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Comment by hoodoof | Hacker News Reader

It's a strange thing that these companies seem only to open their platforms to development in a tardy and reluctant manner, Microsoft being a case in point - "developers, developers, developers" was the cheerleading chant from Steve Ballmer, unless of course the developers wanted to code for Xbox. They've opened it now I believe but again - extremely late in the game.

Meanwhile, Apple welcomes developers from day one and there are so many applications developed that it's hard to get user attention amongst the app store noise.

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That's nonsense. When the iPhone launched it did so without a native app SDK, which was by far the biggest criticism leveled against it from the tech audience. They fixed it, but it wasn't day-one. And didn't the Apple TV launch without an app SDK initially, too?

Meanwhile gaming consoles are obviously not open platforms, but the vendors /do/ usually entertain developer relations from day one - I can't recall any launches with only first-party games.

Considering you can't deploy to iOS without Apple's approval, it's really not any more open than gaming consoles. The App Store and its approval process just operate at a larger scale, they're not conceptually more welcoming.

OK not literally day one but developer support for iPhone was obviously a key early priority, as opposed to Microsoft and Nintendo which seem(ed) unconvinced that anyone except appointed developers should be allowed to write code for their platforms.

True that the Apple TV thing was not programamable till recently but I gotta say there's alot wrong with the AppleTV - it seems to be pretty blah and nothing and found no real definitive identity - a wasted opportunity on Apple's part.

It was Web Apps only originally and that was the battle call from Apple. It wasn't until GeoHot (and others) rooted the phone and we got app stores like Cydia that Apple really started to care.

It was with the launch of the iPhone 3G when they came out with the SDK + App Store and it was a really well executed coup.

Do you know how you got software on your phone before the iPhone? Getjar or side-loading (with a proprietary cable almost no one had with apps that would sometimes hard break your phone).

Is there anything published that shows the true history of Apple's intentions for developer support and on the iPhoine and when in time?

Jailbreakers like to take credit but the App Store launched so relatively soon after the iPhone it's hard to believe it wasn't in the works from the beginning. A year to create all that tooling and polishing the APIs and building the store infrastructure seems on the mark.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when Apple changed their minds, but Jobs was very clear in the original iPhone keynote that the Web was the intended development platform for the iPhone and that not having an SDK was a strength — no hints about a native SDK in the near future or anything. Here's a good article showing Apple's original stance, with additional information from the Steve Jobs biography: http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-i...

I believe they had the appstore and sdk planned all along, but couldn't get it ready in time.

Rather than saying, "we will have an sdk too, sometime", they played it off as intentional, and continued working on it silently. There is just no way they built it all in the single year from the release of the iphone.

Well, yeah, nobody thinks they built it all in a single year. The SDK largely just publicized a subset of Apple's existing private APIs that they used to make their own apps. Foundation, UIKit, etc. — that stuff was already there, but you couldn't use it without jailbreaking your phone. Here's an article running down all the stuff that was included with the original iPhone, from almost a year before the SDK was announced: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/07/16/iphone-os-x-archite...

Obviously, most apis themselves were done at the iphone launch, and wouldn't take much more work.

The rest, all the infrastructure needed to have a working app store would be a much more substantial project. It is this part that would be difficult to build in a single year, and would have had to be in the pipeline when Jobs made his statement.

Apple already had the iTunes Store and a lot of very mature associated infrastructure. The App Store was built on that, and a year sounds like a pretty generous estimate for the project.

This is the same Steve Jobs who said there would never be an iPod that did video about a year before they did so.

They may have had the app store model planned out from the start for the next version of the iPhone, but didn't want to talk about it when releasing the first version because that would highlight the shortcomings of the existing product and cut into sales. But you still have to have an answer to the question of how you make software for the new product, so they say build web apps.

The best source I know of on early iPhone is the Nitin Ganatra episodes of the Debug Podcast [0]. He was in charge of the early iOS apps from before the iPhone shipped so he talked about those days. Those podcasts and the ones he did with Don Melton (former head of Safari team at Apple) are all excellent for getting insight into behind the scenes at Apple.

[0] http://www.imore.com/debug

The biggest kickers for Apple were:

a) Sensible means of payment, no need to setup credit card processing, do deals with carriers etc for developers. Oh and no carrier lockdown on installing applications.

b) Macs going x86 based so you could develop for Windows / Linux and Apple all on the one box.

Basically Apple managed to make it possible for small dev shops to work on the iPhone without spending huge amounts of cash AND get money from consumers.

My understanding was that the SDK at release 1.0 would have been terrible, and an expensive maintenance burden. The internal teams rushed hack jobs just to get the first iPhone out the door, there was a _lot_ of internal bugs and half-baked APIs.

So if you're arguing Apple is hostile to developers because they didn't have an SDK on launch day, then you haven't thought through what iterative development at very large scale actually requires. Giving developers access to tools that aren't ready isn't the best criteria.

I don't really disagree with your point but literally every other mobile and smartphone platform that existed before the iPhone was released with an SDK at 1.0.

And you have not read the comment he/she is replying to:

Meanwhile, Apple welcomes developers from day one and there are so many applications developed that it's hard to get user attention amongst the app store noise.

Yes, the original commenter was taking issue on the literal point of whether or not there was an SDK on day one as stated in the top level comment, not with the (somewhat obvious) broader point that Apple enthusiastically embraced third party developers for iPhone.

But that's HN for you - we are all a bunch of pedants who love to point and yell when something is incorrect - I include myself.

Not all of us. Some of us are not. Well, I may do it but I don't love it. So you're wrong!

anyone who has launched titles on a gaming-platform-to-be will be able to tell you about half-baked APIs. :-)

A buggy, half-baked API is better than no API at all, though.

I do think Apple is hostile to developers, because I don't want a vendor to get inbetween me and my user audience, but that problem applies equally to iOS devices and gaming consoles.

I didn't argue that point in my post. I'm aware the reasons for the iPhone not having a SDK on day one and the reasons for why gaming console vendors don't have a mass developer relations story are very different.

The more interesting point is that developer relations for gaming consoles and iOS devices are really conceptually pretty similar: Both require you to ask the device vendor for permission to ship your app. It's equally walled gardens.

> I don't want a vendor to get inbetween me and my user audience, but that problem applies equally to iOS devices and gaming consoles.

So, pre-iPhone, the market for downloadable apps for mobile phones was huge and there wasn't any intermediary parties (like, say, network operators) getting in the way of developers, right?

Where did I say that again?

On my Palm Treo, apps were plentiful and there was no intermediary.

And widely used by millions of people?

Yes, several million Treos alone were sold, and the Palm ecosystem was much larger than just the Treo line. http://blog.treonauts.com/2006/03/sales_double_ov.html

For a number of years, Palm OS was the dominant mobile ecosystem, with sales almost double of its main competitor WindowsCE.

Several million devices sold ≠ several million people buying software for device.

I can't recall any launches with only first-party games.

The N64 launched with only Nintendo titles, but it launched with only 2 titles, and was in some ways a fiasco. Some third party developers had got cold feet during the pre launch period and jumped ship to Sony.

Thankfully for them, one of those two titles (Mario 64) was mindblowing for the time (and still fun today), and it was worth getting the console just for that alone.

I don't know if new consoles could get away with that anymore though, since there's so many other options out there for games nowadays.

Not really.

A major reason for the early game industry crash was that the "openness" led to a incredible amount of "shovelware" games that overloaded consumers with bad choices.

In fact the NES being closed in a very heavy handed manner (for example you had limit of games per year per publisher!) was seen as a good thing that helped rebuild the industry.

Now we are seeing this with mobile, where something like only 1% of the products have decent profits, or steam, that is slowly getting filled with crappy games that are outpacing their "discovery" features and got nicknamed "indiepocalipse" and has as one of its effects make people start to prefer AAA games again, due to lower budget games now being perceived as "most of the times crap, retro hipster pretentious, or both"

One the most important reasons people prefer AAA games is that you can get some semblance of a community.

It's almost impossible to even get your friends to try playing a game they've never heard of (that another 100 people play, at most), so the community for the game is DOA. Hence none of the things you can get from bigger games, like guides, support, community, clans, competition, marketplace, mods etc.

At best you might be getting a half-dead subreddit.

> Meanwhile, Apple welcomes developers from day one

That's utterly untrue. Can I ...

* run my own (i.e. unsigned) kernel extensions in OSX?

* run OSX on non-Apple hardware?

* distribute apps for iOS through means other than the App Store?

* distribute non-approved iOS apps at all?

* build apps for iOS that allow end-users to program their own devices?

Apple is actually incredibly developer-hostile, especially considering their early history with machines like the Apple 2.

This is what a developer-friendly machine looks like:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena

You can turn off signing checks for kernel extensions.

Zinio has released a version of their iOS app for iOS 5 outside the app store. You went to their site on your iOS device and it downloaded and installed the app. I think it was done using Enterprise certificates, but I'm not sure.

As for iOS apps, you can compile and run iOS apps on your own device without the need for a signing cert.

There are apps for iOS that allow end-users to program their own devices. For example, Pythonista:

http://omz-software.com/pythonista/

Plus, Swift Playgrounds gives access to the whole iOS SDK.

I really don't understand how those points address mine? Maybe only point 1.

Well done for pointing out all the restrictions and completely ignoring everything positive the company does for developers.

I believe the negatives are a) not usually mentioned, b) far outweigh the positives, and c) are often overlooked by developers unaccustomed to genuinely developer friendly environments (like older Apple systems)

Because of the 1983 crash, which is happening live on the app stores again, full of shovelware.

For me as a developer what matters is good relationship with the platform owner and support for when technical issues happen, not getting everything for free without quality control.

> Microsoft being a case in point - "developers, developers, developers" was the cheerleading chant from Steve Ballmer, unless of course the developers wanted to code for Xbox. They've opened it now I believe but again - extremely late in the game.

For the original XBox sure but the XBox 360 came with XNA at almost the start of the XBox 360. For free I downloaded the SDK, connected to my store bought XBox 360 and deployed code directly to it. It was amazing.

Granted they eventually axed XNA and left a hole partially filled in other ways afterwards but initially the XBox 360 was an amazing thing of beauty as far as openness. In fact I was in school and put in charge of making an XNA game with the cooperation of another University. It failed miserably but it was an awesome experience.

>so many applications developed that it's hard to get user attention amongst the app store noise

That's precisely what the console makers don't want: a huge mountain of uncurated, low-quality shovelware for customers to wade through. That's what XBLIG was until it was shut down.

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