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Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

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Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#451

Post by anigbrowl »

bloppe wrote: post #406
anigbrowl wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice try, but I've found it's impossible to convince nerds that maybe businesses aren’t mindless tyrants, but rather that every firm has different target markets for their business model and it’s fruitless to try and force your preferences on them. I would personally just not buy an iOS device for this reason, though now they're putting M* chips in them I suspect they'll eventually be jailbroken and able to run an op…

Nice try, but I've found it's impossible to convince businesses to break me out of jail.

You just need to find less respectable businesses, although the terms-and-conditions might be more, ah, strictly enforced.

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#452

Post by josephg »

ta3564664 wrote: post #415
danaris wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And these days, every Mac comes with a full Unix terminal built-in. Xcode is a free download (remember, if you wanted to develop Macintosh applications back in the day, you had to buy something like CodeWarrior!), and, as you say, they've developed Swift Playgrounds specifically to make a nicer onramp for people interested in developing their own stuff. It's never been trivial to configure the Mac in terms of things…

Even though its now probably 20+ years old, the CodeWarrior experience was vastly superior to XCode. For a company with Apple's budget, XCode is a disgrace.

Oh my god, I’ve been using Xcode to make something recently and holy moly it’s where energy and ambition goes to die. The sheer number of bugs in both Xcode and in apple’s APIs is astounding.

Constant crashes, unreliable and underdocumented apis. Urgh.

I’ve been doing web programming for the last decade or so. When I started web programming, it was a mess of browser incompatibilities and jquery. But now I’d take modern web development over apple’s hellscape any day. MDN, caniuse, flexbox & grid CSS, modern bundlers, svelte and solidjs - this stuff is a delight in comparison.

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#453

Post by josephg »

a4isms wrote: post #240
Terretta wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs called it "bicycles for the mind".* Back in the beginning there was lots of talk of "toasters" as an appliance every household has and even a child can use (to the point there was a famous screensaver of flying toasters). The Mac 512, Plus, and SE were embodiments of this. (The Apple //c with LCD attachment and carry handle was an earlier attempt.) Note that all of those included portability as a feature, while…

I remember "Bicycles for the mind" well: http://raganwald.com/assets/images/bicycle-jobs.jpeg But as a metaphor, I don't think of a bicycle as an appliance. Mainstream bicycles are brutalist: The chain and gears are usually on display and user-serviceable. Parts like wheels, saddles, and handlebars are standardized in a way that allows users to mix and match components freely. In the days of steel frames you could ma…

I joke that modern devices with modern social media act more like a taxi for the mind.

Programming on an iPad? Forget it. Have you thought about doom scrolling instead?

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#454

Post by iggldiggl »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #233
closeparen wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge part of the improvement has been sandboxing, code signing, and trusted distribution channels. In the Windows XP era, a freeware game or utility you downloaded turning out to be a virus was 100% your fault. It wasn’t a defect in Windows that your whole computer got owned, that was just how computers worked. Crazy to me that people want to go back there.

No, that was absolutely how Windows worked. XP security was atrocious, and there were already better, functional models of how to structure things out there.

> and there were already better, functional models of how to structure things out there.

Even today, no file sandboxing solution I'm aware of really properly handles more complex file formats that don't consist of a single atomic file.

Only macOS goes beyond the simple "allow the user to pick a single file or directory and that's that" model, and even then according to the documentation I found it only handles simple sidecar files that only differ in the file extension from the main file, but still breaks down for anything more complicated than that.

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#455

Post by analog31 »

sramsay wrote: post #68

What bothers me about this -- and it bothered me enough to leave the platform -- is not fees, or "hobby computing," or "it's just for my own use," or trying to figure out why this or that would be in Apple's interest. What bothers me is that it feels like an offense against the entire notion of what a computer is. I am, of course, aware that many (perhaps most) computers in the world are effectively appliances, but a…

I'm there too. My first computer started with a beep and a BASIC prompt. That's still my standard. I can forgive my phone because the screen is too small to type on, but still, I can program my phone in JavaScript if I want.

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#456

Post by toyg »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #443
toyg wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I guess a $30,000 car that will leave you with nearly nothing after several years also has no value? How about a $5000 vacation with your family? How about a great bottle of wine? Many, many things we choose to value enough to invest in are temporary. That is not a useful criteria.

> a $30,000 car that will leave you with nearly nothing after several years also has no value?

It has metal and plastic, assembled in parts that you can sell for a total amount that will be surprisingly high, or that can be sold for scrap metal, or driven until the end of days, or or or... It's obvious that it has some sort of value, however low - it is a thing made of resources in the real world. You can argue about the price, but you can quantify it in so many different ways (weight, dimensions, speed, consumption, age, etc etc etc).

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#457

Post by rchaud »

stakhanov wrote: post #187
PedroBatista wrote: post #128

The relationship some developers have with Apple should be a case-study with multiple PhD thesis in psychology. Not even in movies I've seen so many cases of children desperately chasing their emotionally unavailable parent. Apple is a trillion dollar company, it's the "parent" who sells you +$40 dongles for everything. "Hobbies" are only good if they make them money AND doesn't increase their risk or any liability.…

I agree. The whole article left me feeling a resounding "well, duhhhhhh". The author has simply chosen one of the least hackable compute platforms for his hacking hobby and is then complaining about it (I mean "hacking" in the original sense, not implying anything about illegal activities). If he were a farmer writing angry blog posts about how VW has made it damned-near impossible to plough a field with a VW beetle,…

> The simple truth of the matter is that Linux and other open source OSes...

...have zero presence on mobile

...don't spend a cent on marketing to developers, so the awareness isn't there

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#458

Post by rchaud »

stakhanov wrote: post #247
_trackno5 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn’t he complain about it though? If nobody complains there’s no chance things will change. Sure people could vote with their feet, but not everyone is willing to do that. They should still be allowed to ask for improvements.

But his unwillingness to vote with his feet is the actual message here. He's basically saying: Here are the horrible things that Apple is doing to me and yet I'm still giving them my money and investing myself in their developer ecosystem. That's how much I love them, for some reason that remains unstated in the article. That's what the parent commenter alluded to: There's some really weird psychology happening here,…

> There's some really weird psychology happening here

Sunk cost mentality. They have invested time and resources into learning a whole platform, only to find that it is not suitable for use, and they have to start all over again somewhere else.

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#459

Post by yencabulator »

0xEFF wrote: post #435
anonymouse008 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m fleshing out these thoughts more in a longer form - but I think Jobs was heading the company into the abyss with the appliance model. If it weren’t for the AppStore, it would’ve been the end of Apple. The iPhone wasn’t released with it at the outset - because this “make your own” wasn’t a part of the ethos. The Mac also suffered tremendously with no love to Final Cut, snipping Aperture, and leaving the hardware t…

It’s difficult to square creating both the most successful product and the most successful company in history with the idea Jobs heading the company into the abyss with the appliance model.

I'm fine with saying "the abyss of rent-seeking" even when rent-seeking behavior by corporations makes them a lot of money.

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#460

Post by rchaud »

irrational wrote: post #379
PedroBatista wrote: post #128

The relationship some developers have with Apple should be a case-study with multiple PhD thesis in psychology. Not even in movies I've seen so many cases of children desperately chasing their emotionally unavailable parent. Apple is a trillion dollar company, it's the "parent" who sells you +$40 dongles for everything. "Hobbies" are only good if they make them money AND doesn't increase their risk or any liability.…

I agree, but... in my experience Android and Android devices suck in comparison to iOS and iPhones. Why can't anyone else create a true competitor to iOS and iPhone that is as open as Android? Is it because of Apple patents? Is it because they assume that if a company as large as Google couldn't do it then nobody can do it? Is it just developers are such a small part of the general populace that there is no money in…

> Why can't anyone else create a true competitor to iOS and iPhone that is as open as Android?

Nokia tried in 2009/10 with the N900 running a Linux-based OS. It flopped, partially because Nokia was about to jettison their entire software stack to shack up with Windows Phone OS. But also partially because it came way too early, at a time when Apple and Google were spending millions to tell consumers that smartphones without app stores were useless and dangerous.

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