Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 292 posts

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#171

Post by sutterbomb »

jollins wrote: post #154
gonehome wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this surprising and it makes me wonder if native android apps are just bad? The difference between a native iOS app and a fake app that's really just a wrapped web page is obvious. Native apps are a lot faster. It's possible there is some selection bias here and you only notice the web apps when they're bad, but I really don't think this is the case. Native apps just seem categorically better. If Facebook pour…

Facebook was pouring resources into their HTML5 mobile apps ten years ago. I’m not saying web apps on mobile feel native now by any means, but I don’t think that’s a good example of a big company trying and failing anymore.

But what makes you think html+js+css performance have improved enough over native in the subsequent years where this isn’t relevant?

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#172

Post by jolux »

ddevault wrote: post #131
twicetwice wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode runs amazingly on my 2.5 year old laptop. And while I love the word "webshit" in itself -- it's a very pleasing word to say -- I object to it. The web is not universally shit. It has advantages: primarily almost truly "write once, run anywhere." I run Ubuntu. I almost certainly would not be able to use VSCode on my laptop if it were not an Electron app. I am better off having an Electron version of VSCode than…

>VSCode runs amazingly on my 2.5 year old laptop. Is this some kind of great achievement? Vim runs ten times as fast on a 28 year old PDP-11. >The web is not universally shit. [citation needed] To quote the old Java saying, saying "write once, run everywhere" is a selling point of Java is like saying anal sex is great because it works on all genders. Like... maybe, but it's not really the point. You couldn't use VSCo…

>To quote the old Java saying, saying "write once, run everywhere" is a selling point of Java is like saying anal sex is great because it works on all genders. Like... maybe, but it's not really the point.

what does this mean exactly

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#173

Post by tempestn »

gonehome wrote: post #2

Even as just an app store user I find the ads for competitors extremely obnoxious. Search "Overcast" -> top ad is some crappy competitor (not even a good real competitor, but usually some sort of near-scam). It makes me think less of the competitor and Apple every time I see it, it also seems completely unnecessary. I obviously want the app I searched for. It seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people…

This is also very frustrating with branded searches on Google. It's basically extortion, where you have to buy the ads on your brand or someone else will. They excuse it by pointing to how cheap it is on a PPC basis, since the clickthrough rate and resulting quality score is so high. Great, you're only extorting a nominal amount. Thank you.

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#174

Post by Larrikin »

the_af wrote: post #167
toast0 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is as true for Nintendo anymore. The switch store is full of tons of stuff. Maybe they're not letting everything through, and they certainly aren't letting everyone make physical games, but the digital store seems like it must not have a big filter.

I don't own a Nintendo console: what's a physical game and how does it differ from a digital game?

There are some games where you can't buy a physical cartridge and Nintendo actively encourages players to buy digital versions of games that are stored on the switch by offering a discount. Personally I refuse to buy digital versions whenever I can after what happened with the Wii, but some titles I can't actually get.

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#175

Post by normalnorm »

wolco wrote: post #168
intopieces wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple should wind down their ads system (iAd) entirely. Advertisements are antithetical to what Apple stands for - privacy, premium experience, doing the right thing for users. They should lower their cut to 10% (not to 20, as the article states) and start offering curated experience bundles like they do with AppleTV.

Lowering their cut is antithetical Apple. Apple should remain at 20% and perhaps go as high as google adsense. You agree it is a premium experience that comes at a cost.

Premium experience comes at a cost because it is expensive to produce. You need good materials, you need to hire the best people, you need to take your time, etc. And you need to be free from cheap "feature factory" thinking.

The above has nothing to do with Apple's cut on other people's work. That is just exploitation and is unrelated to increasing the quality of the experience for users. On the contrary, it makes life harder for developers wanting to bet on quality and instead encourages shovleware and deception. And this is exactly the outcome one sees.

The app store experience is what is antithetical to Apple. There is nothing premium about it.

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#176

Post by im3w1l »

leonidasv wrote: post #35
californical wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although this gets tricky -- will everyone just start naming their app "Podcast player" and "Podcast 1" so that their app name is optimized to match a search term exactly? Maybe this already happens, but I can see it being hard to distinguish if the person is looking up a specific app called "podcast player" or a generic term

You're assuming that just looking for the title is everything a search engine does when it's not. It's easy to create and train a model to distinguish between brands and generic words by counting how many times a single word appears over app descriptions, for example - there are countless ways to do this. This, in turn, can neutralize the effect of naming your app after a generic word when it comes to search ranking.

How do you know it's not competitors putting the product in their descriptions enough times that it will count as generic so they can rank above? I mean you can solve that too I'm sure, but it starts becoming more complicated than sixothree originally suggested.

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#177

Post by realusername »

flatiron wrote: post #123
paulvorobyev wrote: post #110

>Apple’s biggest competition right now is the web. More and more “apps” are just thin, non-native veneers on top of web sites (cf Zoom, Slack, Steam, etc). The issue for Apple is, why would anyone choose Apple devices if the exact same apps are available on all devices? Apple should be doing everything it can to support good third-party developers that make the real Apple apps that make Apple devices unique, and prov…

Genuinely interested how you think their WebKit (which they started from KHTML back in the day) implementation has “poor support for modern browser features” I agree with browser lock in though. But I feel that iOS is so successful that they don’t treat the web as a second class citizen. It’s just WebKit...

I'm a web developer, Safari mobile feels honestly on the borderline of being abandoned, every time I look at their new Safari release, there's a least a minimum of 6 to 8 years of lagging behind Chrome and Firefox (and that's just the features we're talking about here, not basic layout, forms & css bugs they still have...). I generally spend as much time to fix Safari mobile as IE11

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#178

Post by sutterbomb »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #107
philistine wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack, renown for horrible app performance, should never be an example in any discussion about underlying architecture. It seems poor performance is a core value at the company.

I think that's a bit unfair to Slack. I've been using it for 5 years now and it's one of the most dependable apps I've ever used. When you consider how many messages and rich content it's handling, I think they are doing a fairly decent job. I wouldn't call it slow either. If anything my biggest beef with slack is sometimes the cross-device syncing isn't perfect. And I'm unable to use it offline at all.

Slack is hands down the worst app I’ve ever used in environments that aren’t very high latency.

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#179

Post by ooobit2 »

normalnorm wrote: post #175
wolco wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lowering their cut is antithetical Apple. Apple should remain at 20% and perhaps go as high as google adsense. You agree it is a premium experience that comes at a cost.

Premium experience comes at a cost because it is expensive to produce. You need good materials, you need to hire the best people, you need to take your time, etc. And you need to be free from cheap "feature factory" thinking. The above has nothing to do with Apple's cut on other people's work. That is just exploitation and is unrelated to increasing the quality of the experience for users. On the contrary, it makes l…

The entire dev process with Apple is hardly ethical. No flexibility with payment options, the constant review and redevelop process even on apps that have already established a strong history. And the upfront and continuing costs... You'd have to buy every available iPhone version on market, a Mac, the programming license, the app store license, and hope Apple doesn't just rip off your idea for a future iOS feature then kick your app out of the store entirely. I may be off on some of this, but any of it is too much.

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#180

Post by toast0 »

the_af wrote: post #167
toast0 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is as true for Nintendo anymore. The switch store is full of tons of stuff. Maybe they're not letting everything through, and they certainly aren't letting everyone make physical games, but the digital store seems like it must not have a big filter.

I don't own a Nintendo console: what's a physical game and how does it differ from a digital game?

To add on/clarify. A physical game for the switch is basically a memory card --- put it in any switch and you can play. A digital game is a download, tied to your device and/or account.
Post reply on HN