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Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

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Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#131
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is all three companies - Apple google Microsoft - are making their platforms worse. It’s a symptom of low competition and immense concentration of capital / labor.

Is that actually true for Microsoft? How they've evolved .NET and VS Code is amazing. You can make a PR on Microsoft's repos, someone actually pays attention, you get to talk and worth with Microsoft employees, and they merge things in. Microsoft is leaps and bounds more open than Google and Apple when it comes to development tooling.

Microsoft's developer relations are highly variable: they are great in some areas (C# and .NET Core continue to be fantastic, Visual Studio's debugger is second to none, going back to gdb after it is like banging rocks together to make fire), and awful in others (if I want to write a GUI application in Windows, what should I do to be on the idiomatic happy path? Microsoft: shrug, try one of these half-dozen half-baked frameworks. No we won't tell you which one, and that doesn't matter because it'll be deprecated in three years anyway).

This is better than the story from Apple and Google, who are just terrible consistently, but there is room for improvement.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#132
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad thing is that Apple seemed more inviting to developers before they got high on the App Store cut. Every boxed Mac OS X came with a second disc containing the SDK (Xcode has always been an unstable cow, tho). They used to publish tech notes that explained how the OS works, rather than WWDC videos with high-level overviews that feel more like advertisements. Back then they've at least made attempts to use some…

Apple has always resented 3rd party developers, right back to the Apple 2 days. They saw them as capturing value that they had created.

They said it in the Epic vs Apple litigation, something along the lines of "we create the entire App Store market", like the 3rd party developers aren't.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#133

I was going to defend Xcode and say it's not that bad... but then I read the article and realised that I have just become so accustomed to these problems that I don't consciously realise the daily hellfire that I experience. Even when you think you're immune to it, Stockholm syndrome is real. A similar article I wrote on the 'Dark Side' of Apple Development, brings up many additional issues: https://www.magiclasso.co…

Every time there is an Xcode update, I dread installing it because it will be a whole bunch of new bugs, and I just finally figured out the previous ones.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#134
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mean in a way xcode is incredibly valuable product considering anyone who wants to publish to the app store (where they collect insane rent for zero effort) needs to interact with it.

Apple probably views the product as the privilege to develop and publish apps.

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Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#135
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mean in a way xcode is incredibly valuable product considering anyone who wants to publish to the app store (where they collect insane rent for zero effort) needs to interact with it.

Apple probably views the product as the privilege to develop and publish apps.

I can confirm this. Have a relative that works for Apple. Made the mistake of complaining in front of her about their take on sales (they make six-figures annually from my app). She went off on how much they give us (including Xcode) for the privilege of having an app on their phones.

Still don't have a contact there. Would have thought I would at least get someone there to talk with if issues come up.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#138
post #55

Apple would have been avoided by developers if they weren't part of the smartphone duopoly. The tools and processes are just that bad. Now Google has decided to make theirs even worse than Apple at least when it comes to publishing in the play store.

Aren't Google just matching Apple with the signing and notarization bullshit? Except Google is free?

Yes, but this doesn't mean we should put up with it. After this comes into effect in 2027 or so, you won't be able to install an app on your Google-certified phone without Google knowing, just like on iOS. What happened to user control?

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#139
I don't develop for Apple platforms so I don't deal with Xcode (apparently thank god), but all of this reminds me of web development back in the early days of Internet Explorer. Until Mozilla/Opera/Safari/Chrome started taking market share did the development information/stability really start to drastically improve. I'm inferring that it's basically impossible to build tooling for Apple because it is all proprietary/undocumented, so their own tools have no competition. It blows my mind that you can't CI/CD builds on servers readily requiring people to setup weird mac mini server farms since the whole xserver line died years ago.

Ballmer's "developers developers developers" moment will forever be burned into my brain, but that wasn't wrong on a strategy level.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#140
I had the same issue and thought it was just a skill issue on my part. It’s good to know that other developers are experiencing the same problems.

I also felt like I had to install the latest iOS emulators almost every week, and everything lagged on the 8GB RAM base model MacBook Air.

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