Apple’s worsening relations with developers
- Thread starter hrpanjwani
- Start date
It means they inevitably turn into the "yes, they will," "no, they won't," "yes, they will SO!"
Which, yes, is possible on Internet forums, but it's noise, not signal. I'm in favor of having useful discussions on the Internet not random assertions of "reasonable" counterfactuals.
"I've retired and thus haven't paid attention to what's really happening in the app world, so I definitely know it sucks" is also not a convincing argument.
Just looking at my phone, I give you: Duo Mobile, Parcel, Coinless, Bookends, Sports, Flightradar24, Flighty, Metropulse, United, and Amtrak. That's just a first cut. All of these are insanely useful in different ways and for different things. I haven't triple checked that they're all post 2016, but all of them have become what they are since then (eg, United and Amtrak took massive leaps in the last few years).
Respectfully, Tim’s money is going to get spent. The only question is will it be spent on consultants, lawyers and eventually fines from governments around the world or will it be spent on making things better for developers.
Morally and logically, the choice is clear. But then corporate thinking is its own thing isn’t it?
The point was that these threads always devolve into Apple should spend billions on THIS! NO, THIS! And it becomes only slightly more interesting than the threads about Why Apple Should Release An Update For My iPhone 8.
In the non-games category, devs continue to do amazing things. Sofa and Current are examples from this year that are amazingly well designed and useful apps. I like current more as it’s a one time purchase while sofa is a very pricey sub and an even pricier one time purchase. But the free version of sofa is pretty good too so buying it is not absolutely required. Hopefully, the dev will have a buymeacoffee link so that I can pay them something for using the free version.
My concern is that for current there should be an upgrade pricing mechanism as the dev adds features. This is a key missing element of the App Store that should have been addressed by now. Sure, new features can be locked behind IAP. But to users that feels like blackmail. It may be functionally the same but psychologically it’s not.
That said the cadence of good apps has lowered. Maybe we have picked most of the fruit already and will only see the occasional good app now.
Like I said before, gaming is essentially a toxic waste town of gacha games. Maybe Apple needs to prune these games like they did with fart apps in the early days of the App Store. Give devs with good games a fighting chance of gaining visibility.
Last edited:
I agree it will be difficult. But with AI tools, it’s should be significantly faster and require less human effort.
I would argue that they do. There is serious money in gaming and Apple needs to look for the next thing that keeps juicing their financials.
As the old adage goes, you gotta spend money to make money. Apple seems to understand this very well when it comes to developing hardware. But sadly not when it comes to developing software while hobbling developers who could help them raise their software offerings.
Some of the bugs are so idiotic. I can browse and buy music from iTunes Store very easily on my iphone. But on my iPad it’s hit and miss, sometimes it works and sometimes it won’t. Forget buying, browsing is broken.
Apple needs to get off the old iTunes backend for all the stores. Move them all to the web and also allow remote installation of apps like Google does.
In fact one of my pet peeves is that they killed the iTunes app to make the Music app. They should have kept iTunes for music purchasers and made Apple Music a web service that exclusively works for streaming. Music buyers and streamers are essentially orthogonal markets. So why force them both into one app?
I don’t see how ‘it stands to reason that Apple having positive relationships with developers is likely to lead to more and better apps than if Apple has antagonistic relationships with developers’ necessarily leads to “yes, they will,” “no, they won’t,” “yes, they will SO!”
Attacking strawmen is noise, not signal. Though clearly, you’re right—since I retired two years ago, I must have no idea what’s happened in the app world over the last decade. Moreover, moving to another country; traveling around the world; communicating with people and businesses around the world in multiple languages; and dealing with international banking, taxes, and other commerce clearly would not expose me to anything going on the app world.
Flight tracking, sports scores, and the like don’t strike me as new or innovative, though it’s nice that they’ve had incremental improvements. And if you have to point to an app that lets you pay for car washes with your phone as a sign of great progress in apps, well….
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t any new or innovative apps in the last decade or so; I’d just say that there have been surprisingly few.
I think it's been said that this year's OS is going to be a sort of Snow Leopard bug-hunt. Of course they'll also be doing the whole Apple Intelligence/Siri makeover.