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

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

#201

Post by wilshipley »

ericflo wrote: post #97

People who are worried about Apple's review process being arbitrary and onerous have no idea what's in store for them when VR/AR becomes more mainstream. Facebook's Oculus store is more of a "don't call us, we'll call you" and it's not getting better - they're actively training users to want this type of curation. The smartphone era will quickly be seen as the Good Old Days where publishing was self-serve at all. Bas…

Honestly I prefer a curated store. I’ve had discussions with people who work at the Apple App Store about having only curated apps show up by default, but anyone “rejected” from the curated list can still put their app up, they just have to give the direct App Store URL for people to find their app.

I’d love this, myself, as a customer and as a developer. But, also, I’m arrogant enough to assume I’d be one of the curated.

-Wil

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

#203

Post by wilshipley »

mantap wrote: post #106
ericflo wrote: post #97

People who are worried about Apple's review process being arbitrary and onerous have no idea what's in store for them when VR/AR becomes more mainstream. Facebook's Oculus store is more of a "don't call us, we'll call you" and it's not getting better - they're actively training users to want this type of curation. The smartphone era will quickly be seen as the Good Old Days where publishing was self-serve at all. Bas…

When the iPhone was first released there was no App Store. Many people asked for one. Eventually Apple relented and told developers to... make web apps for the iPhone instead. This wasn't enough, so eventually eventually they released the App Store. Somewhere alone the line the iPhone was also jailbroken and users with the jailbreak could install their own software. The point is that a general purpose computing devic…

I was also one of the people who lobbied for the original App Store. Obviously, we won that fight. (But also I knew more people at Apple back then.)

-W

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

#204

Post by andrekandre »

musicale wrote: post #84
slimsag wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even $0.99 is "expensive" for most people these days In my experience, this is not really true - most people (including myself) just cannot find these apps and instead see only subscription ones which seems to be the new trend. The last 7 apps I downloaded on iOS wanted a $5-10/mo monthly subscription, and I literally _cannot_ purchase the app. And I'm talking about really basic zero-infrastructure apps: - 2 transc…

> most people (including myself) just cannot find these apps and instead see only subscription ones which seems to be the new trend. Yes!! The App Store search function is useless. I want affordable paid apps without ads, subscriptions, or IAPs.

i cant tell you how many times i could not reactivate an in-app-purchase when getting a new mac; might as well just paid upfront... i think apple really messed up iap by having the dev-side do all the transactions/authentication...

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

#205

Post by realusername »

Nextgrid wrote: post #191
realusername wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What kind of features are we talking about though? As a user I don’t see what I really miss out on by using Safari. If anything, the lack of user-hostile features such as push notifications is a good thing.

You don't see you're missing out because there's people spending hours to adapt the website to make it work...

For the features, I could mention from what I ran into myself: input[type="number"] (yes, they still have not fixed their implementation after all those years...), the full screen api, Media Source Extensions, css ::selection, Intersection Observers, autofocus (yes, even that does not work), I could add a lot more here.

And that's not mentioning the various bugs you have on this platforms, again some example of what I ran into:

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18047353/fix-css-hover-o... (yes, you read it well, even tapping on an element does not work as normal)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11768364/svg-scaling-iss... (svg rendering issues)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52826005/workaround-for-... (iframe focus bug)

There's plenty of weird quirks like this everywhere. It's never completely broken but it's pretty comparable to the time you spend fixing things on IE11 honestly.

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

#206

Post by wilshipley »

on_and_off wrote: post #157

Strongly agree with most of the points, but not all. Disagreements : - App updates. I think that the subscription model would be pretty good for apps actually if you could have a micro transaction system. Great quality apps are constantly maintained and often have recurring costs (API, servers, etc). Selling apps for a one time fee does not fit that well in this model. A nominal fee for app updates kinda solves part…

The subscription model fails in a lot of ways, for everyone. For example, my next app is an interior design / home control app. How would the customer feel if they stopped paying and didn’t have access to their house any more? Most people would be pissed. I don’t want to hold my customers’ data for ransom and cut them off if they stop paying me my extortion money.

I’m pretty sure we can do micro-subscription already — I could ask Apple to just charge $1 a month, that’s pretty micro. (I don’t think we can do pennies, yet.) But that model doesn’t really work for all types of apps.

For instance, I estimate about half the people who buy version one of my app will enter their floorplan into their computer, place their furniture, be happy, and never use the app again (until I upgrade it to offer home control, as well). If those users had the option to just pay me 5 cents for the month they used the app, I’d have to get 16 million of these users to make back the money I’ve put into this app.

That’s not really feasible.

-—

My point with the web is that pass-through web “apps” on iOS are the same as pass-through web “apps” on Android, so Apple is losing a competitive advantage if they kill of their native developers.

If you’ve got Slack or Chrome or a banking app or a finance app or a health app on your iPhone, you could be running the exact same app on Android. So why did you spend extra on an iPhone? Apple needs to treat its independent, native developers better because we are the only ones who are making products that are Apple-only, and show off all the cool things iOS and macOS can do.

-Wil

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

#207

Post by wilshipley »

danielrhodes wrote: post #34

I was curious about the arguments for not including upgrade pricing on the App Store. Apple maintains that upgrade pricing is a relic of shrink wrapped software and subscriptions are better. I lean softly towards Apple on this one. A few reasons I can think of for why subscriptions are preferred over upgrade pricing: - The app developer can keep making money over a longer period of time. - Generally means somebody ca…

I responded to some of these in a different response, I’ll edit it a bit here, but my points are the same:

The subscription model fails in a lot of ways, for everyone. For example, my next app is an interior design / home control app. How would the customer feel if they stopped paying and didn’t have access to their house any more? Most people would be pissed.

I don’t want to hold my customers’ data for ransom and cut them off if they stop paying me my extortion money.

Also, I estimate about half the people who buy version one of my app will enter their floorplan into their computer, place their furniture, be happy, and never use the app again (until I upgrade it to offer home control, as well). If those users just pay like a buck each and cancel after the first month, I’m not going to make my money back for the six years I’ve put into this app.

--

New stuff:

I’d argue that it’s much more important Apple let developers put out one-time-per-customer, timed, fully-functional demos.

Developers with successful products are already incentivized to keep updating them. What I’ve found again and again is that version two of a product will do better than version one.

Adobe’s been selling Photoshop since I was in college, and it’s not like they didn’t upgrade their app. Same with Intuit / Quicken.

-Wil

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

#209

Post by wilshipley »

unix_fan wrote: post #16
mod50ack wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit sad. I feel like mobile gaming is in large part dead because of these stupid pay-to-play games. Back in the early days of the iPhone, even the iPhone games were one-time $2 games (and good for that!), while you had the DS where games were $20+ (often more). Now mobile games of quality are mostly dead.

unfortunately, the market isn’t willing to pay for high-quality games.

I buy a lot of $60 games for my PS4 every year. There’s a market for quality, but the owners of the platform have to support it. Apple has instead fostered a race to the bottom.

-W

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

#210

Post by wilshipley »

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…

My argument wasn’t for ruining the web. It was saying, look, there are a ton of apps out there that are written (usually using emulation layers) for basically all platforms, and if Apple kills off all its native, independent developers, those are the ONLY apps that will exist.

At that point, there won’t be much reason to buy Apple products. Of course, Apple says they have the best products and ecosystem, blah blah blah. (And it’s an ecosystem I largely like, to be fair.) But Apple should not become so arrogant that they think customers will flock to buy their products based only on the Apple’s own software.

Innovation comes from the small, independent developers. The first web browser for Mac OS X, the first PDF viewer for Mac OS X, the first image viewer for Mac OS X, and the first video barcode scanner on ANY platform were all created outside Apple.

Also, Pages and Keynote are rewrites of Pages and Concurrence (apps created by Lighthouse Design for NeXTstep) done _by the some of the same people who did the originals_.

It’s easy once you the hit mega-billion-dollar success level to forget how many of your products and ideas didn’t come from inside your company. But also fatal.

-Wil

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