In my experience the app store (Mac iOS) has been terrible also for another reason. Due to brexit we relocated from UK to another EU country. There was no way to easily change the country associated with our account, we had to request it and the first meaningful reply arrived 1 year later. This is incredibly problematic from any business perspective (accounting, legal, etc.).
We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems
211–220 of 454 posts
Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
apt-get and yum and pacman and the rest do not enforce containerization.
Which is why some distros like Ubuntu are moving to replace them.
Not entirely, Flatpak is not intended for the base system, only for applications. Snap is AFAIK but probably not because Canonical wants to sandbox the OS from itself.
Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems
#213Actually; now that I think about it, from a user perspective I also really dislike the App Store. I used to _love_ it, I would check weekly for new things, maybe there was some new shiny (often beautiful) program to do something really well. The experience was on the 'better than passable' side, nobodies favourite interface maybe, but certainly not terrible. But I actually avoid the App Store these days, both on MacO…
> But I actually avoid the App Store these days, both on MacOS and my iPhone. I never really noticed but I just slowly stopped installing new applications from there That sounds less like avoiding and more like not using. I think this is natural. When the App Store first came out, apple planted the idea in our head that we needed new ways to use our machines. But unless you are a new user, it’s likely you’ve hit an e…
I’ve noticed something different. The apps on the app store used to be good. I’m not sure how or why but the apps on the iOS app store are _terrible_. For any given function, there appears to be no good option on the app store compared to, say, iOS app store 4 years ago (or android around the same time, the last time I used it). This is entirely on apple and not the developers, as Apple are the curators and the developers have already demonstrated they can make good apps.
Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the iPhone is still around, whereas Symbian isn't. Possibly proving that iOS (and the hardware it runs on) was what consumers wanted in the mid-2000's and onward?
Had Elop not destroyed Symbian business, history would have taken a different path, nothing to do with iOS. https://insights.dice.com/2013/09/25/a-timely-revision-of-el... Symbian with Qt was already on the right path to win the hearts of many developers.
Symbian was in trouble in 2008 - two years before Elop became CEO of Nokia. It wasn't user-friendly. Ditto for Blackberry.
iOS and Android wiped the floor with Symbian and BB in terms of ease-of-use.
"..the inscrutable difficulty of navigating menus on Nokia's Symbian phones": https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/10/10/how-apples-iphone...
Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want things sandboxed for sure but I definitely don't want to be forced to use App Store. In reality App Stores are bad, too much enforced centralization. Takes the power out of the user's hands.
> In reality App Stores are bad, too much enforced centralization. This holds for any kind of store, from supermarkets to Amazon.
What's the alternative?
Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems
#216Actually; now that I think about it, from a user perspective I also really dislike the App Store. I used to _love_ it, I would check weekly for new things, maybe there was some new shiny (often beautiful) program to do something really well. The experience was on the 'better than passable' side, nobodies favourite interface maybe, but certainly not terrible. But I actually avoid the App Store these days, both on MacO…
Nature has dark patterns if 2% chance of popularity is the threshold to qualify. Many other markets I see converge on a few huge players too, retail, food, hotels, software, banks, etc.
The difference is the Apple app store is not nature. They make a point of curating the app store. When the results are bad and getting worse there is only one player to blame.
Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very hard. Supporting API + UI changes is not easy. Microsoft is not doing it (Skype etc) so why should small teams do it. We don't just program we run BUSINESS.
Can you explain the Microsoft bit? There's an ocean of difference between Microsoft and Apple. You can pretty much pick any MS API from the past 20 years and it'll still work on Windows 10.
Microsoft is moving away from that model. The cost of rapid release cycles for Windows is dropping the testing and compatibility work that was done in the past.
You see the impact on a few things like Office and SCCM today. As the legacy windows platforms fade, it will become a thing in other areas. My guess is you’ll see more “fixed in Azure only” scenarios to drive demand for those products, and act as a sales funnel for complementary services.
Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Had Elop not destroyed Symbian business, history would have taken a different path, nothing to do with iOS. https://insights.dice.com/2013/09/25/a-timely-revision-of-el... Symbian with Qt was already on the right path to win the hearts of many developers.
Symbian was in trouble in 2008 - two years before Elop became CEO of Nokia. It wasn't user-friendly. Ditto for Blackberry. iOS and Android wiped the floor with Symbian and BB in terms of ease-of-use. "..the inscrutable difficulty of navigating menus on Nokia's Symbian phones": https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/10/10/how-apples-iphone...
This is an infuriating topic to read about because everybody seems to be varying levels of uninformed.
I worked at Nokia's R&D facility in Ruoholahti briefly in 2011, so I got inducted into the inner sanctum of history regarding the phones.
Symbian was designed for very anemic hardware, there were very tight constraints it's a marvel that the thing ran on what it did. The iPhones first CPU was at least an order of magnitude (and then double it again) more powerful than what Symbian was designed on.
the iPhone, famously did not meet any of the internal tests at Nokia, no drop test, battery life tests nor usability tests for blind people passed at all.
Basically from all avenues it looked dead on arrival.
However, it was obviously _not_ dead on arrival, and so Nokia started looking at things from a "UX first" perspective, the engineering culture was still around though, so, not a major "product" team or graphics design team to be found on the floors of the R&D facility.
But they started this effort _after_ the iPhone had launched, and these projects take a long time.
That's what Maemo was. And it was later merged with Intels efforts and named MeeGo. And everyone who used that system seemed to really enjoy it.
It was, indeed, killed in its crib by Elop. Although to be truly fair, the iPhone and Android were very incumbent at that point.
Symbian was considered obsolete or deprecated internally, not for lack of very intelligent design, but because people seemed to care for things other than that Nokia had believed people cared for.
Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spam and malware destroyed the open experimental Internet.
Only partially. Spam can be filtered, as PG himself was early to point out, and malware can be countered with better security. This could have been fixed, given enough time. The kill shot, instead, has been delivered by ad-sponsored media; clickbait, fake news, mass rage-storms, fake reviews, etc.
Advertising as a business model causes real damage to the open internet: advertisers censor perfectly good sites because they object to something in there. Slowly but surely, a wide spectrum of ideas and self-expression gets reduced to nothing but sanitized advertiser-friendly content. People can and do censor speech they don't like by targeting the advertisers backing the host.
Re: We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems
#220I like the App Store because it handles automatic updates pretty well. Then again these days with sparkle, the apps I use do update, so it's not a big advantage for Apple. And how do I know sparkle works so well? Well whenever a dev has an app both in the store and directly downloadable from their site I choose the latter. The price is the same, the functionality is the same (or sometimes more) but the dev gets 30% m…
The sandboxing of apps is a nice benefit, though. I can be reasonably confident apps won't conflict with each other and that they're interfacing cleanly and minimally with the host OS.
Perhaps not the best example, but I set up Wireguard recently. On Linux, this involves building and installing a kernel module, and directly modifying the host's networking configuration. On Mac, I can install it from the App Store, and I know any networking configuration is handled through Apple's high level APIs (I've built a VPN-based Mac App Store app before).
Alternatively, you might install Tunnelblick, a Mac app that wraps OpenVPN and is distributed outside the App Store. It'll end up running scripts like these, as necessary to configure networking on the host: * https://github.com/Tunnelblick/Tunnelblick/blob/master/tunne...
Nothing in that script is crazy--it's all necessary stuff if you're not limiting yourself to the higher level APIs. But it doesn't take many apps doing things of that complexity for totally justifiable reasons before you start having issues.