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This really is quite true. iOS development is moving at breakneck pace and the API quality is starting to show. Most people outside of mobile dev don't know th

This really is quite true. iOS development is moving at breakneck pace and the API quality is starting to show. Most people outside of mobile dev don't know this, but when iCloud shipped in iOS5 the API support was woefully not ready - heck, even Apple's own 1st-party apps that exploit iCloud had notorious syncing issues. To this day iCloud + Core Data support is buggy, poor, and more or less undocumented (the go-to guide for using it is a thread on the forums dozens of pages long full of angry devs and overwhelmed Apple engineers). There are a number of rather egregious bugs still in the API today that date from iOS3, including one date parsing one that any iOS dev worth their salt has run into first-hand - every time a new release happens people circle back and are continually disappointed that major, easy to hit API bugs are left unattended for so long. It really does seem like Apple is having trouble keeping up. I remember when the iOS4 beta came out for developers - it was an incredibly solid beta, and the OS was stable and highly functional months before it was due. Compare with iOS5 and iOS6, the betas of which have both been notoriously buggy, crashy, and downright unusable right up until release. Devs have had to struggle with horrible stability and broken APIs in all beta builds right up until the day the GM drops. It could be worse. Definitely not the worst API I've ever touched. But still, troubling.

sumukh1 14y ago
As the post mentioned, game developers aren't really interested in the platform. As a result, they file less Radar reports and Gamekit continues to be buggy. I'd really like to see Apple up the ease-of-use of Radar (or something new). It's becoming a trend that iOS devs are forced to struggle with the ecosystem, but like I've been saying, from my experience the revenues are strongly tilted in favor of iOS. While we complain about certain aspects of iOS, on a whole, (at least from anecdotal evidence) it's still better than the problems that other platforms face.
- cageface 14y ago
  That may be true today but in a business that moves this fast you have skate ahead of the puck. And the quality of the engineering I'm seeing on Google's side in the last few releases of Android impresses me a lot more than anything I've seen come from Apple since iOS4. My hunch is the sheer volume of Android sales and Google's engineering edge is going to turn the tide but external factors could trump all.
  - newhouseb 14y ago
    What engineering are you impressed with on Google's side? I'd love to see examples of things to help me erase my painful memories of developing on Android around 1.5/1.6/2.1.
    - cageface 14y ago
      Fragments and the ActionBar. The new holo styles and interface conventions. The flexibility of layouts and the way that activities work. There are some rough edges, to be sure, but it all seems a lot more forward looking than Apple's miniaturization of Cocoa.
      - cageface 14y ago
        Also the new interactive notifications in Jelly Bean are an idea that's long overdue. I think the ability of Android apps to integrate more deeply with the OS is really starting to pay off.
      - rimantas 14y ago
        > The flexibility of layouts And yet somehow iOS6 Auto Layouts and Collection Views do not count? Interesting. I also expect Pass Kit to take off.
        cageface 14y ago
        These both feel like hacks and since Apple can't ever be bothered to backport anything I can't use them until my clients are willing to commit to iOS 6-only releases. Thanks to the maps fiasco I don't see that happening until some time next year.
      - stevenwei 14y ago
        I agree that the flexible layout approach is pretty nice (and obviously we're seeing Apple move towards this direction with autolayout), but I'm not a big fan of the fragment API. They sounded better in theory than they've worked out in practice, IMO. The inability to nest fragments in other fragments makes doing certain things like fragment based tabs or viewpagers rather awkward. And since the fragment lifecycle almost but doesn't quite match up with the activity lifecycle, some extra careful bookkeeping is required to make sure state is transferred properly upon rotation since the entire thing gets destroyed and recreated. Anyway, the biggest problem for me on Android is that although the new APIs in 3.0 and 4.0 are pretty sweet, I can't use most of them due to having to maintain compatibility back to 2.2 (Froyo). ActionBarSherlock and the compatibility library help a bit, but it's not quite the same.
- smackfu 14y ago
  It's very scary to rely on something like GameKit that is unproven because all your bugs are showstoppers, and you need to wait on Apple to fix it. And it's not like you can escalate iOS bugs against Apple...
stevenwei 14y ago
> To this day iCloud + Core Data support is buggy, poor, and more or less > undocumented (the go-to guide for using it is a thread on the forums dozens > of pages long full of angry devs and overwhelmed Apple engineers). I'm impressed that this is still the situation a year after iCloud's release. When iCloud was originally announced, we were faced with the decision to adopt it or continue with our own server-based syncing solution. I'm glad we stayed with our own approach, as iCloud + Core Data has never reached the level of stability for me to be comfortable deploying it. By now it's a moot point though, since we now have an Android version to sync against, which eliminates iCloud as a solution entirely.
6ren 14y ago
Do you think these bugs could be fixed in parallel? i.e. Apple is rich, just throw more devs at it? Or are there interactions, so that adding more developers would make it later?
- krichman 14y ago
  It would be nice if they bothered to fix Xcode so that it wasn't buggy, crashy, and a burden to develop with. They could do that in parallel.
  - josephlord 14y ago
    Actually I think that the latest version seems better. Crashes are certainly less than daily recently (which shouldn't be regarded as good enough but it is a lot better than it was). Bug reporting is annoying as there is no way to search and see if it has already been reported, you just have to fill out an time consuming submission form and get asked to check it 6 months later when it doesn't matter to you any more. Does the iCloud Core Data support include ordered sets yet? It didn't in iOS 5 (properly documented so I wouldn't call it a bug) but I might move iCloud integration back up my action list if supports that - must check again.
  - cageface 14y ago
    I highly recommend AppCode from JetBrains. I only use XCode for IB and for project configuration now and I'm much happier.
    - krichman 14y ago
      I tried AppCode and I preferred Xcode, actually.
pooriaazimi 14y ago
?!! iOS 5 betas were ridiculously buggy. Even the stock apps wouldn't launch. But all iOS 6 betas were rock solid. I was running beta 2 on my (main) iPad untill last week and had no problems with first or third party apps. The rest of the comment is valid and I quite agree with you, but this one was (according to my experience at least) so wrong that I couldn't resist :)
tharris0101 14y ago
Yes, this is so true. I even wrote a blog post about how bad Core Data for iCloud is: (http://loneyeti.com/posts/17 http://loneyeti.com/posts/17). We even see it on Apple's own implementation of features ahemiTunes Matchahem. They are just trying to do too much too fast. A lot of people criticize Apple for not being very innovative lately, but I'm on the opposite side of the spectrum. I wish they would slow down and take a breath and realize that they don't need to implement major changes every year. I almost wonder if Steve Jobs was pushing too hard for things to be released before he died.

sumukh1 14y ago

As the post mentioned, game developers aren't really interested in the platform. As a result, they file less Radar reports and Gamekit continues to be buggy. I'd really like to see Apple up the ease-of-use of Radar (or something new). It's becoming a trend that iOS devs are forced to struggle with the ecosystem, but like I've been saying, from my experience the revenues are strongly tilted in favor of iOS. While we complain about certain aspects of iOS, on a whole, (at least from anecdotal evidence) it's still better than the problems that other platforms face.

cageface 14y ago
That may be true today but in a business that moves this fast you have skate ahead of the puck. And the quality of the engineering I'm seeing on Google's side in the last few releases of Android impresses me a lot more than anything I've seen come from Apple since iOS4. My hunch is the sheer volume of Android sales and Google's engineering edge is going to turn the tide but external factors could trump all.
- newhouseb 14y ago
  What engineering are you impressed with on Google's side? I'd love to see examples of things to help me erase my painful memories of developing on Android around 1.5/1.6/2.1.
  - cageface 14y ago
    Fragments and the ActionBar. The new holo styles and interface conventions. The flexibility of layouts and the way that activities work. There are some rough edges, to be sure, but it all seems a lot more forward looking than Apple's miniaturization of Cocoa.
    - cageface 14y ago
      Also the new interactive notifications in Jelly Bean are an idea that's long overdue. I think the ability of Android apps to integrate more deeply with the OS is really starting to pay off.
    - rimantas 14y ago
      > The flexibility of layouts And yet somehow iOS6 Auto Layouts and Collection Views do not count? Interesting. I also expect Pass Kit to take off.
      - cageface 14y ago
        These both feel like hacks and since Apple can't ever be bothered to backport anything I can't use them until my clients are willing to commit to iOS 6-only releases. Thanks to the maps fiasco I don't see that happening until some time next year.
    - stevenwei 14y ago
      I agree that the flexible layout approach is pretty nice (and obviously we're seeing Apple move towards this direction with autolayout), but I'm not a big fan of the fragment API. They sounded better in theory than they've worked out in practice, IMO. The inability to nest fragments in other fragments makes doing certain things like fragment based tabs or viewpagers rather awkward. And since the fragment lifecycle almost but doesn't quite match up with the activity lifecycle, some extra careful bookkeeping is required to make sure state is transferred properly upon rotation since the entire thing gets destroyed and recreated. Anyway, the biggest problem for me on Android is that although the new APIs in 3.0 and 4.0 are pretty sweet, I can't use most of them due to having to maintain compatibility back to 2.2 (Froyo). ActionBarSherlock and the compatibility library help a bit, but it's not quite the same.
smackfu 14y ago
It's very scary to rely on something like GameKit that is unproven because all your bugs are showstoppers, and you need to wait on Apple to fix it. And it's not like you can escalate iOS bugs against Apple...

stevenwei 14y ago

> To this day iCloud + Core Data support is buggy, poor, and more or less > undocumented (the go-to guide for using it is a thread on the forums dozens > of pages long full of angry devs and overwhelmed Apple engineers). I'm impressed that this is still the situation a year after iCloud's release. When iCloud was originally announced, we were faced with the decision to adopt it or continue with our own server-based syncing solution. I'm glad we stayed with our own approach, as iCloud + Core Data has never reached the level of stability for me to be comfortable deploying it. By now it's a moot point though, since we now have an Android version to sync against, which eliminates iCloud as a solution entirely.

6ren 14y ago

Do you think these bugs could be fixed in parallel? i.e. Apple is rich, just throw more devs at it? Or are there interactions, so that adding more developers would make it later?

krichman 14y ago
It would be nice if they bothered to fix Xcode so that it wasn't buggy, crashy, and a burden to develop with. They could do that in parallel.
- josephlord 14y ago
  Actually I think that the latest version seems better. Crashes are certainly less than daily recently (which shouldn't be regarded as good enough but it is a lot better than it was). Bug reporting is annoying as there is no way to search and see if it has already been reported, you just have to fill out an time consuming submission form and get asked to check it 6 months later when it doesn't matter to you any more. Does the iCloud Core Data support include ordered sets yet? It didn't in iOS 5 (properly documented so I wouldn't call it a bug) but I might move iCloud integration back up my action list if supports that - must check again.
- cageface 14y ago
  I highly recommend AppCode from JetBrains. I only use XCode for IB and for project configuration now and I'm much happier.
  - krichman 14y ago
    I tried AppCode and I preferred Xcode, actually.

pooriaazimi 14y ago

?!! iOS 5 betas were ridiculously buggy. Even the stock apps wouldn't launch. But all iOS 6 betas were rock solid. I was running beta 2 on my (main) iPad untill last week and had no problems with first or third party apps. The rest of the comment is valid and I quite agree with you, but this one was (according to my experience at least) so wrong that I couldn't resist :)

tharris0101 14y ago

Yes, this is so true. I even wrote a blog post about how bad Core Data for iCloud is: (http://loneyeti.com/posts/17 http://loneyeti.com/posts/17). We even see it on Apple's own implementation of features ahemiTunes Matchahem. They are just trying to do too much too fast. A lot of people criticize Apple for not being very innovative lately, but I'm on the opposite side of the spectrum. I wish they would slow down and take a breath and realize that they don't need to implement major changes every year. I almost wonder if Steve Jobs was pushing too hard for things to be released before he died.