Serving at the Pleasure of the King
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Serving at the Pleasure of the King
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Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King
#2Even ordinary users are beginning to understand this. My sister was upset at Amazon because the Kindle app on her iPod would not let her buy books directly. After she found out that Apple was demanding a 30% cut of those sales, she changed her mind. Now she's unhappy with Apple.
I understand the impulse to look at however many millions of IOS devices and to immediately want to get into that market, but the long tail is not a comfortable place to be in a land of 99c standard prices. Having an arbitrary and capricious landlord makes it worse.
Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King
#3These are the exact reasons that I decided to quit developing for iOS. I loved the APIs, I enjoyed the platform and access to millions of users. In the end though, I just wasn't willing to bend the knee.
Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King
#4That post rings true. But then it is true about every single platform provider and 3rd party external dependencies on the market: Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Facebook, Twitter
Even big apps will eventually include features initially provided by plugins. See Photoshop or Jira.
Not to mention the strategy of web giants like Google who will purchase existing successful commercial companies and the offer their product for free, thus crippling entire markets. See Google Analytics, Earth and Sketchup.
Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King
#5This is one of the reasons that I hope Metro apps crash and burn - if the only way to get hold of them is through the MS store, with all the same issues that the Apple store has, then I just don't want anything to do with them.
I know that the Android equivalent has problems (piracy, for instance), but I'd rather have that than something completely locked down.
Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King
#61. Windows has always done this. Occasionally people complain; usually they don't. Honestly, I normally consider it a good thing - the Windows functionality is usually bland and relatively feature-free, but works perfectly. There was a time when TCP/IP support was a purchased add-on, after all. I think we all agree that's better to have built in from the get-go and consistent on every aged uncle's machine we're asked to fix on Thanksgiving.
2. The cleanup feature doesn't really support his point. If I store data on my phone and the phone deletes it all without warning when it thinks I have too much, that's not protecting me at the expense of the app developer - that's just plain screwing me and the developer at the same time. Honestly, I find it incomprehensible that any professional could possibly have considered it a good idea, and I think it's indicative of Apple's manic secrecy that it wasn't headed off early instead of being ignored until release.
I know Apple's doing really well in the market lately - by innovating quicker than anybody else, which has been fantastic for everyone. But in the long run, this arrogance is not going to be good for them. It shot them in the foot for two decades with the Mac, and it's going to bite them now.
Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King
#7He's right and certainly more levelheaded about these kinds of issues than most, but what most don't realize is that many of the software platforms we love have had worse policies for years. Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and Sega all have/had extremely rigorous review process that was even worse than Apple's if you want to be on their game platform. Phone companies had all these build processes if you wanted to write Java ME apps to work on feature phones. And so on and so forth.
The problem is, as devs we are spoiled by the web, where you can just push out new code that says or does whatever you want it to without any consequence because the web is a "relatively" safe runtime, so nobody cares.
We are like children who grew up with a silver spoon in our mouth and we've been asked to endure plastic. Sure, it's still a spoon, but it's not silver and that pisses us off.
Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King
#81. Windows has always done this. Occasionally people complain; usually they don't. Honestly, I normally consider it a good thing - the Windows functionality is usually bland and relatively feature-free, but works perfectly. There was a time when TCP/IP support was a purchased add-on, after all. I think we all agree that's better to have built in from the get-go and consistent on every aged uncle's machine we're asked…
I disagree with point number 2. From Apple's perspective, it's deleting temporary storage (after all, they're called Caches and tmp. You wouldn't store anything important on /tmp on your desktop, would you?)
The "correct" place to put user data on iOS 5+ is any place that syncs with iCloud. That's the crux on this issue: iOS 5 is Apple's assertion that App Store users are their customers, not the app developer's customers, and they want to handle the backup and security around their customers data.
Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King
#9Did I really just read Jeff complaining that Apple shipped something that duplicates third-party behavior and compare them unfavorably to Microsoft in that regard?
I won't excuse Apple for acting like a King, but I think Jeff should find another poster boy for benevolent dictators. Microsoft is famous for steamrolling third-party developers, both from their applications group and their systems group.
I think this rant would read better if it complained about ALL proprietary platforms and used Apple as an example, rather than disingenuously implying that they are the rotten fruit in the barrel.
p.s. Joel Spolsky once said that companies always try to "Commoditize their complements." If you as a developer can create something that adds value to the platform in a broad way, it's inevitable that the platform owner is going to want to commoditize it, either by giving it away or making it easy for your competition to drive prices down to negligible levels.
Building it into the platform is the ultimate commoditization.
Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King
#101. Windows has always done this. Occasionally people complain; usually they don't. Honestly, I normally consider it a good thing - the Windows functionality is usually bland and relatively feature-free, but works perfectly. There was a time when TCP/IP support was a purchased add-on, after all. I think we all agree that's better to have built in from the get-go and consistent on every aged uncle's machine we're asked…
Microsoft, as evil as they may be, have always had a rather open eco system. Even when Windows was at its prime, you didn't have to get permission to develop or install applications on the platform.