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Fear of Apple

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Re: Fear of Apple

#41

Post by dognotdog »

Indie developers have often been at the whim of Apple, throughout its history. But prior to the iPhone, Apple was small, as was the developer 'community' (a more apt moniker then, than now). Apple did control the platform, but not the sales channel. A few evangelists and engineers were enough to sustain a dialog with the developer community. And indie software then consisted of mostly unique applications, often brilliant and unique to the platform, and it was important for the platform to have those apps.

With the introduction of the iPhone, this all changed. It was (is) a gold rush. The number of developers grew from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand. At first, the Mac developers profited from the uptick in Mac popularity, and some could place iOS apps early in the iOS App Store, leveraging their familiarity with OS X and Objective C. But the sheer number of new developers meant that the dialog almost completely broke down.

The App Store is a walled garden, but not only in the usual sense. It's also a wall between Apple and the developers, and the image of a horde of zombie like bazaar salesmen trying to scale it is quite apt to describe the situation. Developers are no longer rewarded for making the best or most beatiful apps. Be fast, be loud, be a winner. A little slip, and you're back to the bottom of the pile, or with a bit of bad luck, out of the game.

Apple is in a position of power, and they seemingly no longer have to care about some small indie dev's app, it's now no more than a drop in the bucket of the App Store ecosystem. So they don't expend any more effort on developer relations than absolutely necessary to keep the bucket overflowing. It make business sense. At least in the short term.

Apple is now in a working mode like any other corp which has become too large for its own good. The shareholders are mostly in it for the money, so they have no qualms about milking the company for short term gains. There is no longer a man at the helm of the company who had a vision and was willing to fight for it, and wasn't just looking to make a quick buck. Tim Cook is doing the best job he can, no doubt, but he is in a completely different position than Steve Jobs was. The tyranny of money is arguably worse than the tyranny of Steve Jobs could ever have been. Not that his presence would fix most problems, but he was seemingly the only one capable of bypassing Apple's corporate machinery to make things happen.

So it's not surprising that developers are frustrated. The decline in software quality is undeniable. The App Store process is a running joke. The App Store UI is absolutely horrible. It simply doesn't scale to the hundreds of thousands of apps it now contains. And for the less scrupulous, it is still too easy to game, more to the harm of other developers, than their own gain, too.

Those in prominent positions in the App Store will do their best to stay in Apple's graces while it lasts, and this is Apple's current version of the Reality Distortion Field. The developers don't fear the company itself, but are continually on such thin ice that they fear putting their foot down too forcefully.

[Good god, what a rant. Despite all the frustration, I seem to be caught in the RDF as well.]

Re: Fear of Apple

#42

Post by ctdonath »

Animats wrote: 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 often see the same pattern in both directions on hot-button topics. There's a burst of short comments from those more emotionally for/against something, with the total score absolute value (up/down voting) becoming large enough to get the attention of the greater number of more thoughtful opposing-view people who aren't so wound up about it upvote & write longer comments, first to counteract the initial burst, and then to support the growing number of thoughtful responses.

I've seen it many times on my own posts: might get a -2 shortly after posting, but then +10 or so about an hour later. (Seems I often push buttons others agree need pushing.)

Re: Fear of Apple

#43

Post by urda »

chrisper wrote: post #6
sschueller wrote: post #4

There are a few who have been banned[1] from Apple events etc. because of a negative review of something Apple made. [1] http://www.computerbild.de/artikel/cb-News-Handy-Apple-boyco...

I don't know if anything BILD is a valid source.

It is not that's why.

Re: Fear of Apple

#44

Post by m3rc »

ctdonath wrote: post #42
Animats wrote: 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 often see the same pattern in both directions on hot-button topics. There's a burst of short comments from those more emotionally for/against something, with the total score absolute value (up/down voting) becoming large enough to get the attention of the greater number of more thoughtful opposing-view people who aren't so wound up about it upvote & write longer comments, first to counteract the initial burst, and…

doesn't "pushing buttons others agree need pushing" just mean "participating in an echo chamber"?

Re: Fear of Apple

#45

Post by snowwrestler »

Animats wrote: 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 sometimes see swings in votes on my comments, although not such a fixed one-hour schedule.

(And I'd challenge your perception of that schedule, unless you're carefully timing every post. Confirmation bias can be strong--once you have the idea that it's an hour, you will tend to remember the times that were close to an hour, and forget the ones that weren't.)

The downvote/upvote patterns I've seen seem to be more related to the time of day. Comments get voted down during the workday by people who are on HN during the workday; but sometimes they'll get voted up in the evening, presumably by people who only check into HN after work.

I see a similar pattern on the weekend--vote trends on Saturday afternoon will sometimes reverse on Sunday night, again I assume because folks too busy to post during the weekend are checking out HN before bed. In general, I find the quality of moderation on HN to be worse on the weekend.

There also seems to be a "heat of the moment" effect, where posts that go against the prevailing wisdom get downvoted right away, but then voted back up hours later. I assume that is because people who read the discussion hours later can take a more measured view of the whole discussion.

Re: Fear of Apple

#46

Post by jasode »

jmduke wrote: post #17

This was a much better article than I was anticipating. (A lot of Apple criticism is either shallow or vitriolic, I guess a side effect of inspiring so much fervor on either end of the spectrum.) My new favorite anecdote of Apple's deficiencies in the services side of things is how the App Store and iTunes Connect was just down for at least half a day a couple weeks back, with no visibility except a press release: ht…

>Still, it makes sense that Apple would continue to deprioritize developer relations (either implicitly or explicitly.)

Yes. I think it also makes sense to remind ourselves of how Apple and Microsoft started in the 1970s. They have very different origin stories.

When Bill Gates and Paul Allen were burning the midnight oil for their first successful Microsoft product, it was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair computer. It was a product for programmers. Yes, Microsoft went on to dominate with operating systems (first DOS, then Windows) but they have "programmers" within their DNA. The CEO of the company (Bill Gates) was an ex-programmer and that perspective cascaded all the way down as direct and indirect decisions in what they did. People mocked Steve Ballmer's stage antics about "developers developers developers" but Microsoft really did pay attention to programmers like no other major corporation. The high praise of Visual Studio (in comparison to other IDEs such as Xcode, Eclipse, etc) is one testament to this. So are dev friendly connections with their internal programmers such as active blog posts and channel9.msdn.com featuring informal whiteboard coding sessions.

Contrast with Apple. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were burning the midnight oil assembling the Apple I to sell to consumers. Wozniak was a programmer but the coding was incidental to making the Apple computer work. (E.g. his triumphant story of programming the floppy disk controller to work correctly.) They were selling end-user hardware and not a programmer's product like Microsoft. In 2011, none of the top 3 guys (Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Jony Ive) were programmers. Craig Federighi is an ex-programmer but Apple doesn't seem like the kind of company that would hand the reigns over to him if Tim Cook stepped down. Craig is a powerful figure at Apple but obviously, he doesn't have the clout that Bill Gates did at Microsoft. The way Apple originated in 1976 has had a ripple effect all the way to the present day in 2015. It guided their org structure and their attitudes towards 3rd-party developers. As a consequence, we should expect blogs in 2015 complaining about their "hostility" towards developers. It's just the way Apple has always been.

As for the issue of too few developers making money in the App Store, I have an opinion that programmers are not going to want to hear: Let go of the idea that you'll get significant income from the App Store. Consider the few megahits that happened (beer drinking app, fart app, Flappy Bird, etc) as outliers and lottery ticket winnings. Sort of like the guy that sold 1-pixel-per-dollar on a 1 megapixel billboard when the web first appeared.[1]

I believe the only realistic way to view the App Stores is to think of it as an adjunct function to something else that makes you money. In other words, you just can't write a college study iOS app for $1.99 and expect income but instead, you create a whole college assistance website and the iPhone app is just one gateway to that functionality. It's the website that has subscribers and generates the major revenue. It's sort of like the "enterprise" model. American Airlines doesn't "sell" their iOS app; they sell plane tickets and the $0.00 app is just their way for customers to conveniently generate boarding passes, check gate times, etc.

That's the financial picture I've come to accept from the App Store and I recommend programmers consider it to avoid heartache. There's no need to complain about getting a "bigger piece of the pie" from the App Store because there is no (predictable) pie of any significance to fight over. I put predictable as a qualifier because I'm not dismissing that the megahits can make a lot of money. You just can't depend on it.

[1]http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

EDITED to fix spelling errors.

Re: Fear of Apple

#47

Post by josu »

m3rc wrote: post #28
Animats wrote: 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 p…

I believe that the HN crowd is educated enough not to fall for cheap manichaeism. It is true that Apple is a brand that tends to polarize opinions, but if a critic against Apple is well backed I don't think that people that usually support Apple would downvote it just out of spite or loyalty.

Re: Fear of Apple

#48

Post by snowwrestler »

raesene4 wrote: post #14
gress wrote: 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.

The popular press does not perceive Android to be the leader in their number one metric, driving pageviews/rageviews.

Re: Fear of Apple

#49

Post by oddevan »

gress wrote: 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.

Exactly. That was the crux of Arment's "regret" of his article. It wasn't that he was critical of Apple, it was that he said it in such a way that the tech press in general was able to quote him on stupid "hit pieces" on Apple. It wasn't his original article per se, but the way that original article was used.

Re: Fear of Apple

#50

Post by FireBeyond »

mikeash wrote: post #34
smackfu wrote: 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.

The thing is, it's completely wrong. Running to the press works great when Apple screws up.

No. There's a big qualifier.

Running to the press works great, /if and only if/, you have enough of a following or already have that groundswell of popular opinion behind you.

If not, be prepared to be either ignored, 'shut down', or get the immediate reprieve you were seeking, and then after the media has died down, run into a brick wall.

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