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Apple's Mistake

paulgraham.com

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Re: Apple's Mistake

#51

Post by wvenable »

credo wrote: post #27

I agree with the primary point that Apple is making a mistake in not treating developers well. However, I think that the essay misses a couple of points. 1. The essay rejects the notion of an "intermediary" or a "software publisher". However, it fails to appreciate the fact Apple has opened up the mobile app market to developers and eliminated far worse intermediaries (the walled gardens of carriers). This is a huge…

1. Carriers never had walled gardens around smartphones. Apple didn't invent smartphones, they've been around for years before the iPhone was released. In fact, the carrier (AT&T) has more control than they do on blackberries or WinMo phones.

2. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. The review process exists so developers are already doing their best to not be rejected and Apple is rejecting anything badly-buggy. Bugs still escape that process, it's inevitable. Fixing them should be easy and quick, but it's not, and Apple is entirely to blame for that.

Re: Apple's Mistake

#53

Post by Xichekolas »

edw519 wrote: post #10

A customer recently asked me to look into a program that used to run in 5 minutes but now took 1 to 4 hours. It's used by thousands of people all over the world all day long. It iterated through an array doing 3 SQL SELECTs against non-indexed files for each element. There used to be about 50 elements in the array; now there were more than 5000. I rewrote the whole thing in one day to do a total of 4 SELECTs and run…

I find when this stuff happens with QA teams, it's almost always a case of protecting turf.

When no one is looking (the first, buggy, submission is made), they will do the minimum necessary and approve it, often quickly.

Then, when everything goes to hell, all eyes are on them. The developers submit a fix with the note "this needs to be approved ASAP to put out fires"... the QA person resents being told what to do, and suddenly feels compelled to justify his job by finding anything and everything that could possibly be considered 'wrong'. There is also the issue that things like indentation are more visibly 'wrong' than obscure bugs that only show up in production environments due to the way database replication is set up.

Now, I'm not saying all QA people are like this. I've worked with some downright awesome QA people before. But awesome QA people don't reject things for spite, and usually don't stay in QA long before moving up.

Re: Apple's Mistake

#54

Post by [deleted] »

lt wrote: post #33
edw519 wrote: post #10

A customer recently asked me to look into a program that used to run in 5 minutes but now took 1 to 4 hours. It's used by thousands of people all over the world all day long. It iterated through an array doing 3 SQL SELECTs against non-indexed files for each element. There used to be about 50 elements in the array; now there were more than 5000. I rewrote the whole thing in one day to do a total of 4 SELECTs and run…

Not that the indentation complaints are valid, but the fix should definitely go through QA while the users continue to suffer. While I'm sure it works on the developer machine, it is much better to have a program that takes a long time and works right than for it to give incorrect results to users, or make a different part of the application stop working. If the feature was really critical and important, QA should fi…

[deleted]

Re: Apple's Mistake

#55

Post by tjogin »

wvenable wrote: post #49
pohl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if Microsoft had vetted every DOS and Windows app Or, hold constant that Microsoft didn't vet DOS/Windows apps and imagine that every DOS/Windows machine had access to a cellular network owned by a some other company. I agree that the review process is completely broken, but I don't think the solution is as easy as having no controls whatsoever.

So you've never heard of Windows Mobile then?

Do you think Apple should look at Microsoft's mobile strategy with envy?

Re: Apple's Mistake

#56

Post by catweasel »

catweasel wrote: post #42
antirez wrote: post #4

Paul captured my whole feeling about the App Store matter, especially about buying Apple products. Now I feel like I'm doing something wrong. I still like the products but I no longer like the company. Today my small team of developers submitted the first "toy" we released just to test how the approval process works. Let's see if we'll have some bad experience as well.

Faustian bargain? Assholes? Evil? .. really, if this is the most serious accusation of "evil" one can level at Apple then it isn't really going to affect my buying decisions. It's not like they're dealing in small arms or manufacturing cluster bombs. If you step back and think about it all Apple is doing is stuffing up their own app store, which can be classified as monumentally stupid and short sighted but not reall…

General Electric, now there's a company that's "evil". http://www.google.com/search?q=%22general+electric%22+%2Bevi...

Do you see my point? To anybody outside the app development community it's going to look a little bit "self important" for developers to be using such strong language and talking of boycotts over something most folks would agree is not evil. I agree what Apple is doing is stupid, in the long term the app store is going to be polluted with crappy apps and they're approval backlog is going to be rather daunting. I think strong lobbying from the development community is in order, but it takes conscious and deliberate inhumanity for me to label someone "evil".

Re: Apple's Mistake

#57

Post by chaosmachine »

If you want a developer environment that fits in your pocket, look no further than the TI-83 graphing calculator.

Much of my free time in highschool was spent creating games on it. It's extremely easy to develop for (it uses a variant of BASIC), and the menu system is designed to minimize keystrokes, which means you can bang out your code very quickly.

Of course, the platform is very dated: 6 MHz CPU, and a 96×64 monochrome LCD screen! I'd love to see something in the same format, built with modern technology. Maybe the default language could be Python.

Re: Apple's Mistake

#59

Post by chaosprophet »

tptacek wrote: post #29

Though I can't marshall any evidence to support this claim, it was specifically not my impression that Apple was a company pro developers loved working with before the iPhone.

Yeah and to think at one point in time, they were literally begging programmers to write software for their Mac platform...

Re: Apple's Mistake

#60

Post by brown9-2 »

edw519 wrote: post #10

A customer recently asked me to look into a program that used to run in 5 minutes but now took 1 to 4 hours. It's used by thousands of people all over the world all day long. It iterated through an array doing 3 SQL SELECTs against non-indexed files for each element. There used to be about 50 elements in the array; now there were more than 5000. I rewrote the whole thing in one day to do a total of 4 SELECTs and run…

This might be a controversial opinion, but does anyone else think that if the QA team is reading your source code then you are doing QA wrong?

Or do you really mean "held up by code review" when you say "get through QA"?

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