where Apple has tightened or loosened their approval process, the before and after on the frequency of client-side issues. Although app developers have no control over the app approval process, one way to mitigate turnaround time risks in fixing issues is implementing as much logic as possible server-side (of course, there are definitely times where this isn’t feasible).
Lamad123 5y ago
It's gotten much worse, but why should the corp care? Shareholders are happy and the sheeple are mostly happy!!
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Sorry. I should have known better than to try to participate in this thread. My apologies. Carry on.
- smithza 5y ago
  So China develops an Olympics app for the athletes and tells them they have to have it on their iPhones, yet with only cursory reviews third-party security analysts found it has malware baked inside. This is a high-profile app, something that some high-up in the review process probably was assigned, and they gave it the OK? Can you help me understand the "rules" that you have come to cozy yourself into?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Can you help me to understand why the nasty? I wasn't telling anyone else what to do; simply relating my own experience. Ah...the heck with it. I should have known better than to stick my oar in here. I'm nuking the comment.
    - smithza 5y ago
      Fair critique, I don't mean anything personal. I was just so peeved about Apple's friendliness to China's communism that I haven't cooled down yet. I am far outside the field of discussion and am only looking in. My question actual question is earnest: I don't understand the "rules" that Apple decides to follow in the context of China.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
        I strongly suspect that they have caved, and are actively cooperating with the Chinese authorities. It's a really big market, and they luvs their munny. I have no intentions of developing apps for distribution in China. I'm not happy, too. I deleted a paragraph in this response about a conversation I had -just this morning- with a friend that owns a fairly substantial company, that does a lot of its manufacturing in China. I won't go into it, but China has their own "rules," and they have the muscle to enforce them.
mikenew 5y ago
So I built a very basic prototype app to explore an idea I had using Flutter (imagine something like a time boxing system where you track how frequently you get distracted). Spent a couple days roughing it out, and then I was able to load it onto my own Android device to start testing. Literally just plugged in my device to my PC, confirm the prompt on the phone, and then `flutter run -d <device_id>`. I also wanted to send it to my brother (who has an iPhone) so he could start playing with it too. So I had to pay Apple $100 to open a developer account. Then sign a bunch of contracts. Then register an app ID and generate certificates. Then bundle the app and submit it to appstoreconnect. Then wait for a bunch of automated checks to pass and tell me that the app ID is missing entitlements. Then figure out what that even means, attempt to fix the entitlements, and run through the submission again. Then set up testing groups and invite my brother to test the app. Then I have to "submit" the app for approval for testing. And a couple days later finally get approval from Apple so that I can start testing it. And that's the short version; there were a bunch of nonsensical Xcode quirks to deal with. For context, I've been an iOS developer for a decade, and it still took me the better part of a weekend to get through it all, even though I know exactly what to expect. And this is so one fucking person can try an app for me. I hate Apple. I don't know how else to put it. I don't think they're evil, I just think they don't give a shit about their developers. Did you know their bug tracker is private? I'll find some weird behavior with, let's say UITableView or something, and spend all day trying to figure out what subtle thing I'm doing wrong using their comically poor documentation. And then somewhere buried in Stack Overflow I'll find someone saying "oh yeah that's a bug in the framework, I submitted a radar 2 years ago". So there's some bug that they know about, and I'm not even allowed to see that. It feels hostile on their part, and it makes me feel hostile on my part. I think Paul Graham was right.
- collaborative 5y ago
  Just wait until you have to manually type "what's new" in each release in each different language your app supports that perhaps adds an invisible fix the user couldn't care less to know about. Oh, and appstoreconnect is designed to prevent you from automating this. This huge time waster is what really makes my blood boil when I think of Apple
daviddever23box 5y ago
File along with Michael Dell's "shareholder value" remark.
alberth 5y ago
Given that pg is a VC, it's interesting to take these comments into consideration given that in 2009 - Apple's market cap was ~$100B and today it's ~$3,000B ($3T). Getting a 30x return for a company at scale is a phenomenal outcome for any VC. Seems like Apple did something right. https://companiesmarketcap.com/apple/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/apple/marketcap/
- ncmncm 5y ago
  As did Oracle? Microsoft? Lock-in has always been a profitable strategy.
  - alberth 5y ago
    Umm, no. - Oracle only 2x market cap [0] (from ~$100B to ~$200B) - Microsoft only 10x market cap [1] (from ~$200B to ~$2,000B) Apple with its 30x increase is an order of magnitude more than Oracle and 3x more than Microsoft. [0] https://companiesmarketcap.com/oracle/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/oracle/marketcap/ [1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/microsoft/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/microsoft/marketcap/
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      I e., Lock-in to walled gardens is obscenely profitable. Just exactly how obscenely varies.
mocmoc 5y ago
Another genius
singularity2001 5y ago
>>> Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would. Other than the despotic caprice that one occasionally encounters, this is indeed the biggest reason why I hate Apple's App Store so much.
- kotrunga 5y ago
  I'm a developer, but just to play devil's advocate... think about the end user. Having a review process (though, Apple can improve theirs, see below) helps protect the end user. Programmers, companies, etc. can't just repeatedly push updates non-stop, starting with half-baked apps, iterating too quickly. How do you have a check process that ensures an app is up to standard and "safe"? In addition, the time cost to release adds value to a release, hopefully helping it be more thought out, bringing more value to the user. Again though... I think the point is that Apple could have a better review process that A) values the developer more and B) shouldn't take as long. I agree with that.
nova22033 5y ago
Apple app store revenue from 2017-2020.. https://www.statista.com/statistics/296226/annual-apple-app-store-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/296226/annual-apple-app-... woody_harrelson_drying_his_tears_with_money.jpg
karmakaze 5y ago
Reading the comments here look like the beginning of a tipping point.
collaborative 5y ago
Apple gets lots of hate but one thing that's rarely mentioned is how the Play Store prevents you from monetizing a successful app. They do this by making it impossible to turn a free app into a paid app A normal app goes through these stages: 1- Free. If it's good, it will receive good reviews, which will make it more popular 2- Paid The first stage is an investment on the part of the developer. He invests his time and effort. But many developers only find out that it's impossible to move to (2) once it's too late (reviews can't be ported to new apps)
whakim 5y ago
I get it, in 2009 smartphones weren't devices that everyone owned. But I still find the myopic obsession with "techie" approval as a harbinger of success pretty narrow-minded. People didn't like the iPhone in 2009 because programmers liked it; people liked it because it felt like (and was) a revolutionary product! > They're so attracted to the iPhone that they can't leave. But they're looking for a way out. I know hindsight is 20/20 and all, but there's a much broader point that could have been made here about "what happens in a world in which entire software distribution chains are at the mercy of one or two megacorps?" Now that would have been a remarkably prescient gripe, and a much more accurate guess at the "mistake" Apple was making (if you can call the current backlash a "mistake"?)

177 points by keleftheriou 5y ago

striking 5y ago

(2009)

dang 5y ago
Added. Thanks!

draw_down 5y ago

znq 5y ago

Article is from 2009. Nevertheless interesting to go back in time and see what has changed. Or hasn't.

TillE 5y ago

> Their reputation with programmers used to be great. Maybe in a vague secondhand sense? Mac developers have pretty much always been a tiny, tiny niche, and I've heard plenty of complaints from them.

api 5y ago

I've dealt with the IRS and with the Apple App Store. The former has far better customer service and is much more transparent.

splitstud 5y ago
It's actually surprising how good it is
fatnoah 5y ago
Not gonna lie, my one and only call with the IRS required waiting about 60 minutes on hold, but once I got to talk to someone, they were friendly, knowledgable, and completely took care of my problem. In my interactions with app store review, it's usually resulted in a terse response that required some guessing to fully understand. In some cases, we simply gave up because it was too hard to get real answers from someone.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  my one and only call with the IRS required waiting about 60 minutes on hold Recently I learned that Waiting-on-Hold-as-a-Service is a thing. According to the newspaper (I forget which one — lots of dead trees around my apartment), there are companies that hire people to do nothing but wait on hold on customer service lines. When the person on hold is next in line, if the company has a paying customer, they switch the call over to them. If not, the person who's been waiting on hold all that time drops the call and dials in again, sort of reserving a spot for the next paying customer. The rate to get straight through to the IRS is $1,000 to $5,000. I think it's a monthly subscription. A bargain for lawyers and accountants and such.
  - ValentineC 5y ago
    I'm surprised few others are creating agnostic competitors to Google Pixel's Hold for Me feature: https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/10071878?hl=en https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/10071878?hl=en
  - howinteresting 5y ago
    Accountants and such have specialized needs, but for ordinary people, you can just get that for free with a Google Pixel.
    - reaperducer 5y ago
      It's not the same thing. The Google thing waits on hold for you. But you still wait. These services connect you immediately because they have people who have already done the waiting.
      - howinteresting 5y ago
        Ahh, I see. That's pretty cool!
mdorazio 5y ago
If you can actually contact the IRS at all. I called multiple times last year and wasn’t even able to be put on hold, just “sorry we have too many people trying to contact us, try later”. If you do actually get a hold of someone, IRS is helpful but also outdated (I had to sign up for a fax service to send documentation to them). Apple’s responses often leave a lot to be desired, but at least you can use support forums and emails with a good response rate. Note that I don’t think this is the fault of the IRS at all - they are woefully underfunded and understaffed.
- e4e78a06 5y ago
  I still find it baffling you need to _physically mail_ your stock brokerage transactions to the IRS in 2022. And you can only do it via USPS! My brokerage already reports all my gains/losses to the IRS, why do I need to mail another set of the same documents on top of that?
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Do you? I never have and I do not see any instructions on Schedule D to breakout individual transactions if they were already included in 1099-B.
- Kye 5y ago
  Context! Remember, they were slammed with more filings than usual due to the stimulus on top of the backlog from the previous new filings for the previous stimulus. They had to deal with this using a reduced staff amid figuring out how to deal with a newly remote workforce.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  The problem is at least partially that companies flood the IRS call center with spam calls, for the express purpose of "reserving a spot" for people who pay them for expedited access to the IRS call queue.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
It's the same in the UK, I've always had good service from HMRC. Mind you I suspect people who fiddle their taxes have a different opinion of them.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

While I agree with a lot of the sentiment in this blog post, it certainly didn't age well. I don't see "developer love" making a lick of difference for how successful the App Store has been (which is, phenomenally). At this point the only thing I see reigning in the power of the App Store (and Play Store, a point pg also got wrong in this post, but I think that was understandable in 2009) is regulation.

Apocryphon 5y ago
> I don't see "developer love" making a lick of difference for how successful the App Store has been Therein we see the commodificafion or the mass consumerization or appification or whatever neologism of software, at least for smartphones.
webmobdev 5y ago
> I don't see "developer love" making a lick of difference for how successful the App Store has been Business history is replete with those whose products were once at the top and / or dominated the industry and yet are now irrelevant.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  This blog post is 13 years old, and was written before App Store had its meteoric rise. A successful "cautionary tale of premature hubris" it ain't.
btown 5y ago
There's an old diagram (now a meme) of the points where WWII bombers were hit and survived to have those hits recorded; the underlying theme is that it's the places where hits weren't recorded that were actually fatal. Looking at whether the App Store was sufficient in its "developer love," and looking at what applications were rejected... paints over what applications might have surfaced if its policies were different, but instead were discouraged before they even began. One of the worst things about the App Store is that there are very few "labors of love" there - very few (if any) quality free-to-play games that don't try to aggressively monetize in-app transactions, very few "shareware" style apps that rival paid subscription apps in quality. There's no real way to quantify what might have existed, but we do know that there were many shareware developers in the early 2000s that wouldn't touch microtransactions with a ten foot pole - where did they go? I think, in part, all this is due to the App Store process being so wildly unpredictable and exhausting. If you develop something useful, it may be rejected on a whim; the only developers who aren't discouraged after that, are the ones whose investors pay them to not be discouraged, may reach out via backchannels to ensure that rejections are escalated, can fund a pivot if necessary, and in turn expect outsized returns. And so every app becomes optimized for monetary return - which, of course, makes Apple extremely profitable. It's a really sad situation.

kerblang 5y ago

Absolutely right, aaaaand... it doesn't matter. People will do whatever is necessary to get their app in the user's hands. But Apple doesn't have Steve Jobs anymore and that matters a lot. Anyhow, the question driving everything now is "Security?". How do you deliver non-dangerous software to innocent people? What is the (un)fashionably libertarian answer on this anyhow? Let them eat blackmail?

splitstud 5y ago
It only matters if Apple doesn't care how many people develop for their platform. You say 'People will do whatever...'. Sure, some will. Some won't. Some have to. Would you want your platform to be skewed in any way towards those that 'have to'? The libertarian and bog standard answers agree in this case = you don't need to know how, we don't need you to be the decision maker.

dudeinjapan 5y ago

I don't think Paul realizes how much it doesn't matter that Apple realizes how much it matters that it's broken. Or rather, that it doesn't matter that it's broken.

stephc_int13 5y ago
I believe you are wrong, and Paul is right, but early. It take times, years and sometimes decades, but developer love is critically important for a platform. Not matter how broken the App Store was at launch, it was much better than anything that was available at the time, smartphone business was really messy and completely unfair for devs.
- tw600040 5y ago
  Being right and early is sometimes indistinguishable from being wrong..
  - stephc_int13 5y ago
    If you are betting on stock yes it might. But if you are talking long term, it can at least be discussed.
- dudeinjapan 5y ago
  Apple owns the users (on the iOS platform), so there's no incentive for them to fix the developer experience in the store. If anything they are being overtly draconian and repeatedly making (petty) displays of the power they lord over devs.

bombcar 5y ago

If you can make something really nice for developers to use, they may use it - if there are some users to sell to (or, it's orthogonal to the released product). This is partially why Electon has spread so far I think - developers like working on Macs (because it's basically "linux with a nice gui" for all practical purposes) meaning that if Microsoft wants developers to use VSCode - and not get used to non-Microsoft products - they need to get to where the developers are. But in those case the devs are the users. A beautiful SDK won't save you, I've heard stores about how good the BeOS API was, or how wonderful development for various other failed devices/technologies was. But if you're trying to keep a dying platform alive, you need to reduce friction, and making a good SDK is a way. And Macs were dying for many years ...

notreallyserio 5y ago
I'm convinced that the UI and more importantly the touchpad is what really drives continued interest in MBPs as developer laptops. If another vendor makes a solid touchpad Apple might suffer a bit. I've yet to find one that comes close.
- _0w8t 5y ago
  A touchpad on the latest ThinkPad X1 from Lenovo is much improved. While it still does not match Apple, a better keyboard more then offsets it. What is puzzling is the screen. Lenovo does not have high DPI mate screens and their non-mate screens are way more reflective compared to Apple offerings. Why cannot they order screens from the same vendor as Apple?
  - akvadrako 5y ago
    Matte screens are just a coating -- you can get the same effect buying an after market film.
    - _0w8t 5y ago
      It is not the same. I have used one 5 years ago on Dell XPS 13. It still reflected more then on ThinkPad X1. And the whole experience was worse then on MacBook Pro.

senko 5y ago

As @Apocryphon comments in a subthread, there's a commodification of app developers. With iOS, Apple has crossed the threshold of who needs who. Now app developers need Apple way more than Apple needs them. In many cases, one app to do thing X is mostly as good as another app for the same X. There's no bargaining power to be had unless you're a huge name. As a developer, you're not leaving the App Store unless you're leaving mobile app development entirely. It'd be commercial suicide (for most) to do that.

BackBlast 5y ago
This remains true for the moment. But discontent among developers are cracks in the foundation. The building can weather that for a time because it's mighty and huge. But those cracks are the beginning of the eventual end. If not cared for, will hasten its demise.
- senko 5y ago
  Maybe. The level of control both Google and Apple have in their mobile OS' (only Safari engine being allowed on iOS is an example) makes it much harder for something else entirely to grow outside their ecosystem and them slam them from the left flank, like the web did to MS' dominance. I'm not entering into the debate whether such technical restrictions are have good (and benign) reasons, but they absolutely keep the control much tighter than it used to be the case on the desktop in Windows heyday.
TameAntelope 5y ago
Nah, you can build a PWA that more or less acts entirely like a mobile app and get out of the app store game entirely.
- jmull 5y ago
  It will be interesting to see if that happens or not.
- senko 5y ago
  Not as a counter-argument, but I would be curious to find out if there are any big commercial successes that targeted mobile niche but were implemented as a web app. I can't think of any.

jll29 5y ago

+1 for expressing the need for a “50% of the size of the MacBook Air“ machine. Oh, and with e-paper display, please.

stephc_int13 5y ago

This post was perfectly on point. I think it can be argued that Apple has never been developer friendly, but these days it is painfully difficult to ignore. And I think this is a huge mistake, I would not be surprised if Microsoft end-up eating their lunch again.

ethbr0 5y ago
Microsoft bought an entire phone company and still failed in the mobile device market. It's hard to identify a future key differentiator that's going to be strong enough to overcome the iOS (status) and Android (widely deployable) ecosystems.
- stephc_int13 5y ago
  Well, all big companies have their peak and then fail. It can be difficult to imagine but even IBM and Coca Cola are going do disappear into oblivion at some point. Apple is not dead from a financial standpoint. But I'd go as far as to call it an incredibly healthy zombie.
setgree 5y ago
An Apple share was worth a little under $7 when PG wrote this. Today, it hovers around $170, and Apple is the largest corporation in history (which also makes it, in some sense, the largest non-governmental institution in history). What do we think its value would be today if it had been more developer-friendly in the ensuing 12.25 years -- higher, lower, the same? I truly don't know. But either way, a "huge mistake," from Apple's POV, is something that appreciably affects the bottom line. And Apple's insane valuation is face value evidence that anything about its corporate strategy that we view as a huge mistake is probably not. Perhaps there's a case that what Apple has done is a huge ethical mistake, but we'd have to make the case for that very differently.
- Kye 5y ago
  I'm sure many companies felt the same way at their peak. Microsoft certainly lived in its hubris before web and mobile forced it to bet the company on making an AWS for its existing contracts who hadn't yet moved everything to clouds.

blehn 5y ago

Developers have pretty much solved the launch-fast-and-iterate problem with server-side updates — they don't need to submit a new build to Apple for every update. I'd argue that Apple's app store policies have mostly resulted in higher quality, more secure apps than we would have otherwise (and Android apps are evidence of that), which resulted in more trust and faster adoption from users.

madmax96 5y ago
I think the real key is that Apple has recognized that App Store delays are a problem and has taken steps to quantifiably improve the situation. See https://appreviewtimes.com/ https://appreviewtimes.com/. Anecdotally, the first version of one of my Apps was approved in < 8 hours. On another, more gray area app, it took ~1.5 weeks. Gone are the days of 4 week update delays. I’ve found that Apple’s release process has identified useful problems in my apps too.

kmeisthax 5y ago

Well, as much as the business model is untenable, it lasted 13 years and counting. [0] The things that have changed aren't strictly upgrades or downgrades. Apple's approval process is much quicker than it was in 2009, but instead of sitting on a bug fix for four weeks, now they reject you with no explanation while 20 other apps doing the same thing Apple is angry about make millions on the store. >They get away with maltreating developers, in the short term, because they make such great hardware. I just bought a new 27" iMac a couple days ago. It's fabulous. The screen's too shiny, and the disk is surprisingly loud, but it's so beautiful that you can't make yourself care. I feel the exact same way with the 13" iPad Pro I bought last year. Amazing hardware, but it feels like computing in a straitjacket. Even jailbreaking it only goes so far to fix the underlying problem, which is that playing by Apple's rules is a genuine roadblock to a lot of pro app developers who are accustomed to selling direct-to-consumer. However, I don't think Apple actually cares. The iPad Pro exists for exactly one kind of customer, and one kind of customer only: professional artists. As far as they're concerned, people who want proper developer tools, the full Adobe or Autodesk suites, or what have you can just give up the touchscreen and cellular modem and buy a Mac. >With Apple that seems less the case. When you look at the famous 1984 ad now, it's easier to imagine Apple as the dictator on the screen than the woman with the hammer. ...Did Paul Graham consult with Tim Sweeney on #FreeFortnite? [0] Also, the submission title should probably have a (2009) in it...

tharne 5y ago
> Amazing hardware, but it feels like computing in a straitjacket. That's precisely what drove me away from apple laptops a few years back and back to linux for my home computing. I was running an (only somewhat) older machine and every update ate more hard drive space and hurt performance. And because apple made it, it was damn near impossible to upgrade either the hard drive or the memory. But, it is beautiful hardware...
chaostheory 5y ago
What pg couldn’t predict is that there are still no good alternatives to the Apple ecosystem. For normal people, there’s still only two viable alternatives: MS and Google. Both have their pros and cont, but neither is significantly better than Apple. Maybe with the coming XR paradigm shift, things will change?

jmull 5y ago

Focusing on iPhone users and and not iPhone developers probably was/is the right thing to do. iOS isn't a developer's platform and if it were, developers probably wouldn't be interested in it very much, since what developers want more than any API, tool or system is users. Not that they couldn't focus on users better, or couldn't support developers better w/o impacting users negatively. They could and should, IMO. Apple has pretty much fixed the issue this post is concerned with (very slow app review process)... but it took several years -- checking the internet, it looks like ~2016 was the general turning point, so around 7 years after this post. It shows just how little the developer experience matters to developers if you have users.

_0w8t 5y ago
This is even true on desktop with Apple deprecating and removing features with new OS releases. The assumption is that developers will take care about it. But for users of niche apps that are no longer supported by developers this is rather problematic and requires to stay at older MacOS versions.
- wil421 5y ago
  Didn’t Apple used to let you run a VM of your laptop? I swear I used to run a VM of a 2011 laptop to use niche software.
  - _0w8t 5y ago
    One cannot run 32-bit Intel binary on Apple silicon even via VM. I suppose VM vendors may eventually support that via emulation, but it will take a while.
    - wil421 5y ago
      Yes you can. Here’s a link for Snow Leopard on an M1. I use parallels to run windows 7 on an M1. https://youtu.be/a6FdLON1Nlk https://youtu.be/a6FdLON1Nlk
    - CharlesW 5y ago

tharne 5y ago

> An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. Yup. That's more or less what's happening or Oracle right now. They'll profitability soldier on for a while due to the massive amount of legacy servers running Oracle databases at companies all over the world. But, every $BIG_CORP out there has on their roadmap a long-term plan to either drastically reduce their spend on Oracle products, or more often, eliminate it entirely.

beachy 5y ago
> But, every $BIG_CORP out there has on their roadmap a long-term plan to either drastically reduce their spend on Oracle products, or more often, eliminate it entirely. Hyperbole much? I guarantee there are plenty of companies doing giant transaction rates happily and stably on their big Oracle. And plenty of ERP customers who are resigned to staying on their Oracle platform for the foreseeable future, even if only because the competitors are just as greedy shark as Oracle.
- tharne 5y ago
  It really isn't hyperbole. Ask 10 random CTO's about Oracle, and the majority will tell you they're looking for offramps. It's not just a matter of Oracle being greedy, it's that they are also bullying and difficult to work with. And their licensing rules are one of the circles of hell.
  - rconti 5y ago
    And that has been true for 15 years.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      The alternatives have been getting better and better. With free software, you can just use an older version if it's better; with Oracle, the latest version is what gets supported, so it can get worse.
  - 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago

Developers really don't have a lot of leverage in anything we do, as much as we like to think so. Many of us work in such a way that we get summoned every morning at 9 to line up and answer "what did you do yesterday that justified 10% of your paycheck and what will you do today that justifies 10% of your paycheck? Turnover among executives is considered a crisis. Turnover among developers amounts to whining about our disloyalty and companies screaming at the government to increase immigration. We are a commodity. A valuable one and hard to obtain one to be sure, but that is it. Apple understood that and won and developers primarily build for Apple now.

d--b 5y ago

> They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. Yep, fast forward to now and it seems that they got it right. Nobody left. Not the users, not the developers. It turns out we really are like musicians

JKCalhoun 5y ago
I've been a developer long enough to have seen the whole industry change, multiple times — Apple may have played a part more recently but there have been other forces at work as well for a long time. Shareware rose, fell, rose again, fell again. Somewhere in the lulls there a developer could publish their software either through small ma-and-pa publishers (I have experience with Casey & Greene, Inc. if anyone in the Mac community remember them) or through AppStore/Steam, etc. At one time publishing meant boxes, floppies, ads in magazines, 15% royalties. A designer at that time, as an example, could sell a font for good money. Fonts though became commodities, the big players (Adobe) moved in and one thread of an era came to a close. CD's replaced floppies and this too had an impact on the industry as well. AOL and the masses coming on-line obviously had a huge impact (and shareware rose again then — ID Software). Again the big players moved in: LucasArts, etc. Quality games were expected to have cut scenes. Everquest and the world-building games that followed required teams of artists such that the indie developer once again was in descension. The iPhone made waves. The AppStore though quickly became a race to the bottom (in price) as a new generation of users came to expect software to be free (like their Facebook and SnapChat). So I don't know, I don't put a lot of blame on Apple in this regard. The industry has been a very dynamic one. One thing I have come to expect about the software development ride though is to never expect it to be the same ten years out.
- d--b 5y ago
  Right I didn’t think about before the internet, but yeah at that time developers were even more subject to distributor’s approval (and cut)!
treis 5y ago
Because the other half of the duopoly treats you more or less the same.

gojomo 5y ago

I'm personally sympathetic to Graham's points in this 2009 piece. He was prescient about the "bummer" it is to be stuck in a monopolist's monoculture. But Apple's growth in market value since – from $175B at the end of November 2009, to $2.73T today – at least raises the possibility that Apple wasn't making a "mistake", from the perspective of Apple shareholders, managers, & employees. Maybe once you've reached a certain powerful 'commanding heights' via other strategy & technology, the optimal enterprise strategy is truly to bully developers, & take their lunch money for yourself. Still a drag on human progress & welfare, sure.

draw_down 5y ago
mattbrewsbytes 5y ago
If we’re going to talk about “drag on human progress and welfare”, there are much bigger fish to fry in the Tech world than a 30% surcharge by an App Store. You could start with any social media company and in my opinion, they surpass anything Apple has done as far as a “drag on human progress & welfare”.
- gojomo 5y ago
  Whataboutism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism) is pretty boring unless we were specifically trying to create a ranked list of the worst things. Also, without an explanation of why "in your opinion" "any social media company" is worse, you're just declaring a personal bias - and vaguely, too. (Is social media company Snapchat more destructive than Apple's App Store policies?) If you have some larger grudge against some specific social media companies, why not write it up, with reasoning & naming names, in an appropriate place? Why only allude to it, to make Apple's destructiveness seem smaller?
  - mattbrewsbytes 5y ago
    The parent commenter brought up “drag on human progress and welfare” and keeping the topic to Tech companies I was pointing out there are far worse. There are studies that show social media causing mental health issues and issues with spreading misinformation, many have shown up here on HN. I was stating my opinion which should be obvious, but maybe it’s not, every comment where you type into a comment text box is an opinion. I don’t have a grudge, just think the contributions to humanity by social media companies are far less than the problems they cause. The hypocrisy on HN is funny sometimes, many times articles/comments about startups are about monetizing and charging customers more, raising capital, etc. and then for large companies they charge too much and it’s a “drag on human progress and welfare”?

JKCalhoun 5y ago

> Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil. Not me (caveat: I worked at Apple). Clumsy is the word that comes to mind with regard to their handling of the AppStore. I see little or no evil intent > Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software. That's a bold statement. I'll be more nuanced. My impression is that Steve Jobs treated 3rd party software on "his devices" as a necessary inconvenience. He preferred the software he had a hand in, the software developed in house. To me that is enough to explain Apple's approach to the AppStore.

mandeepj 5y ago
> Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software. then in the same breathe, please tell me who understands it.
- burnished 5y ago
  That is a direct quote from the article, mandeep, you're gonna have to hassle Paul Graham directly to get a proper answer.
  - mandeepj 5y ago
    I was pointing to PG himself with my comment, and not the poster.
    - burnished 5y ago
      Pardon if I misunderstood, but it looks like you replied to a specific person. I believe the etiquette for arguing with the author is to issue a top level response.
      - mandeepj 5y ago
        I will keep that in mind, going forward. Thank you
5y ago

dang 5y ago

Related: Apple's Mistake (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7344783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7344783 - March 2014 (56 comments) Apple's Mistake (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6329991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6329991 - Sept 2013 (8 comments) Apple's Mistake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1081514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1081514 - Jan 2010 (25 comments) Apple's Mistake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950751 - Nov 2009 (269 comments)

pier25 5y ago

When this was written I was an Apple fanboy. These days, as a dev, I really don't trust Apple at all. I would never even think of making a product for any of the Apple platforms. As a freelancer I've stopped taking any iOS/macOS projects too. It's not the 30% but Apple's attitude of controlling their turf like the mafia under pretended moral superiority. As a user I'm as cynical as I've ever been. I use macOS and Windows on a daily basis, and for dev work I generally prefer macOS over Windows. But I'm always running at least a major macOS version behind and never buy any 1st gen Apple product. I simply expect their stuff to fail in one way or another. I've been bitten way too many times to trust them. Nvidiagate, Radeongate, Yosemite, iPad 3, iPhone 4, etc, the list is very long. Just weeks ago, my wife's Macbook Air (a 4 year old machine) started having issues with the keyboard and trackpad disconnecting. Apple's authorized repair services* say they want to replace almost all the parts (pretty much excluding the screen) and the repair cost is almost as much as buying a new Air. * Apple Mexico doesn't really do repairs here like in the US so you're forced to go through one of those services. Or right now, the Apple TV has been suffering issues with Atmos for the past couple of months. There's a thread in Apple's forums with 14 pages of users complaining which keeps growing even though posts are deleted by the mods constantly. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253168177 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253168177

wil421 5y ago
Apple in the US kinda stopped doing repairs. They used to replace screens but now they just give you a new iPhone or iPad.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I assume at some point, technology becomes so integrated and tiny that it no longer makes sense to do repairs.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    By which you mean it makes them more money to sell you a new thing than to make repairs possible. I had a Mac 512K, and later a Mac SE/30, where I ran A/UX. I would never, ever buy any Apple product, today, under any circumstance.

terracatta 5y ago

I think it's easy to read this post, then look at Apple's market cap and conclude that Paul got this one wrong. I don't think he did. As an entrepreneur, when I held the iPhone 4s in my hand ~10 years ago, I saw only possibilities. In 2022 when I hold my iPhone 13 in my hand, I see a known quantity with all the use-cases permanently ossified. I don't dare to dream about what is possible. Only Apple can truly move this platform forward. I'll be a passive observer. This is not how I feel about the Mac, and I think Paul's post accounts for the difference. I really feel if I have a great idea and execute I can meaningfully impact the trajectory of the platform. There is no doubt the iPhone and the iPad will continue to be commercially successful products. But now, 14 years after the launch of the App Store, that feels like such a poor measurement of their net-new impact on society. The magic is gone.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
We’re just getting old. I used to think the same thing. Then I watched a designer effectively scan my home into a 3D model with her phone and return it from her assistant’s iPad with proposed changes reflected within thirty minutes. That wouldn’t have been possible only a few years ago. That’s a pretty vain example, but there are a lot of opportunities opened by having a sensor that can create 3D models of nearby surfaces in everyone’s pocket. And that’s just one sensor Apple has added to their phones over the years.
- etchalon 5y ago
  Completely agree. The difference between then and now is that EVERY use case was changing. As smart phones have "mastered" to the common ones, the real change is happening at the edges and it's crazy what other industries are doing with the platforms.
- vincentmarle 5y ago
  > Then I watched a designer effectively scan my home into a 3D model with her phone and return it from her assistant’s iPad with proposed changes reflected within thirty minutes. Curious to know which app she used for that?

renewiltord 5y ago

Interesting. Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory is more predictive of Apple’s domination of mobile applications than this. Perhaps this is just porn for developers because it makes us feel powerful. The truth, though, is that the developers go where the demand goes.

mdoms 5y ago

You all still buy their goofy aluminium laptops and publish on their store so I guess Apple wins.

mlang23 5y ago

pornel 5y ago

The part about lost goodwill sounds very true. I used to love Cocoa, and did my best to write quality apps for it, despite Mac's small market share. But App Store ham-fisted rules made me distrust and resent Apple. I've stopped using Apple-only languages and frameworks as much as I could, and as a user I'm looking to leave the platform entirely (which unfortunately after a over a decade of using, I'm locked into and resent that too).

sebastien_b 5y ago

Favorite passage: How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?

luckyorlame 5y ago

Yawn

mileskaos 5y ago

This article doesn't hold up so well since Apple has a market cap > $1T. Please tell us how they're gonna fail now, Paul. This is like Ted Dziuba trying to convince the world in '09 that NOSQL was useless and would die soon. Pure genius

sebastien_b 5y ago
It reflects that Apple is a de facto monopoly on app distribution for phone apps.

Koraza 5y ago

thenthenthen 5y ago

I dunno, getting you app approved on the (jailbreak) cydia store, via like big boss back in the days was equally hard as the official appstore. This both frustrated and satisfied me; actual people reviewing the work and giving cryptic feedback haha. Is/was(?) the bigboss process inherited from the apple appstore?

josephwegner 5y ago

Sidebar: am I seeing this wrong, or is PG's website really showing a bad SSL cert? Looks like it is serving some cert for Yahoo domains? It also isn't auto-upgrading to HTTPS, which is a smaller issue, but just kind of surprising for someone with PG's tech stature.

musesum 5y ago

> Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil. Well, not until 2016 when Apple began to offer ads in the AppStore -- as though that was a good thing for indy developers. And a couple years later, when Spotify keeps getting pushed down the list: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/09/technology/apple-app-store-competition.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/09/technology/ap... This is why we're going to develop for Spotify's API first.

organicpotato 5y ago

As other commenters have already mentioned, it doesn’t really matter how “broken” the App Store is as long as Apple owns the user relationship. Developers follow the user base, which is dependent on Apple’s hardware and overall ecosystem. Although Paul provides a few ad-hoc conversations with frustrated developers, it doesn’t seem like any of the issues mentioned impact the supply of developers for both Apple and its App Store in a meaningful way. Paul suggests that Apple is “evil”, as if the company is immoral and intentionally aiming to harm a group of people (in this case, the App Store developers). I don’t see any “evil” intent here, and think that Apple intended to develop a feedback loop to incentivize App Store developers to improve quality control. It’d be difficult to obtain, but what would be interesting to see is a graph of the following data points: - The frequency of moderate to high-severity client-side bugs released for the same app to Google's Play Store and Apple's App Store. - If there were ever times where Apple has tightened or loosened their approval process, the before and after on the frequency of client-side issues. Although app developers have no control over the app approval process, one way to mitigate turnaround time risks in fixing issues is implementing as much logic as possible server-side (of course, there are definitely times where this isn’t feasible).

Lamad123 5y ago

It's gotten much worse, but why should the corp care? Shareholders are happy and the sheeple are mostly happy!!

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Sorry. I should have known better than to try to participate in this thread. My apologies. Carry on.

smithza 5y ago
So China develops an Olympics app for the athletes and tells them they have to have it on their iPhones, yet with only cursory reviews third-party security analysts found it has malware baked inside. This is a high-profile app, something that some high-up in the review process probably was assigned, and they gave it the OK? Can you help me understand the "rules" that you have come to cozy yourself into?
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Can you help me to understand why the nasty? I wasn't telling anyone else what to do; simply relating my own experience. Ah...the heck with it. I should have known better than to stick my oar in here. I'm nuking the comment.
  - smithza 5y ago
    Fair critique, I don't mean anything personal. I was just so peeved about Apple's friendliness to China's communism that I haven't cooled down yet. I am far outside the field of discussion and am only looking in. My question actual question is earnest: I don't understand the "rules" that Apple decides to follow in the context of China.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      I strongly suspect that they have caved, and are actively cooperating with the Chinese authorities. It's a really big market, and they luvs their munny. I have no intentions of developing apps for distribution in China. I'm not happy, too. I deleted a paragraph in this response about a conversation I had -just this morning- with a friend that owns a fairly substantial company, that does a lot of its manufacturing in China. I won't go into it, but China has their own "rules," and they have the muscle to enforce them.

mikenew 5y ago

So I built a very basic prototype app to explore an idea I had using Flutter (imagine something like a time boxing system where you track how frequently you get distracted). Spent a couple days roughing it out, and then I was able to load it onto my own Android device to start testing. Literally just plugged in my device to my PC, confirm the prompt on the phone, and then `flutter run -d <device_id>`. I also wanted to send it to my brother (who has an iPhone) so he could start playing with it too. So I had to pay Apple $100 to open a developer account. Then sign a bunch of contracts. Then register an app ID and generate certificates. Then bundle the app and submit it to appstoreconnect. Then wait for a bunch of automated checks to pass and tell me that the app ID is missing entitlements. Then figure out what that even means, attempt to fix the entitlements, and run through the submission again. Then set up testing groups and invite my brother to test the app. Then I have to "submit" the app for approval for testing. And a couple days later finally get approval from Apple so that I can start testing it. And that's the short version; there were a bunch of nonsensical Xcode quirks to deal with. For context, I've been an iOS developer for a decade, and it still took me the better part of a weekend to get through it all, even though I know exactly what to expect. And this is so one fucking person can try an app for me. I hate Apple. I don't know how else to put it. I don't think they're evil, I just think they don't give a shit about their developers. Did you know their bug tracker is private? I'll find some weird behavior with, let's say UITableView or something, and spend all day trying to figure out what subtle thing I'm doing wrong using their comically poor documentation. And then somewhere buried in Stack Overflow I'll find someone saying "oh yeah that's a bug in the framework, I submitted a radar 2 years ago". So there's some bug that they know about, and I'm not even allowed to see that. It feels hostile on their part, and it makes me feel hostile on my part. I think Paul Graham was right.

collaborative 5y ago
Just wait until you have to manually type "what's new" in each release in each different language your app supports that perhaps adds an invisible fix the user couldn't care less to know about. Oh, and appstoreconnect is designed to prevent you from automating this. This huge time waster is what really makes my blood boil when I think of Apple

daviddever23box 5y ago

File along with Michael Dell's "shareholder value" remark.

alberth 5y ago

Given that pg is a VC, it's interesting to take these comments into consideration given that in 2009 - Apple's market cap was ~$100B and today it's ~$3,000B ($3T). Getting a 30x return for a company at scale is a phenomenal outcome for any VC. Seems like Apple did something right. https://companiesmarketcap.com/apple/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/apple/marketcap/

ncmncm 5y ago
As did Oracle? Microsoft? Lock-in has always been a profitable strategy.
- alberth 5y ago
  Umm, no. - Oracle only 2x market cap [0] (from ~$100B to ~$200B) - Microsoft only 10x market cap [1] (from ~$200B to ~$2,000B) Apple with its 30x increase is an order of magnitude more than Oracle and 3x more than Microsoft. [0] https://companiesmarketcap.com/oracle/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/oracle/marketcap/ [1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/microsoft/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/microsoft/marketcap/
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    I e., Lock-in to walled gardens is obscenely profitable. Just exactly how obscenely varies.

mocmoc 5y ago

Another genius

singularity2001 5y ago

>>> Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would. Other than the despotic caprice that one occasionally encounters, this is indeed the biggest reason why I hate Apple's App Store so much.

kotrunga 5y ago
I'm a developer, but just to play devil's advocate... think about the end user. Having a review process (though, Apple can improve theirs, see below) helps protect the end user. Programmers, companies, etc. can't just repeatedly push updates non-stop, starting with half-baked apps, iterating too quickly. How do you have a check process that ensures an app is up to standard and "safe"? In addition, the time cost to release adds value to a release, hopefully helping it be more thought out, bringing more value to the user. Again though... I think the point is that Apple could have a better review process that A) values the developer more and B) shouldn't take as long. I agree with that.

nova22033 5y ago

Apple app store revenue from 2017-2020.. https://www.statista.com/statistics/296226/annual-apple-app-store-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/296226/annual-apple-app-... woody_harrelson_drying_his_tears_with_money.jpg

karmakaze 5y ago

Reading the comments here look like the beginning of a tipping point.

collaborative 5y ago

Apple gets lots of hate but one thing that's rarely mentioned is how the Play Store prevents you from monetizing a successful app. They do this by making it impossible to turn a free app into a paid app A normal app goes through these stages: 1- Free. If it's good, it will receive good reviews, which will make it more popular 2- Paid The first stage is an investment on the part of the developer. He invests his time and effort. But many developers only find out that it's impossible to move to (2) once it's too late (reviews can't be ported to new apps)

whakim 5y ago

I get it, in 2009 smartphones weren't devices that everyone owned. But I still find the myopic obsession with "techie" approval as a harbinger of success pretty narrow-minded. People didn't like the iPhone in 2009 because programmers liked it; people liked it because it felt like (and was) a revolutionary product! > They're so attracted to the iPhone that they can't leave. But they're looking for a way out. I know hindsight is 20/20 and all, but there's a much broader point that could have been made here about "what happens in a world in which entire software distribution chains are at the mercy of one or two megacorps?" Now that would have been a remarkably prescient gripe, and a much more accurate guess at the "mistake" Apple was making (if you can call the current backlash a "mistake"?)