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Very nice if they did this as a supportive gesture. Apollo is great, and the kind of thing Apple needs to encourage on the app store. Unfortunately, Apple has

by wilg 3y ago

Very nice if they did this as a supportive gesture. Apollo is great, and the kind of thing Apple needs to encourage on the app store. Unfortunately, Apple has a huge problem where the only developers that really "get" making great iOS apps are independent people or small teams. Every other major app is some kind of weird amalgamation of half-busted UX concepts from various platforms, probably because there's no good way to offer a service with a mobile app without having to design and engineer for the least-common-denominator. I'll also add that Apple's own iOS apps are often much worse than the third-party competitors in the space in terms of design and functionality, and update on a glacial yearly cycle, but have deeper platform integration than most developers can muster.

Rebelgecko 3y ago
>Very nice if they did this as a supportive gesture The whole reddit API kerfuffle happened like 4 days ago. I think the presentations were recorded well before then- FWIW Kojima was in Cupertino 2 weeks ago
- whazor 3y ago
  Switch the app icon in post?
  - dhritzkiv 3y ago
    The app was called out by name during a on-device demo. It would require ADR, and reshooting the actual device. Unreasonable for something that can be left in.
derefr 3y ago
> probably because there's no good way to offer a service with a mobile app without having to design and engineer for the least-common-denominator. Isn't the "good way", just to not treat "mobile" as a monolith, and instead have a separate team, with separate competencies, develop a separate app for each platform, such that each app can take advantage of all the strengths of each platform? Back in the early console-game times, if you had made an arcade game, you'd have one company, who knew Nintendo programming really well, do your Nintendo port; and another company, who knew DOS PC programming really well, do your DOS PC port; and so forth. Why did we stop doing that? Companies had enough money to do it back then. And the same companies are 100x richer now. They can totally afford a development team per platform, targeting that platform natively.
- aikinai 3y ago
  Because more frameworks and abstraction make it feasible to not do that. I absolutely agree with you and wish companies cared enough about the quality of their experiences, but it’s not economically required so most companies naturally won’t do it.
  - bloppe 3y ago
    The underlying problem is that it's difficult to make high-quality cross-platform apps. A symptom of this problem is that companies create low-quality cross-platform apps instead of high-quality platform-tailored apps, because it's cheaper. I don't think we should treat the symptom by spending more money on platform-tailored apps. We should treat the disease by making platforms more interoperable.
    - derefr 3y ago
      The underlying "problem", then, is capitalism — and what you're highlighting as the "problem" is rather the benefit of it. Companies seek to differentiate themselves in the market by offering features that their competitors don't have; and companies that offer platforms seek to win mind-share for developing on their platform, by building out hardware features that their competitors don't have. That's where technological innovation comes from.
- dathinab 3y ago
  > Why did we stop doing that? cost and hard to measure returns (i.e. the cost of not doing so doesn't clearly show up anywhere) building two apps can easily be twice the frontend dev (and worse maintenance) cost and a higher backend dev cost too (but not twice). Theoretically with the right abstraction and flexibility wrt. to how UI components get data you can have less the twice the cost. But getting that right is hard and needs somone who knows what they are doing forcing that decision and having the time/will to setup the skeletons rightly and educate how to keep things "the right way" to not fall out this sync pattern etc. Practically this tends to not be viable in bigger orgs (they don't want to take the risk of the expert getting it wrong) and bigger teams (they tend to have very mixed skill levels and things will get bad at some point leading to increasing dev cost approaching 2x if not some costly refactoring is done in time). That a lot of teaching in the App dev scene seems to be more like "here how you do it the Apple way it's the only right way", "here how you do it the Android way it's the only right way" instead of "here are the concepts, this is how they apply with Android, this is how they apply with Apple etc." probably doesn't help either. I know it's a stereo type but I have just meet way to many app devs which do not understand the underlying concepts of both the framework they use and the language and don't realize it. (I also have meet the opposite, so maybe saying there are a lot of bad devs out there is more appropriate.). EDIT: I nearly forgot: That you have to use not just different frameworks but different languages per platform to do it "fully right" succs bad, like really bad.
bloppe 3y ago
If they did it as a supportive gesture, the irony would not be lost on me. Apple notoriously despises 3rd party clients. They don't even have a web client for iMessage.
dathinab 3y ago
Idk. about the Apple eco system but this always had been strange for me. But on Android there are very clear easy to understand and explained rules about how to do material design, but somehow basically no app (including most ones from google) get it right. My guess for the Android ecosystem is (at least theoretical) unnecessary programmatic complexity when implementing the "how", but then I'm not an App developer so idk.

by wilg 3y ago

Rebelgecko 3y ago

>Very nice if they did this as a supportive gesture The whole reddit API kerfuffle happened like 4 days ago. I think the presentations were recorded well before then- FWIW Kojima was in Cupertino 2 weeks ago

whazor 3y ago
Switch the app icon in post?
- dhritzkiv 3y ago
  The app was called out by name during a on-device demo. It would require ADR, and reshooting the actual device. Unreasonable for something that can be left in.

derefr 3y ago

> probably because there's no good way to offer a service with a mobile app without having to design and engineer for the least-common-denominator. Isn't the "good way", just to not treat "mobile" as a monolith, and instead have a separate team, with separate competencies, develop a separate app for each platform, such that each app can take advantage of all the strengths of each platform? Back in the early console-game times, if you had made an arcade game, you'd have one company, who knew Nintendo programming really well, do your Nintendo port; and another company, who knew DOS PC programming really well, do your DOS PC port; and so forth. Why did we stop doing that? Companies had enough money to do it back then. And the same companies are 100x richer now. They can totally afford a development team per platform, targeting that platform natively.

aikinai 3y ago
Because more frameworks and abstraction make it feasible to not do that. I absolutely agree with you and wish companies cared enough about the quality of their experiences, but it’s not economically required so most companies naturally won’t do it.
- bloppe 3y ago
  The underlying problem is that it's difficult to make high-quality cross-platform apps. A symptom of this problem is that companies create low-quality cross-platform apps instead of high-quality platform-tailored apps, because it's cheaper. I don't think we should treat the symptom by spending more money on platform-tailored apps. We should treat the disease by making platforms more interoperable.
  - derefr 3y ago
    The underlying "problem", then, is capitalism — and what you're highlighting as the "problem" is rather the benefit of it. Companies seek to differentiate themselves in the market by offering features that their competitors don't have; and companies that offer platforms seek to win mind-share for developing on their platform, by building out hardware features that their competitors don't have. That's where technological innovation comes from.
dathinab 3y ago
> Why did we stop doing that? cost and hard to measure returns (i.e. the cost of not doing so doesn't clearly show up anywhere) building two apps can easily be twice the frontend dev (and worse maintenance) cost and a higher backend dev cost too (but not twice). Theoretically with the right abstraction and flexibility wrt. to how UI components get data you can have less the twice the cost. But getting that right is hard and needs somone who knows what they are doing forcing that decision and having the time/will to setup the skeletons rightly and educate how to keep things "the right way" to not fall out this sync pattern etc. Practically this tends to not be viable in bigger orgs (they don't want to take the risk of the expert getting it wrong) and bigger teams (they tend to have very mixed skill levels and things will get bad at some point leading to increasing dev cost approaching 2x if not some costly refactoring is done in time). That a lot of teaching in the App dev scene seems to be more like "here how you do it the Apple way it's the only right way", "here how you do it the Android way it's the only right way" instead of "here are the concepts, this is how they apply with Android, this is how they apply with Apple etc." probably doesn't help either. I know it's a stereo type but I have just meet way to many app devs which do not understand the underlying concepts of both the framework they use and the language and don't realize it. (I also have meet the opposite, so maybe saying there are a lot of bad devs out there is more appropriate.). EDIT: I nearly forgot: That you have to use not just different frameworks but different languages per platform to do it "fully right" succs bad, like really bad.

bloppe 3y ago

If they did it as a supportive gesture, the irony would not be lost on me. Apple notoriously despises 3rd party clients. They don't even have a web client for iMessage.

dathinab 3y ago

Idk. about the Apple eco system but this always had been strange for me. But on Android there are very clear easy to understand and explained rules about how to do material design, but somehow basically no app (including most ones from google) get it right. My guess for the Android ecosystem is (at least theoretical) unnecessary programmatic complexity when implementing the "how", but then I'm not an App developer so idk.