8 ms·

As much as I support Apple and have been since 1979, including being an early Mac developer in 1985 and even working there in the horrible mid-90's, the major p

As much as I support Apple and have been since 1979, including being an early Mac developer in 1985 and even working there in the horrible mid-90's, the major problem is that Tim and Jony don't care (and Steve didn't either for that matter) about developers enough to do anything more than what works for Apple. Whether the people in charge have no budget or don't care or are hamstrung by politics, nothing will change until and if the top people start to care. Apple makes so much money even with all the crap we have to put up with as developers they clearly have no reason to change and sadly I don't expect them to. You don't tell the world's most valuable company how to run their business. It didn't work for people telling Microsoft in the 90's or Apple today. Sorry for the brutal truth but it is what it is.

linguafranca 12y ago
Completely true. Kind of makes me want to look more seriously into making apps for Microsoft platforms. That said, Mac owners are generally far more likely to go out and look for new apps to buy. Whereas Windows users will find an app that does the job, and keep using that app forever (and recommend it to friends/family). So even though there are way more Windows users, it seems more likely to make a living as an indie Mac dev than an indie Windows dev.
- linguafranca 12y ago
  (Disclaimer: that last part was told to me as advice by a lone indie dev who makes about $189,000 per year off his lone Mac app and puts nearly all of the revenue in savings. So I have a bit of trust in that advice.)
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    Wowsers, what app is that?
    - jawngee 12y ago
      My one sole app in MAS pays my rent and some bills every month with absolutely zero marketing or advertising on my part.
      - 72deluxe 12y ago
        May I ask which app it is? It is good to know that MAS does indeed produce such success.
        jawngee 12y ago
        Shave, a video editor for OS X. http://shave.rocks/ http://shave.rocks/
- zyxley 12y ago
  That seems anecdotally accurate to me. It's not hard to find "spiritual sequel" Mac and iOS apps that do quite well as people switch to them from older apps that are lacking in development or aren't as "cool" anymore, such as Cyberduck -> Transmit, iSSH -> vSSH, BBEdit -> TextMate -> Sublime Text -> Atom, and so on.
- swartkrans 12y ago
  > making apps for Microsoft platforms. They're both not great, so you would just be trading one set of problems for another. You might want to look at building web applications, which also has problems. There is no perfect platform. You just have to figure out which set of problems hurts your business the least.
  - monstermonster 12y ago
    Disagree. Been building "apps" since when they were called programs for windows, Unix and Mac. Windows is the great constant, has the greatest overall power and flexibility. Unix is a mess of portability and build problems, mac has incredibly high framework churn and low longevity but as I've said already, stuff I wrote for NT4 in 1996 works today absolutely fine and I reckon it will in another 20 years. Not only that, the market for well paying customers is huge if you ignore the volatile and unprofitable "store" model and sell bespoke and specialised stuff. Don't solve popular problems, solve well paying ones :) As for the web it's getting there but a lot of bigger clients won't touch it yet.
    - millstone 12y ago
      I'm primarily a Mac developer. From my outside perspective, the Windows framework churn looks enormous. The "best way" to write a Windows app went from Win32/MFC, to WinForms, to Silverlight and WPF, to WinRT, and still seems to be evolving. The preferred language has gone from C++ to C# to C++/C#/JavaScript(?), and now MS is pushing a UI framework that seems terribly ill-suited to what traditional desktop apps have done. On the Mac side, the story has been constant since OS X first shipped: the best way to write a Mac app is to use the Cocoa frameworks, with Objective-C. There was some churn around garbage collection, and now Swift, but overall the developer story has been much more stable than with Windows.
      - monstermonster 12y ago
        Err we still use win32 and MFC. Plus some winforms which is a wrapper around win32 via the CLR. Not much has changed. Hell even WinRT is just a win32 wrapper. Office is a ball of win32 and MFC too. Absolutely no one is touching WinRT or WPF apart from a few trading dashboard outfits and for win phone which is fine. It'll hang around but will still sit on top of the win32 subsystem. Bear in mind there is very little difference between windows 1.0 code (1985) windows 8.1 code now. There's some 16 bit scum on the API but that's it. Mac... You forgot carbon...
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  That's if you are trying to sell to consumers. Try making some business software. Every business on the planet runs Windows and they all need new software all the time.
Tloewald 12y ago
The problem with the App Store isn't that Apple is making too much money from developers (they're not making more money than anyone else who retails products for you). The problem is that the App Store doesn't support stuff developers need, like upgrades, migration from previous licensing schemes, free trials (vs. in-app purchases of functionality). This was very much a Steve-ism (let's keep things simple for customers) but they need to treat developers as customers too.
- byEngineer 12y ago
  I like the idea of making it easy on customers. I'd rather go through additional pain as a business/developer and make more money (better product) than have an ecosystem that is unfriendly for paying customer but nice for geeks like me. What I love as a consumer in my iPhone (compared to Android, etc.) is no upgrades -- annoying like hell. No messages about license changes (thanks God!). Why you guys insist on making sure that your software is annoying to people who use it?! I don't get it. Where is Steve?!
  - milen 12y ago
    The whole point is that nothing will change, as far as the consumer experience is concerned. You won't get bothered about upgrades or anything like this. All that would happen is you might see an "Upgrade" button in your list of apps you purchased. That's it. Note that while the notion of paying once and getting infinite updates forever is quite nice, it's not rooted in reality. Either the app you're using will get abandoned or you will have to pay up at some point in the future, somehow - ads, IAP, etc.
    - tormeh 12y ago
      Or the developer makes a sequel app, and you have to pay again to get the new one.
      - byEngineer 12y ago
        I like that concept. I paid to go from MS DOS 3.5 to MS DOS 5.0. Have no problem doing the same with your app bro!
clumsysmurf 12y ago
As an independent Android developer, I have the same feelings towards Google Play. There have been many things about Play that devs have repeatedly brought up, but Google does not take action. For example, iOS has "Promo Codes" but not Play. Another is not being able to migrate a paid app to IAP (In App Purchase) without pissing everyone off (the linkage is lost between what the customer already paid for and the new IAPs). Not to mention the algorithmic jail you wind up in if you ever inadvertently get caught tripping some automated alarm in the googleplex. I wish there was some strong alternative by now, whether Ubuntu Touch or Windows Phone. We need more options.
- apayan 12y ago
  Re: promo codes They are unnecessary on Android. If you want to give your app to someone, you send them an email with a link to an APK and they install it directly.
  - clumsysmurf 12y ago
    Then they do not receive updates (unless I send everyone on the distribution list a new APK via email).
    - richardwhiuk 12y ago
      APKs receive updates from the Google Play Store - at least free apps do in this respect
      - forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
        Well you wouldn't need a promo code for a free app, so that doesn't really solve the problem. Also, you can give out promo codes over the internet, but I wouldn't just install any .apk someone sent me. It's hardly the same thing.
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    And have to have every update sent to them by email as well.
gress 12y ago
You don't have any knowledge at all about Tim or Jony's feelings towards developers that the rest of us don't have. Some counterpoints: Why does apple keep investing in APIs for developers who they don't care about Why did Tim make a speech on stage at WWDC about how much they care about Developers. You seem to be directly accusing him of being a liar. Now, I actually agree with almost all of the linked post, and I am an iOS and Mac developer myself. Software has been devalued by the advertising supported models of the Internet changing people's expectations. That's the root problem, and it wasn't Apple's doing Could Apple do more to combat this? Yes, I think they could, and should, and I hope they will. But as long as you have their largest competitors doing everything they can to devalue software, you can't complain that Apple should be making sure their customers have to pay more. Let's also face another hard truth. There is a lot of software that just isn't that valuable. People are willing to pay money for things that a) make their life feel better, b) save them money, or c) help them make money. The vast majority of apps just don't do any of these things well enough to be worthwhile. If anything, consumers are spending too much money on worthless software.
- lukifer 12y ago
  Talk is cheap. What actions has Apple taken to demonstrate that they care about facilitating the businesses of developers using the App Stores? They've added APIs, tools, even a new language, but the only improvement I can think of for the App Stores is video preview. While it's not Apple's job to enable every possible business model under the sun, they ultimately hurt both themselves and users by trying to force everything into the "game vending machine" model, not to mention the app types which are forever excluded due to sandbox restrictions (see Panic's experience with the MAS, for example [1]). [1]: http://www.panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/ http://www.panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/
  - vitd 12y ago
    Well one thing they’ve done is ensure that all apps are sandboxed so that I can be sure when my mother downloads an app, it’s not going to be a vector to infest her computer.
tolmasky 12y ago
Its just as bad if not worse from a customer perspective. The Mac App Store is basically the antithesis of what Apple is theoretically about ("the details") while at the same time highlighting everything Apple is bad at (ahem hem >services<). Some simple examples: 1. I go to buy an app, oh, I already own it. I know since it says "Installed". So helpful, now I can go search for it again on my computer. Compare this to the iPhone where it isn't completely idiotic and instead of "installed" says "open" which you can click on. 2. Type "Diasy Disk" into the Mac App Store search. You'll get 5 results that AREN'T "Daisy Disk". That's because Apple couldn't search their way out of a paper bag. 3. Let me send a link to this app to my friend. Of course its buried in an unlabeled drop down since sharing content is a decade ahead of any thinking going on at Apple. Let's not try to get any network affects for these apps, that would be silly. 4. The top 10 is full of apps I already own. Super useful. Really makes me want to open this thing up periodically if I'm feeling spendy. Heaven forbid the tailor that page to at the very least show the top 10 apps I don't own. But we live in a world where selling me toilet paper online is more sophisticated than applications. 4.1. My favorite is that #2 on top free is OS X Mavericks. How about just putting up a banner telling me reasons to upgrade to Mavericks instead of eternally taking up a slot in the top 10 free essentially making it a top 9? Especially when most your customer base is already on Mavericks and thus making that slot the most useless slot ever. 5. Hey what was that app I was looking at yesterday? Welp, since we chose to make it a super-fast amazing native experience, I don't get simple features like browsing history that I'd get from this being in a browser. But hey, at least all these 3d graphics in the Mac App Store are crazy performant right? Now if only I could view two apps at once, you know, like maybe two competitors I'd like to compare, in tabs... It's funny because they ended up having to mirror the content on the web anyways, so the Mac App Store is now the worse of the two options you get (the other being google -> mac app store pages)
- lpsz 12y ago
  At least (1) has been finally fixed as of late. An "Open" button at last. I see MAS as a good entry point for novice Mac users. But Apple could do a better job at curation here. Unlike on iOS, MAS apps have a bigger responsibility with user data, since even with sandboxing you can lose files or have your data sent across the wire. Check out the reviews for countless "disk cleaner"-type apps. Seeing apps like [1] repeatedly in top 10 makes me lose faith in the review process. Macs don't need users to manually manage "free" memory. By "freeing" memory you're purging the cache and forcing the system to reload things. Hey, at least it's free. Another: seemingly dozens of poor clones of built-in apps like Preview, complete with one-star reviews. For example, [2] by a developer who published 60+ (!) apps of similar quality. Or, [3], same situation but with a $6.99 in-app-purchase. [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/memory-clean/id451444120?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/memory-clean/id451444120?mt=... [2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jpg-to-pdf-converter-lite/id812844173?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jpg-to-pdf-converter-lite/id... [3] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jpg-to-pdf-lite/id862295940?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jpg-to-pdf-lite/id862295940?...

linguafranca 12y ago

Completely true. Kind of makes me want to look more seriously into making apps for Microsoft platforms. That said, Mac owners are generally far more likely to go out and look for new apps to buy. Whereas Windows users will find an app that does the job, and keep using that app forever (and recommend it to friends/family). So even though there are way more Windows users, it seems more likely to make a living as an indie Mac dev than an indie Windows dev.

linguafranca 12y ago
(Disclaimer: that last part was told to me as advice by a lone indie dev who makes about $189,000 per year off his lone Mac app and puts nearly all of the revenue in savings. So I have a bit of trust in that advice.)
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  Wowsers, what app is that?
  - jawngee 12y ago
    My one sole app in MAS pays my rent and some bills every month with absolutely zero marketing or advertising on my part.
    - 72deluxe 12y ago
      May I ask which app it is? It is good to know that MAS does indeed produce such success.
      - jawngee 12y ago
        Shave, a video editor for OS X. http://shave.rocks/ http://shave.rocks/
zyxley 12y ago
That seems anecdotally accurate to me. It's not hard to find "spiritual sequel" Mac and iOS apps that do quite well as people switch to them from older apps that are lacking in development or aren't as "cool" anymore, such as Cyberduck -> Transmit, iSSH -> vSSH, BBEdit -> TextMate -> Sublime Text -> Atom, and so on.
swartkrans 12y ago
> making apps for Microsoft platforms. They're both not great, so you would just be trading one set of problems for another. You might want to look at building web applications, which also has problems. There is no perfect platform. You just have to figure out which set of problems hurts your business the least.
- monstermonster 12y ago
  Disagree. Been building "apps" since when they were called programs for windows, Unix and Mac. Windows is the great constant, has the greatest overall power and flexibility. Unix is a mess of portability and build problems, mac has incredibly high framework churn and low longevity but as I've said already, stuff I wrote for NT4 in 1996 works today absolutely fine and I reckon it will in another 20 years. Not only that, the market for well paying customers is huge if you ignore the volatile and unprofitable "store" model and sell bespoke and specialised stuff. Don't solve popular problems, solve well paying ones :) As for the web it's getting there but a lot of bigger clients won't touch it yet.
  - millstone 12y ago
    I'm primarily a Mac developer. From my outside perspective, the Windows framework churn looks enormous. The "best way" to write a Windows app went from Win32/MFC, to WinForms, to Silverlight and WPF, to WinRT, and still seems to be evolving. The preferred language has gone from C++ to C# to C++/C#/JavaScript(?), and now MS is pushing a UI framework that seems terribly ill-suited to what traditional desktop apps have done. On the Mac side, the story has been constant since OS X first shipped: the best way to write a Mac app is to use the Cocoa frameworks, with Objective-C. There was some churn around garbage collection, and now Swift, but overall the developer story has been much more stable than with Windows.
    - monstermonster 12y ago
      Err we still use win32 and MFC. Plus some winforms which is a wrapper around win32 via the CLR. Not much has changed. Hell even WinRT is just a win32 wrapper. Office is a ball of win32 and MFC too. Absolutely no one is touching WinRT or WPF apart from a few trading dashboard outfits and for win phone which is fine. It'll hang around but will still sit on top of the win32 subsystem. Bear in mind there is very little difference between windows 1.0 code (1985) windows 8.1 code now. There's some 16 bit scum on the API but that's it. Mac... You forgot carbon...
WorldWideWayne 12y ago
That's if you are trying to sell to consumers. Try making some business software. Every business on the planet runs Windows and they all need new software all the time.

Tloewald 12y ago

The problem with the App Store isn't that Apple is making too much money from developers (they're not making more money than anyone else who retails products for you). The problem is that the App Store doesn't support stuff developers need, like upgrades, migration from previous licensing schemes, free trials (vs. in-app purchases of functionality). This was very much a Steve-ism (let's keep things simple for customers) but they need to treat developers as customers too.

byEngineer 12y ago
I like the idea of making it easy on customers. I'd rather go through additional pain as a business/developer and make more money (better product) than have an ecosystem that is unfriendly for paying customer but nice for geeks like me. What I love as a consumer in my iPhone (compared to Android, etc.) is no upgrades -- annoying like hell. No messages about license changes (thanks God!). Why you guys insist on making sure that your software is annoying to people who use it?! I don't get it. Where is Steve?!
- milen 12y ago
  The whole point is that nothing will change, as far as the consumer experience is concerned. You won't get bothered about upgrades or anything like this. All that would happen is you might see an "Upgrade" button in your list of apps you purchased. That's it. Note that while the notion of paying once and getting infinite updates forever is quite nice, it's not rooted in reality. Either the app you're using will get abandoned or you will have to pay up at some point in the future, somehow - ads, IAP, etc.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    Or the developer makes a sequel app, and you have to pay again to get the new one.
    - byEngineer 12y ago
      I like that concept. I paid to go from MS DOS 3.5 to MS DOS 5.0. Have no problem doing the same with your app bro!

clumsysmurf 12y ago

As an independent Android developer, I have the same feelings towards Google Play. There have been many things about Play that devs have repeatedly brought up, but Google does not take action. For example, iOS has "Promo Codes" but not Play. Another is not being able to migrate a paid app to IAP (In App Purchase) without pissing everyone off (the linkage is lost between what the customer already paid for and the new IAPs). Not to mention the algorithmic jail you wind up in if you ever inadvertently get caught tripping some automated alarm in the googleplex. I wish there was some strong alternative by now, whether Ubuntu Touch or Windows Phone. We need more options.

apayan 12y ago
Re: promo codes They are unnecessary on Android. If you want to give your app to someone, you send them an email with a link to an APK and they install it directly.
- clumsysmurf 12y ago
  Then they do not receive updates (unless I send everyone on the distribution list a new APK via email).
  - richardwhiuk 12y ago
    APKs receive updates from the Google Play Store - at least free apps do in this respect
    - forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
      Well you wouldn't need a promo code for a free app, so that doesn't really solve the problem. Also, you can give out promo codes over the internet, but I wouldn't just install any .apk someone sent me. It's hardly the same thing.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  And have to have every update sent to them by email as well.

gress 12y ago

You don't have any knowledge at all about Tim or Jony's feelings towards developers that the rest of us don't have. Some counterpoints: Why does apple keep investing in APIs for developers who they don't care about Why did Tim make a speech on stage at WWDC about how much they care about Developers. You seem to be directly accusing him of being a liar. Now, I actually agree with almost all of the linked post, and I am an iOS and Mac developer myself. Software has been devalued by the advertising supported models of the Internet changing people's expectations. That's the root problem, and it wasn't Apple's doing Could Apple do more to combat this? Yes, I think they could, and should, and I hope they will. But as long as you have their largest competitors doing everything they can to devalue software, you can't complain that Apple should be making sure their customers have to pay more. Let's also face another hard truth. There is a lot of software that just isn't that valuable. People are willing to pay money for things that a) make their life feel better, b) save them money, or c) help them make money. The vast majority of apps just don't do any of these things well enough to be worthwhile. If anything, consumers are spending too much money on worthless software.

lukifer 12y ago
Talk is cheap. What actions has Apple taken to demonstrate that they care about facilitating the businesses of developers using the App Stores? They've added APIs, tools, even a new language, but the only improvement I can think of for the App Stores is video preview. While it's not Apple's job to enable every possible business model under the sun, they ultimately hurt both themselves and users by trying to force everything into the "game vending machine" model, not to mention the app types which are forever excluded due to sandbox restrictions (see Panic's experience with the MAS, for example [1]). [1]: http://www.panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/ http://www.panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/
- vitd 12y ago
  Well one thing they’ve done is ensure that all apps are sandboxed so that I can be sure when my mother downloads an app, it’s not going to be a vector to infest her computer.

tolmasky 12y ago

Its just as bad if not worse from a customer perspective. The Mac App Store is basically the antithesis of what Apple is theoretically about ("the details") while at the same time highlighting everything Apple is bad at (ahem hem >services<). Some simple examples: 1. I go to buy an app, oh, I already own it. I know since it says "Installed". So helpful, now I can go search for it again on my computer. Compare this to the iPhone where it isn't completely idiotic and instead of "installed" says "open" which you can click on. 2. Type "Diasy Disk" into the Mac App Store search. You'll get 5 results that AREN'T "Daisy Disk". That's because Apple couldn't search their way out of a paper bag. 3. Let me send a link to this app to my friend. Of course its buried in an unlabeled drop down since sharing content is a decade ahead of any thinking going on at Apple. Let's not try to get any network affects for these apps, that would be silly. 4. The top 10 is full of apps I already own. Super useful. Really makes me want to open this thing up periodically if I'm feeling spendy. Heaven forbid the tailor that page to at the very least show the top 10 apps I don't own. But we live in a world where selling me toilet paper online is more sophisticated than applications. 4.1. My favorite is that #2 on top free is OS X Mavericks. How about just putting up a banner telling me reasons to upgrade to Mavericks instead of eternally taking up a slot in the top 10 free essentially making it a top 9? Especially when most your customer base is already on Mavericks and thus making that slot the most useless slot ever. 5. Hey what was that app I was looking at yesterday? Welp, since we chose to make it a super-fast amazing native experience, I don't get simple features like browsing history that I'd get from this being in a browser. But hey, at least all these 3d graphics in the Mac App Store are crazy performant right? Now if only I could view two apps at once, you know, like maybe two competitors I'd like to compare, in tabs... It's funny because they ended up having to mirror the content on the web anyways, so the Mac App Store is now the worse of the two options you get (the other being google -> mac app store pages)

lpsz 12y ago
At least (1) has been finally fixed as of late. An "Open" button at last. I see MAS as a good entry point for novice Mac users. But Apple could do a better job at curation here. Unlike on iOS, MAS apps have a bigger responsibility with user data, since even with sandboxing you can lose files or have your data sent across the wire. Check out the reviews for countless "disk cleaner"-type apps. Seeing apps like [1] repeatedly in top 10 makes me lose faith in the review process. Macs don't need users to manually manage "free" memory. By "freeing" memory you're purging the cache and forcing the system to reload things. Hey, at least it's free. Another: seemingly dozens of poor clones of built-in apps like Preview, complete with one-star reviews. For example, [2] by a developer who published 60+ (!) apps of similar quality. Or, [3], same situation but with a $6.99 in-app-purchase. [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/memory-clean/id451444120?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/memory-clean/id451444120?mt=... [2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jpg-to-pdf-converter-lite/id812844173?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jpg-to-pdf-converter-lite/id... [3] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jpg-to-pdf-lite/id862295940?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jpg-to-pdf-lite/id862295940?...