Given Apple's history with wonky system updates in the era of both of those things, I would say absolutely yes.
Apple’s worsening relations with developers
- Thread starter hrpanjwani
- Start date
This makes it a great example of where human QA matters. I’m sure Apple can write a million programs that, when run against Tahoe, exit 0 or print “ok.” I’m also sure a competent tester can rip it to shreds. I worked with some back during the dot-com boom, and they were absolute geniuses at breaking the stuff I wrote.
I personally believe in software being “done.” For example,TeX is more or less feature-complete as text formatting software, as is ls for listing files. Would you build anything on top of ls if it had a monthly version treadmill?
Yup, developers constantly reading into the users pockets may be good for the devs and Apple in the short term but won’t work out in the long term, especially with cost of living issues. Apple is the only one with the power to modulate this behavior. Hence the changes that I have suggested or something similar are required for keeping the ecosystem healthy.
I feel like you haven’t been paying attention to the world around you. In the past week, Mythos has found bugs in all sorts of software - including bugs that date back to the dot com boom that no amount of human QA testers ever found. So while I totally agree that QA testing is incredibly important, it’s hard for me to think that in 2026 relying on human QA is going to pass muster. If you’re making a more general point that Apple should do more QA… yeah, I think we’re all on board with that.
This feels like a goal post shift. You had been talking about packaging and selling upgrade versions of software and making the case for why that was better than a subscription model. But of course either a periodic large update (perhaps with upgrade pricing) or a subscription model both imply some ongoing potential in the future features space. If we’re talking about software that just has no runway for new features then upgrade pricing and subscriptions are equally non-applicable. No one is buying a subscription to their calculator nor is anyone looking to pay upgrade pricing for a major new version of their calculator.
Developers are people who have bills to pay, too. If they can't monetize then they won't be able to stick around as a developer.
When your cash cow product is the modern apotheosis of a utility knife, it is then incumbent on you to either make all the blades and tools your customers require, or to allow others' to attach neatly.
Sure, I am not against developers earning money. But subscription fatigue is very real. Hence my stance that Apple needs to improve things.
One key thing Apple needs to do is get off the old iTunes backend for App Store. Move the store to the web and allow remote installation of apps like Google does. Then they can offer devs much more flexible licensing and distribution.
One possibility is to is re-arc the rev split so that is it more like 20/10/70 were 20 goes to the referral source (apple if the user finds organically through the App Store but also other sources) 10 goes to Apple, and 70 to the dev. Then auto enroll all dev accounts as referral sources so if my app links you to another app I get the 20% of the revenue that users will provide for the next year. There should be protections against gaming the system, for example one policy could be keeping the user for a year should be required for the dev should get referral amount.
How is hving to hire people to update and maintain external code and run out-of-house custom services to keep the abandoned software running in perpetuity a "win" for Apple?
Apple should hire people to fix the millions of bugs in their software. I have lost almost all the will to contribute to the open source softwares I maintain, every 4 click there is a bug in macOS or in some framework that will never be fixed.
Even Feedback Assistant is such a bug ridden app , it asks to log in again every week, you enter the email and click continue, and it doesn't select the password textfield so you have to manually click it, then it logs in and the window it shows is not even the one active in the foreground, so you have to click again, then it doesn't remember the sidebar size, then you try to create a new feedback and the list of components hasn't been updated since 2015 so you'll end up selecting a mostly unrelated category. In the end no one will ever respond to the feedback, and the only hope to get something fixed is that someone at Apple will rewrite the entire framework or app, and replace the old set of bugs with a new one.
Even Feedback Assistant is such a bug ridden app , it asks to log in again every week, you enter the email and click continue, and it doesn't select the password textfield so you have to manually click it, then it logs in and the window it shows is not even the one active in the foreground, so you have to click again, then it doesn't remember the sidebar size, then you try to create a new feedback and the list of components hasn't been updated since 2015 so you'll end up selecting a mostly unrelated category. In the end no one will ever respond to the feedback, and the only hope to get something fixed is that someone at Apple will rewrite the entire framework or app, and replace the old set of bugs with a new one.
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ALVR (on the App Store) does OpenVR, but not OpenXR. So that's the VR part of XR and they would have to do the AR part natively -that would make for a complex and painfully developed app I think.
Given the level of protections / paranoia engineered into the Vision Pro’s AR subsystems and frameworks, it’s likely only Apple could write an OpenXR implementation.
Apple Arcade is quite a ghost town. Buying games that are going to get abandoned by developers and repurposing them for the arcade might be a good idea to boost the service.
From what I have read there are around 200 games there and roughly half a dozen games get added every month.
I seriously doubt Victorinix pays any formal attention to third party blade / part manufacturers, let alone treats them nicely.
Possibly because Victorinox chooses the former strategy. Apple chooses the latter.
Which invalidates your metaphor. And this whole thread is about how Apple is not choosing the latter. Do you want to try for a better metaphor? Or argue against the entire thread?
Disagree, subjective, please offer your own, mischaracterization.
I'm sorry you find the metaphor challenging; the OP and our resident Senator seem to have understood it. Perhaps they could weigh in.
Or, why not offer your own answer to this question?
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Apple can’t build every app that users may want or need. Apple needs the support of developers to do so. The most innovative and useful apps often come from medium or indie developers. Hence allowing large developers to flood the store with crapware that essentially amounts to predatory subscription pricing erodes both user trust and developer goodwill.
The market for apps has evolved significantly beyond what it was two decades ago. The App Store policies and features do not reflect this shift adequately. If Apple won’t make the necessary changes themselves, bureaucrats will start tinkering with them instead and who knows what the result will be.
Personally I like having a direct relationship with developers of software that is critically important to me, so that if there is some kind of problem the chain of communication and responsibility is clear. A minor example is a subscription organisation/notes type app I've used for a while on my Mac and iPhone (Agenda). It's a good app -- there are a lot in this space, but for whatever reason the UI approach of this one works for me better than most. But recently I'm getting an error message where the Mac version can't update to version 8, and I get a warning that the database might get de-synced between phone and Mac. I think it might have something to do with the fact that I have two Apple IDs (one Canadian and one US), but I can't update it with either. After a bit of back-and-forth, I'm just going to stop using the app and stop the subscription, as I have alternatives. So that is one minor case of Apple being the intermediary being part of the problem. This would be a big deal for an application that I utterly rely on.
That said, the centralizing app-store approach has huge benefits I love: centralized software updates (this particular case notwithstanding), and centralized subscriptions that are easy to cancel. Whatever happens with the App Store model, I would love Apple to keep some kind of centralized back-end so that users can easily check for updates, cancel subscriptions, and also have some kind of essential security/privacy functionality. And I would like that to be applicable even across multiple app stores.
That said, the centralizing app-store approach has huge benefits I love: centralized software updates (this particular case notwithstanding), and centralized subscriptions that are easy to cancel. Whatever happens with the App Store model, I would love Apple to keep some kind of centralized back-end so that users can easily check for updates, cancel subscriptions, and also have some kind of essential security/privacy functionality. And I would like that to be applicable even across multiple app stores.
An App Store and an individual relationship with a particular software vendor are not mutually exclusive.
All the other issues aside, I really hope the advancement of LLMs lets Apple focus on this stuff and burn down some outstanding bugs. Even if they don't let Opus or whatever loose on the guts of their OS, I've found it to be remarkably effective at finding random bugs that could then be actioned on by their developers once identified.
seeing apple kill ai apps that let people build their own applets/apps on their phone was disappointing. this is clearly the future and it seems apple is trying to choke it off so they can get their strategy in place, rather than empowering the ecosystem to see how people evolve it.
Because I'm not the one advocating it. I do think that Victorinix should be better to third party blade developers. They're very exclusionary.
That undercuts your point. Apple isn't being good to developers and yet developers are creating the "most innovative and useful apps" on the platform. Note that I'm not asking if Apple should allow third party development on iOS. I think they should for the reasons mention. But they seem to be coming even if Apple isn't nice to them.
Which is an argument for not being nice to all developers.
This is amusing since they actually kinda started doing that a while back. They got some older "classic" mobile games (like some of the ones that became big hits at the time) and at least in some cases had to update them to work on the latest iOS.
That was true in the first decade or so of the iOS/iPadOS App Store. The last decade has seen very little in the way of good apps. Virtually no games for outright purchase compared to the firehose of gacha games.
Yup, It’s worked out for them decently. They should expand this program significantly. That way Apple can become a gaming powerhouse on par with industry incumbents.
Agreed. In fact, they are almost entirely unrelated.
I'm a small-time hobby developer with 2 apps on the App Store. It is a requirement of the App Store to include a support link for each app. My users don't seem to have any trouble getting in touch with me. And I've even developed some long term (multi-year) conversations with some of them which are entirely unrelated to the apps.
Without the app store, it is just as easy for vendors to provide no way of contacting them directly as it is with the app store. However, most (decent) developers do have some method of support available via their web page, which is independent of the app store and applies whether they use the app store or not.
Apple has an M&A strategy that is focused on acquiring smaller companies. I am suggesting that they extend this to the gaming space. No need to do huge acquisitions like Microsoft did with Activision. Just buy smaller gaming firms and build a games library for Apple Arcade. Eventually they can release an Apple TV with a controller and become a serious player in gaming. This will also allow them to grow their services revenue, which seems to be a key priority for the current leadership.
Broadly apps are games and non-games. Non-games are still decent although there is over reliance on selling subscriptions. But that’s fair enough, it’s an acceptable market change. Most of these apps deliver good value to their users.
The games space has collapsed. Roughly thousands of gacha games are released in a month while good games number in a few dozens as developers with ethics seem to have abandoned the space due to economic realities. Someone like Zach Gage still releases good titles once in a while and seems to make decent money but the struggle is quite uphill.
For example, the LTV of FB is $300 or so. The top selling gacha games have a similar LTV. Gaming on iOS has essentially become an addiction instead of enjoyment. This is the problem that needs to be solved and Apple is the only one who can do it by realigning incentives.
Buying a bunch of smaller companies in the gaming space isn’t going to make them a “serious player”. That’s just a crazy reading of the gaming market.
We’ve moved from the importance of developer relations to the latest installment of Spend Tim’s Money.
Apple could, and arguably. should, polish up the former. However, Apple absolutely doesn’t need to be a serious player in the gaming space. Setting aside, for purposes of this discussion the argument that they already are players — just not in the way serious gamers would like them to be. They’re doing very nicely with casual games and, were I to have Tim’s ear, games wouldn’t make my top ten. Probably not even my hot hundred.
Apple could, and arguably. should, polish up the former. However, Apple absolutely doesn’t need to be a serious player in the gaming space. Setting aside, for purposes of this discussion the argument that they already are players — just not in the way serious gamers would like them to be. They’re doing very nicely with casual games and, were I to have Tim’s ear, games wouldn’t make my top ten. Probably not even my hot hundred.
It’s not binary. It’s reasonable to think that there could be more and better apps if they are created.
Again, not binary. “very little” does not equal “no” good apps.
That's unprovable and thus not really arguable.
Okay (noting that @hrpanjwani has essentially backed off the point for non-games), but do you find "very little" in the way of good apps in the last decade plausible? I don't.
As these conversations always go, combined with rambling anecdotes about how mean Apple was to [insert specific developer].
It’s a logical inference. Many arguments and suppositions aren’t objectively provable, as we aren’t able to see into the future or alternate realities. That doesn’t mean we can’t discuss them on an internet forum.
Aside from games, I primarily use communications apps like Safari, Mail, Messages, Google Translate, and Overcast, and basic utilities like Pages, Photos and Google Maps. Before I retired, I used Microsoft Word and Google Docs. All of these were introduced more than a decade ago. In the last decade? I dunno…I guess IQ test scoring software and Apple fitness? It’s really not a lot, now that I think about it.
That is the complete opposite of buying defunct titles, and updating them themselves to keep them running. That’s a fool’s endeavour, given that any app that grew from a good idea rather than a structured environment is full of spaghetti code that even the guy who once wrote it probably no longer understands, except to know where not to touch things lest they break.