Things Apple Isn’t Doing | Hacker News Reader

Things Apple Isn’t Doing

sdbr.net

21 pointsx005415 comments

How about properly supporting developers?

I feel like Apple once said "Let's make (force) people to developer for macOS and iOS using our tools.... awesome!" and in the progress they leveraged a strong UNIX core and command line.

Then developers from other facets (IT, Web Developers, Android) showed up and said "Hmm, command line? I can use that!" And we ended up with a pretty sweet development environment.

But now it's 2019. Where is the package manager? Where are the regular security patches to stuff like OpenSSL? Where is the "Xcode Lite" to compete with Atom/VSCode even?

If Apple gave a shit about developers as a whole (and maybe purchases Homebrew as the official package manager?) they would continue their dominance in schools and tech. But they don't seem to have much interest in that.... (Remember "New macbook pro without an escape key! Pro's don't need 32gb ram!" debacle?) it's exactly the right time for someone else to step up with a programmer focused platform.

(Perhaps https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c... ?)

(EDIT: Also relevant for my crazy theory: https://developer.android.com/topic/arc/studio)

Apple is losing dominance in schools because Homebrew is maintained by a third-party? I'm just not seeing it.

According to ADB Podcast, the large majority of Android developers using Android Studio are on Windows, as per telemetry data.

ChromeOS support is irrelevant outside US, as those devices are nowhere to be seen.

I don’t know much about servers and cloud, so I’ll just stick to the first point: gaming. Apple is already in one of the largest gaming markets(if not the largest) - handheld gaming. The number of people playing candy crush and fortnite is much, much more than Red Dead Redemption 2, and Apple is more than happy to take in 30% of all those in app purchases. Yes, it would be nice if Apple made a PlayStation class console, but I’m pretty sure they won’t. The people at Apple are interested in serving casual gamers, and it already makes more money than most AAA gaming, so why invest in making a serious console when you could make that money from pay-to-win games?

Apple doesn't make nearly as much money from gaming as the big-dogs in gaming (XBox and ilk) make. Apple's 30% cut of app-store revenues for 2018 was about $12.5B, and I'm sure most of it is not from gaming. While Xbox raked in $10B for MSFT

A few years ago games were around 75% of the app store’s revenue.

50-75% of Apple’s App Store revenue is gaming. That’s a lot. Apple expands the gaming market with their products, so they don’t need to be as big as Microsoft and Sony because they aren’t fighting “the console wars.” Besides, comparing Apple’s software revenue to Microsoft’s hardware plus software doesn’t make sense. Surely some fraction of iPads, Macs, Apple TVs and potential new hardware should count as gaming purchases.

By that definition, Microsoft also makes a ton from gaming on the PC, as both a publisher and distributor of games.

One could argue that a large percentage of premium desktops and laptops choose windows for gaming compatibility and attribute a part of Windows revenues to gaming too. But that would be gaming numbers!

I think it fair to compare app store gaming revenues to consoles, as NO ONE buys an iPhone for gaming. They happen to (casual) game on the device they have on them in bed, or on the train, or everywhere.

Apple doesn't offer ANY advantage in servers, cloud, personal home-server, etc. NO ONE wants Apple to impose their will on servers, like they do on the app-store, or on their devices by willfully being standards in-compliant for the sake of revenues (think chronic in-compliance with W3C just to favor their app-store, BS decisions like 1 USB-C port on MacBook air that can't even tether to an iPhone without a convertor, etc.)

> While Swift is an open source language, the libraries for it do not have to be

MOST server software is open-source for a reason - NO ONE trusts closed-source with user data on their servers! PaaS providers have just started to earn trust from customers, but no one will willfully drop in closed-source software when open alternatives are thriving.

This is more a fan-fiction homage from a fanboy than a collection of realistic opportunities for Apple.

> This is more a fan-fiction homage from a fanboy than a collection of realistic opportunities for Apple.

Well said.

Counterpoint: the entire business IT community outside Silicon Valley runs Windows on every machine and proprietary software for every use case, with only a recent and tentative warming to open source.

With the open source option being dominated by Red Hat.

I think many readers of HN would be satisfied with much simpler things. E.g. MagSafe and keyboards that don't suck.

Apple can't even do simple things right any more.

I would love a personal iCloud solution.

Some Airport/Time Machine solution where I can set my iDevices to only sync locally to that device.

I wanted to have iCloud Airport Time Capsule Server for a long time. All iOS Backup, super fast along with fast restoring from local. Currently restoring an iOS devices takes a long time and often get stuck for whatever strange reason. Local caching of iOS MacOS Update. Along with caching of App Store update.

I think all the above are already available in macOS Server iCloud Caching option. Except no one wants to spend $799 for it.

I do think this devices should work along side with iCloud and not on its own though. It is hard to avoid HDD Failure, File Corruption, Bit Flip etc. Cloud Still gets you much better Data Safety. ( Someone else taking care of it )

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