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they really want keep you inside their ecosystem. so they can control you as much as they can.
* they want you to pay the apps submission fee.
* they want your user payment subs processed within the ecosystem
* they want easily track everything.
they keep doing this hyprocysy to the web eco. while they really know: almost the problem in native can be solve under the web browser stack.
When I think about it, it astonishes me that there are people in the world who take Apple's developer tools, and make some really beautiful and useful iOS apps. I've tried on and off since high school and have never been able to do it. I started in high school with Xcode and Objective-C, which is a very difficult language to work with (being not that far removed from C/C++). When they moved to Swift I thought "okay f…
Honestly, having “enjoyed” decades of different systems, from the days of 8” floppies onwards, developers today are spoilt rotten, and still find things to complain about. Grumble, mumble, kids today, get off my lawn etc etc
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A better way to describe their differences is that Apple started as an end-user company (and became a services company while at it) where hardware was a means to an end. The products they sell are based around an experience rather than just a bag of components/parts, as those are just the means to an end. It's why their design envelope is the way it is, and why the kept vertically integrating more and more over the d…
> Microsoft on the other hand is a typical SKU-mover As far as I can tell there is nothing typical about Microsoft. The sophisticated, deeply-root long game they’ve executed extremely well puts them in a very different place. As a contrast to Apple, the differences are striking - not because of the difference between “bing” and “bling”.
The only thing that is unique about microsoft is being in the right place at the right time, making the right B2B licensing deals and entrenching for decades because of it. Operating systems, window managers, filesystems, graphics, SDKs, IDEs, it's all been done before (and after) at equal, better and worse quality levels.
Their broad catalog is somewhat unique in having more SKUs that don't work well together (or at all) vs. ones that do, but the same applies to IBM and Google for example. And the things that do work well together tend to be based on technologies that have little to do with the company itself (like WebDAV and Kerberos), and that's not unique to Microsoft either.
The sophistication is in their business and SKU broadness, not in making proper end-to-end vertically integrated user experiences that make people happy. (well, they have started to get there in the gaming market I suppose)
If you have an example where that is not the case, and there was a product choice that merited their offering, I would love to hear about it.
The web is great in theory, but the bare-bonesness of the browser environment makes it an exceedingly unappealing platform for apps specifically when you’re used to developing with a throughly batteries-included experience like you get on Apple platforms. Where on macOS a highly capable, polished app can be easily be developed with a list of dependencies and sub-dependencies that can be counted on a single hand (and…
What’s wrong with Javascript
It evolved into one, and the platform has improved for app development with things like modules, but it is still part of an ecosystem that expects the developer to bring the app framework. Custom Elements tried to solve this, but React came and solved the same problem in a more ergonomic way. So now, we're in the same place: apps are built with open source stacks like React where you have to bring your own toolkit because the browser doesn't make assumptions about which one you're using.
The web is a lot like Linux: it evolved as thousands of developers try thousands of different ways of doing things. Some of those things are great and become de facto standards, but it's an ecosystem you can't manage top-down.
If you've ever worked at Google, there's a famous internal deck about how decentralized ecosystems evolve like an amorphous slime mold. It's written in the context of Google product management, but it applies to things like Linux, and the web too.
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What’s wrong with Javascript
It’s not JS itself that’s the problem, it’s the need to write it to fill gaps in browser facilities. Rather than there be 10k different implementations of a scrolling recycler list of wildly varying quality, there could just be one in each browser engine that web devs can rely on, allowing them to instead focus on writing application code.
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Apple's iOS and macOS have very similar dark patterns, but they go unmentioned. Yes, Windows has been making some really bad decisions with the Windows and Edge products, and it is really annoying. But at least their dev tooling is top notch, and you can easily interact with actual Microsoft employees in their repos. It's a nice experience.
> Apple's iOS and macOS have very similar dark patterns, but they go unmentioned So you agree pitchforks should be out both for Apple and Microsoft. Count me in.
I don't understand why these companies make the OS level decisions they do though. They make billions. You think they could relax and try to capture users by making them happy instead of kidnapping them.
What if we created an App Store that was solely focused on getting users to “install” using a bookmark.
And convinced top app players to forgo the App Store and advertise “get a 10% discount if you install our app with App Store X, the alternative App Store.”
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PWAs, especially those built with an offline-first approach, are so much closer to the native experience than those from half a decade ago. However what concerns me is Google's and Apple's incentives to help them get better to a point where they can rival native apps which could hit their bottom line.
The nice thing about the web is that while it’s no company’s favoured platform, it’s valuable to all of them as a way into each other’s platforms. That’s why whoever is “winning” the platform war a particular point tends to neglect the web. See Microsoft in the 2000s, and Apple now. But all their competitors are incentivised to push the web forward, because it’s a useful fallback as a way to get their apps into the w…
This. Apple's Safari (on iOS and macOS) is the Microsoft IE of 2020s. It's unbelievably behind the more sophisticated browsers (Firefox, Chrome) and yet, Apple couldn't care less.
The web is great in theory, but the bare-bonesness of the browser environment makes it an exceedingly unappealing platform for apps specifically when you’re used to developing with a throughly batteries-included experience like you get on Apple platforms. Where on macOS a highly capable, polished app can be easily be developed with a list of dependencies and sub-dependencies that can be counted on a single hand (and…
Together with WebAssembly (& alternatives like Flutter) the bare-bonedness shouldn't be a problem anymore.