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Apple-Developer Relations

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Re: Apple-Developer Relations

#21

Post by echelon »

atonse wrote: post #2

I am deeply invested in the Apple ecosystem and yet, can’t wait for the DoJ to throw the gauntlet on the App Store. I really hope they get broken up, with the App Store being extracted into a separate business.

1000%.

Apple created the most anti-developer, anti-computing protection racket our industry has ever seen. They captured 50% of all American consumer computing and won't let you have a relationship with your customer, won't let you bill your customer without extracting obscene margin, make you jump through weird hoops, won't let you deploy at your cadence, and won't let you write software the way you want.

This shouldn't have been allowed to happen. The closed nature of the platform is abnormal and has been anticompetitive from the start, and the DOJ fell asleep at the wheel.

iPhone computing is general purpose computing and commerce. It's not video game toys.

All platforms like this should be open like Microsoft Windows.

Make no question. Apple's stance is about capturing every ingress to American consumers they possibly can so that they can tax it.

They're fleecing American companies.

DOJ has one action to take: Force Apple and Google to allow web-based installs of any software (including non-Safari web browsers!) and prevent both companies from running any form of required payment gateway.

Re: Apple-Developer Relations

#22

Post by wayneftw »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #6

I'm wondering if webapps are achieving parity with native apps. My intuition says that most of the use cases today could transfer over if they really wanted to. Does anyone have any insight into the major differences between native and web app in 2021? The biggest disparity between webapp and native used to be Notifications - but with Twilio, it appears trivial to make an arguably better notifications user flow throu…

I'd like to hear the thoughts on this of people who are arguing with me in another thread that "Apple planned for web apps to be the only apps for the iPhone until they just happened to come up with the idea for the store full of native apps".

Honestly, if you believe that Apple ever planned for iPhone to be web only you've got to buy this bridge from me. No kidding.

Apple used the "web only apps" angle as a stopgap until their SDK was ready. Then they did everything they could to ensure that web apps ran like crap without making it too obvious.

Re: Apple-Developer Relations

#23

Post by pjmlp »

mathgladiator wrote: post #10
anonymouse008 wrote: post #6

I'm wondering if webapps are achieving parity with native apps. My intuition says that most of the use cases today could transfer over if they really wanted to. Does anyone have any insight into the major differences between native and web app in 2021? The biggest disparity between webapp and native used to be Notifications - but with Twilio, it appears trivial to make an arguably better notifications user flow throu…

This is why I'm optimistic about WebAssembly, beyond time and investment, what prohibits it from achieve performance parity with native?

Politics.

This is what Flash was already capable of doing in 2011 with CrossBridge, their C++ compiler stack.

https://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/

"Unreal Engine 3 Support for Adobe Flash Player - Unreal Tournament 3"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y

Here we are 10 years later with WebAssembly still mostly stuck at MVP 1.0, browsers that bork WebGL experience thanks blacklisting, which no matter what will never go beyond OpenGL ES 3.0.

Even if WebGPU gets released tomorrow, I would like to point out that WebGL 2.0 was released in 2017 and still isn't available across all browsers.

Then there are all other native capabilities that I glanced over.

Re: Apple-Developer Relations

#24

Post by cglong »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #6

I'm wondering if webapps are achieving parity with native apps. My intuition says that most of the use cases today could transfer over if they really wanted to. Does anyone have any insight into the major differences between native and web app in 2021? The biggest disparity between webapp and native used to be Notifications - but with Twilio, it appears trivial to make an arguably better notifications user flow throu…

TikTok, Starbucks, and Lyft all have fully capable webapps. If you have an Android phone, you can "install" them directly from their websites to have a completely equivalent UX to a native app. This is super interesting when you consider the primary argument in the article (that most download funnels are driven by the app developer, not Apple).

Re: Apple-Developer Relations

#25

Post by orbz »

echelon wrote: post #21
atonse wrote: post #2

I am deeply invested in the Apple ecosystem and yet, can’t wait for the DoJ to throw the gauntlet on the App Store. I really hope they get broken up, with the App Store being extracted into a separate business.

1000%. Apple created the most anti-developer, anti-computing protection racket our industry has ever seen. They captured 50% of all American consumer computing and won't let you have a relationship with your customer, won't let you bill your customer without extracting obscene margin, make you jump through weird hoops, won't let you deploy at your cadence, and won't let you write software the way you want. This shoul…

On one hand, the developer in me agrees with you that it does make life harder. On the other hand, as a consumer I've found that I'd rather not trust developers to write software however they want. I want them to have restrictions on how much of my stuff they can access, how they can update their software and how much of a blast radius there would be from messing something up.

Re: Apple-Developer Relations

#26

Post by FridayoLeary »

post_break wrote: post #13

I used to love browsing the app store looking for cool apps. Now I can't even trust searching for the app by name because sometimes a completely different app shows up, and then there is the case of appstore ads. It's a joke.

It's a bit unfair to state that you are the only option when it comes to ios apps, to then push ads on your captive customers and provide them with a lower quality of service. iPhone is a premium product, ads have always seemed to me to be a symbol of tacky seediness, a cheap alternative for the masses. It's not in line with Apples image. At least it shouldn't be.

Re: Apple-Developer Relations

#27

Post by echelon »

orbz wrote: post #25
echelon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1000%. Apple created the most anti-developer, anti-computing protection racket our industry has ever seen. They captured 50% of all American consumer computing and won't let you have a relationship with your customer, won't let you bill your customer without extracting obscene margin, make you jump through weird hoops, won't let you deploy at your cadence, and won't let you write software the way you want. This shoul…

On one hand, the developer in me agrees with you that it does make life harder. On the other hand, as a consumer I've found that I'd rather not trust developers to write software however they want. I want them to have restrictions on how much of my stuff they can access, how they can update their software and how much of a blast radius there would be from messing something up.

Life is hairy and complicated. Every day millions of Americans jump into death chariots and we expect them to mostly be fine.

We should not err on the side of creating a locked down Fisher Price playpen for consumers. Not at the expense of our freedoms and the rest of our industry. Think about how much damage this has done to innovation because costs are redirected to Apple's coffers rather than putting more engineers behind novel ideas.

Apple is sitting on mountains -- a continental shelf -- of opportunity cost. What a waste.

Re: Apple-Developer Relations

#28

Post by lostgame »

dmitrygr wrote: post #3

> Without our apps, the iPhone has little value to most of its customers today. Looking at my iPhone I see no 3rd party apps. I use safari to access websites and eschew any service that wants me to "use our app" and doesn't have a web version.

So your use case effectively represents maybe 1% of iOS/iPadOS users? :P Realistically probably less?

Because, as a musician - I should just use the Web App version of GarageBand, right?

Because I'm sure the Web App version of GarageBand will run circles around the native version, right? :P And it'll have all the support for things like Audio Bus, USB Midi support, and USB Audio card I/O - of course. And that'll all be totally secure, too!

...

(GarageBand adds immense and completely irreplaceable value for iOS for me...it's actually the reason I use iOS/iPadOS as I can import those creations into Logic Pro on my Mac and that ease of workflow is absolutely impossible to reproduce anywhere else. I'd pay $200 for GarageBand if it wasn't shockingly free, minus the requirement to stick with iOS/iPadOS.)

Plus - who could forget about that fantastic Web-only version of ProCreate, for all the millions of hobbyist and professional designers who buy an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil for - y'know - art.

I love using the Apple Pencil to manipulate extremely high-resolution art in the browser - it never crashes and it's so much more responsive than a native app!

...

(Obviously there is not - nor ever will there be - a Web version of ProCreate. Or GarageBand. And the replacements will certainly not perform better or support awesome things like AudioBus.)

Gotta love how well Garageband, ProCreate; and all those native video games hundreds of millions of people like to play and use work in a browser on iOS - you're right - better scrap the App Store altogether!

Clearly nobody installs apps and there are no potential use cases for tens of or hundreds of millions of users to do so.

...okay, I'm done. :P

Re: Apple-Developer Relations

#29

Post by izacus »

orbz wrote: post #25
echelon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1000%. Apple created the most anti-developer, anti-computing protection racket our industry has ever seen. They captured 50% of all American consumer computing and won't let you have a relationship with your customer, won't let you bill your customer without extracting obscene margin, make you jump through weird hoops, won't let you deploy at your cadence, and won't let you write software the way you want. This shoul…

On one hand, the developer in me agrees with you that it does make life harder. On the other hand, as a consumer I've found that I'd rather not trust developers to write software however they want. I want them to have restrictions on how much of my stuff they can access, how they can update their software and how much of a blast radius there would be from messing something up.

Those two things are not fully related. Apple could (and to some extend does) design a system that keeps YOU in control without being an anti-competitive platform that prevents competition in non-OS / non-platform markets.

Preinstalling and pushing Apple Music / iCloud (not to mention giving it private entitlements the competitors can't use) is not related to the iOS security model by itself.

There's also no reason that the curator of your app store has to be the same entity that sold you your hardware - there are plenty of even more trustworthy organizations and people that could create curated stores which might be even more relevant than AppStore haphazard and inconsistent curation.

Imagine if AppStore could just be a framework where you can choose curators you trust more than a Californian megacorp.

Re: Apple-Developer Relations

#30

Post by enos_feedler »

"The “way” is already paid by the hardware — but Apple uses their position of power to double-dip."

I understand the optics of this don't look good, but is it wrong to have multiple sources of revenue derived from the "way"?

1. what happens if supply chain dynamics and smartphone market competition negatively impact the hardware margins? What happens when consumer appetite for innovation in the phone stagnates and margins collapse? This would happen because Apple couldn't leverage new hw+sw features to differentiate itself.

2. How do we know the price of the hardware today isn't offset by services revenue? service revenue disappearing might increase the upfront cost of the phone for everyone.

In either of these scenarios, if Apple got to the point of _needing_ the app store fees to make the iPhone an attractive product to build and support, they couldn't start charging in the future. It needs to be set in advance and continue. They can always decrease the fees, but cannot make them go up. It would not be fair for developers to decide on making an app as a business venture only to find out in the future there is a 30% platform. This is something that has been known and transparent since day, yet developers continue to see the value of the platform.

Just looking at it from their position

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