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Apple Developer Update

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Re: Apple Developer Update

#21

Post by wonderzombie »

spdy wrote: post #4

Only Apple can get away with something like this. "Hey guys sorry we where down for days but now everything is fine again enjoy" No aftermath report. No details on anything.

FWIW the details, such as they are, came earlier:

In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.

Re: Apple Developer Update

#22

Post by wonderzombie »

theschnabler wrote: post #14
rimantas wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get a copy of "Mythical man month". Btw, where did you get an idea, that Apple has limited resources? What I hear is that they have really small teams.

They have $150 billion in the bank. If that's not "unlimited", what else is?

Immortality, I say half-seriously, since you can't spend time faster than anyone else.

You can't add more people to a project without slowing everything down. What else would you spend your money on, esp if you have enough that investing it may actually give you a higher ROI? You'd be well-advised to play the long game.

Re: Apple Developer Update

#23

Post by mojuba »

ohwp wrote: post #19
mojuba wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more often a matter of choice of the next tier in the "supply chain", i.e. my customers' choice, not my own. I still love Apple's hardware, as well as their design decisions in a broad sense. Everything they do almost never disappoints in terms of novelty and coolness. The only fundamental question in this context is, is developer lock-in part of what makes Apple Apple? I doubt so.

I don't think there is any developer lock-in. As you are saying it's the customers choice. When customers have more choice they can choose to go for an OS without Apple-control.

There is a lock-in. We invest a lot of time in learning an ecosystem with a very specific programming language, quirks, rules, practices, problems - oh, and the AppStore approval process. On top of that, one day we suddenly discover we also depend on the availability of Apple's cert server.

Customers/consumers are not locked in in this regard, and generally they don't care whether or to what extent developers are.

Re: Apple Developer Update

#24

Post by autodidakto »

dragontamer wrote: post #20
spdy wrote: post #4

Only Apple can get away with something like this. "Hey guys sorry we where down for days but now everything is fine again enjoy" No aftermath report. No details on anything.

Can they really get away with it? Will people actually put up with this kind of treatment?

iOS 7 is requiring lots of work from app developers, to both fix what ios 7 broke in their app and to make their UIs fit in with the new design language apple is pushing. (To be fair, there are new APIs some apps are benefiting from).

Developers response to the need to do a lot of work for no gain? "This is a great opportunity!"

Anyway, it comes down to who has the power in the relationship. Though both parties are obviously necessary, the devs need Apple more than Apple needs the devs. Add to that the fact that the biggest devs are making tons of money, what's the point in rocking the boat?

Re: Apple Developer Update

#25

Post by grey-area »

mojuba wrote: post #2

Most of the services still don't work for me. Can't generate certs/profiles, no forums. I get redirected to the maintenance page from most of the links with very few exceptions. Also no response from customer support so far. Based in Ireland, if that matters. No, it's not a browser cache issue and no, I'm not a new subscriber. I seriously don't understand why would a security breach take weeks to fix. Complete re-wri…

Can't generate certs/profiles, no forums.

Cert generations and forums are both working for me here in the UK, and are up according to their status page. Perhaps worth contacting their support to ask about your access? Have you tried curl or similar just to check?

Re the forums, I do find SO far better than the apple dev forums in terms of quality of answers, at least for released SDK questions.

I too am curious as to what exactly has gone wrong, but there are a few possibilities which could explain the delays. I doubt Apple will ever come clean. They shouldn't be rewriting code save essential security patches, but then perhaps they've had to upgrade some frameworks or libraries to get security patches and were so far behind that this required extensive rewrites of their code-base?

I did notice that they lost some certs generated near the interruption as well, so perhaps their backups situation is a mess (really they should have had nightlies leading to no data loss), and perhaps they had an accretion of ad-hoc services running on servers that were never restarted or rebuilt, leading to chaos when they had to rebuild them all at once and try to restore from clean backups. That could take quite a while to sort out.

Given the number of developers using these services daily, I'm really surprised as well at how long Apple took to handle this.

Re: Apple Developer Update

#26

Post by ctdonath »

theschnabler wrote: post #6

This is a serious question: Can someone explain, why this takes Apple - who have "unlimited" resources - this long to fix?

Throwing more resources at a late project makes it later.

Nine women can't make a baby in a month.

And just because you're Apple doesn't mean throwing a billion dollars at a major security breach will fix it completely and correctly in less than a week.

Re: Apple Developer Update

#27

Post by ctdonath »

alimoeeny wrote: post #18
alimoeeny wrote: post #8

WTF, That's all I can say.

No Honestly, I'd appreciate it if you can shed light on this, imagine it was a smaller company like github, or dropbox, they would have come forward and explained things, CEO or CTO would have posted to their blog, explaining what happend and what the plan was, Apple does not even have a link to that status page from their developer.apple.com page.

Such explanations make people feel better - but don't actually solve the problem. Apple's focus is do it, do it right, and don't involve anyone who doesn't facilitate getting it done.

Re: Apple Developer Update

#28

Post by shaggyfrog »

spdy wrote: post #4

Only Apple can get away with something like this. "Hey guys sorry we where down for days but now everything is fine again enjoy" No aftermath report. No details on anything.

Member Center is one of four services still not back up again. "Everything" is not fine yet, and they haven't stated anything to that effect. Why don't you wait for the issue to be resolved before expecting a post-mortem?

Re: Apple Developer Update

#29

Post by clarky07 »

ohwp wrote: post #19
mojuba wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more often a matter of choice of the next tier in the "supply chain", i.e. my customers' choice, not my own. I still love Apple's hardware, as well as their design decisions in a broad sense. Everything they do almost never disappoints in terms of novelty and coolness. The only fundamental question in this context is, is developer lock-in part of what makes Apple Apple? I doubt so.

I don't think there is any developer lock-in. As you are saying it's the customers choice. When customers have more choice they can choose to go for an OS without Apple-control.

They can, but they aren't really. Why would any consumer anywhere care if the apple dev forums are down for 2 weeks. Nobody knows, cares, or has any reason to know or care. less than 1% of people likely. Readers of HN do not account for all buyers of smartphones as it happens.

Re: Apple Developer Update

#30

Post by wmeredith »

dragontamer wrote: post #20
spdy wrote: post #4

Only Apple can get away with something like this. "Hey guys sorry we where down for days but now everything is fine again enjoy" No aftermath report. No details on anything.

Can they really get away with it? Will people actually put up with this kind of treatment?

As long as Apple owns the best platform in terms of potential profitability for developers, yes.
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