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Fear of Apple

elischiff.com

21–30 of 276 posts

Re: Fear of Apple

#21
post #15

This is the same Apple who has a published document saying: "If your App is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps." https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ When this company controls your livelihood, you are wise to take a very broad view of what "trash us" means.

Ha - I thought you were paraphrasing and editorializing, but it actually says that. I'm surprised they're so blunt & honest about that.

Re: Fear of Apple

#22
There's a strange phenomenon if you make negative remarks about Apple on forums such as HN or Slashdot. They tend to be voted up shortly after posting. Then, about an hour later, a lot of downvotes come in. I've seen this several times, with a consistent response delay of about an hour. After the downvotes at one hour, more upvotes may come in; the downvote effort is a one-time event.

Anyone else seeing this?

Re: Fear of Apple

#23
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the press doesn't make hit pieces about brands that are not perceived as the leader to be toppled.

Given that in the mobile field, Android is perceived as the leader, this line of thinking doesn't really seem to hold.

[deleted]

Re: Fear of Apple

#24
While I agree with the basic thrust of the article (Apple is not your friend, is often vindictive in response to criticism and could do more to help developers), I always feel when reading App Store articles that there's quite an odd underlying assumption, namely that Apple somehow owes all developers a living and has it within its power to achieve this if only it wanted.

Please correct me if my history is wrong but I don't think being an independent software developer has been anything but a high risk and/or low profit endeavor. It's not like everything was just great for indies until Apple came along and devalued software. On the contrary, I feel the App Store has done more to level the playing field for indies than anything before it.

Discoverability is not a solved problem for any product or service apart from massive advertising expenditure, which is why "big labels" come to exist. It's not like Apple is holding back on a solution out of spite. Is it supposed to routinely feature each of the million apps on the store?

In a short space of time, the App Store has become a mature market of too many people chasing after too little money. This isn't some kind of outlier in capitalism. It's an entirely predictable pattern of consolidation that we've seen time and time again.

The only unusual thing is that the independent developers got invited the party in the first place without having to worry about payment or delivery infrastructure.

Re: Fear of Apple

#25
post #22

There's a strange phenomenon if you make negative remarks about Apple on forums such as HN or Slashdot. They tend to be voted up shortly after posting. Then, about an hour later, a lot of downvotes come in. I've seen this several times, with a consistent response delay of about an hour. After the downvotes at one hour, more upvotes may come in; the downvote effort is a one-time event. Anyone else seeing this?

[deleted]

Re: Fear of Apple

#26
post #3
post #2

This piece ignores the obvious. These people aren't afraid of their own criticisms of Apple. They are afraid that their criticisms will be magnified and distorted by the press and used as the basis of hit-pieces, and that this will reflect badly on them. This isn't fear of Apple. It's legitimate fear of what the press will do with what they say.

Doesn't wash. Trick question, why is it that they are not afraid about what the press will do with their snarky comments on say, Google, Microsoft, Samsung or Android?

For some of the more notable bloggers, because everyone knows they're on Team Apple. They aren't just people who have a lot of Apple products, they're people who have significantly bought into Apple's worldview and culture. Since tech punditry as a whole is very tribal, trashing the other teams regularly is par for the course, but trashing your own team is seen as a betrayal, an extraordinary event, a reaction to the company's own betrayal of the pundit's heightened trust. The latter is newsworthy, the former is not.

(While this mentality is strong in Apple-land, it certainly has its place among Google partisans as well, among others...)

Re: Fear of Apple

#27
I know somebody who is close with one of the people mentioned in the article. It's strange to me that people can even be so devoted to Apple to start with, but beside that, it's terrible to see how Apple's callousness is disillusioning even their most loyal developers. It's not a good situation, and when I ask "but why?!", nobody has any answers. It just seems senseless.

Re: Fear of Apple

#28
post #22

There's a strange phenomenon if you make negative remarks about Apple on forums such as HN or Slashdot. They tend to be voted up shortly after posting. Then, about an hour later, a lot of downvotes come in. I've seen this several times, with a consistent response delay of about an hour. After the downvotes at one hour, more upvotes may come in; the downvote effort is a one-time event. Anyone else seeing this?

I see it with pretty much any divisive opinion. People who don't share the opinion in the original low score comment don't pay it any attention and don't vote, but those who do share that opinion upvote it in a sort of comradery display. Then the comment gets higher up on the page, and the people who disagree now see it as a sentiment that people are actually discussing, and downvote it. In places like HN where the pro-Apple camp far outnumbers the anti-Apple camp, that leads to the comment being downvoted into oblivion.

Additionally, on HN you have the added strange behavior of the downvote button needing to be unlocked. Since the current prevailing attitude is very Apple-fanboy-ish the people that choose to stay around long enough to actually get the downvote tend to be those who agree with the pro-Apple sentiment, and those who dislike Apple (or any popular thing) tend to leave or aren't active enough to get their downvote button.

Re: Fear of Apple

#29
post #15

This is the same Apple who has a published document saying: "If your App is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps." https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ When this company controls your livelihood, you are wise to take a very broad view of what "trash us" means.

Ha - I thought you were paraphrasing and editorializing, but it actually says that. I'm surprised they're so blunt & honest about that.

It's written in a much different voice from most of Apple's stuff.

Re: Fear of Apple

#30
post #15

This is the same Apple who has a published document saying: "If your App is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps." https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ When this company controls your livelihood, you are wise to take a very broad view of what "trash us" means.

It's worse than that - sometimes "trashing them" (i.e., writing a dryly-worded blog post simply stating events that transpired with no hint of anger) is the only thing that helps.
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