Write code for the web

To the degree that you can describe a company in general as such, Apple is one of the most arrogant companies I've ever had to deal with, sometimes as a customer, more often as a developer and very much so when I was involved with a partner in one of their many supply chains.

I think this is true at the same time that it's also true that they currently create some of the highest quality, almost perfectly fully integrated computing products in the world.

I have a real love/hate relationship with this company. I'm deep in their ecosystem, I don't really want to have to leave it, but I still see the arrogance bleed through and it pisses me off every time I notice it.

What this article describes - a seemingly widely perceived arrogance and disdain towards developers - isn't purely developer focused in my view - though I think they get the brunt of it. I think this is symptomatic of a wider issue. A cultural thing which is as deeply embedded in Apple as is their high attention to detail, technical excellence and sense of design.

I wonder if it came from Jobs himself - who, a bit like Musk, was by many accounts a bit of an asshole to those around him, but was also an extremely talented visionary, with that rare ability to pull together talented multi-disciplinary teams to help synthesise beautifully designed and - often - thoughtful products. (The current trend is against also thinking about Musk like this but I do think he and Jobs have a lot in common).

The high quality output of the company is either in spite of or dependent upon the slightly morally compromised and contradictory means of producing that output. I'm not sure which.

I often feel like I'm in a bit of an abusive relationship with Apple. I can't quite put my finger on it. They make wonderful things, which I often really really love using, but then in another moment they seem to manage to gaslight me in some way - making me feel utterly stupid for continuing to give them my money. Sometimes I think their products are literally unmatched and I focus on the fact that their attention to quality and innovation pulls the whole industry forwards, other times I just think I'm in their predatory ecosystem simply because they're the best of a bad bunch.

I think the thing the most annoys me with Apple is the disparity between the "perfect" public image they try extremely hard to portray - more than any other tech company - and the very obvious contradictory behaviour that can often be revealed just by scratching the surface.

//rant

You put this better than I could have. Extended support can in fact be malicious. Appreciate your contribution.

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.

"I tried developing on , actively avoided using their tools and tech, and the experience sucked because nothing I tried was supported."

> Ironically Google is the good guy here, they’re doing great work for the web.

Still naive, eh ? I would be extremely wary of following in Google's footsteps : the use Chrome(ium) and their web apps as a trojan horse to wrestle control of general computing from the OS and native apps.

And it typically results in a worse user experience, because you lose performance by running in an emulator (and/or the extra, always somewhat leaky, layers of abstraction complicate the developer's job), and the browser's interface gets in the way.

So no, please do NOT write code for the web (except if your program is extremely basic and you don't think it will ever get more complex), write code for Linix (or other libre software/hardware, and excepting the likes of Android) - Librem 5 and PinePhone are particularly in need of your help, since they have quite the task ahead of them, going against Google, Apple, and Huawei.