Comment by kiawe_fire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kiawe_fire | Hacker News Reader

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I think the core sentiment here is being lost.

This isn’t so much a call to action against Apple’s fees.

It’s pointing out something that I’ve felt building over the last couple of years out of Apple, which is an attitude of hubris, contempt, and a “taking for granted” of Apple’s developers.

The WWDC spiel of how much they value us has become trite and transparent.

They do produce some really nice tools and APIs. I can’t knock what they provide developers.

But often times the attitude beneath the veneer is a precursor of things to come, and it’s becoming noticeable that Apple’s culture seems to care less about its developers now than before.

You might say “sure, but so what? Developers are part of the means to an end of selling stuff”, and you’re not wrong.

But one of the things I loved about Apple circa 2009 was their respect for their user. It was palpable and magical, even.

Then, learning Cocoa and Interface Builder coming from Eclipse and Java, that same respect seemed to permeate their dev environment as well.

That seems lost. Following some of their tech leads on Twitter exposes some rather vitriolic feelings towards people in general.

Customers, be they users or devs, deserve respect. Apple used to be great at giving that respect. I fear it’s slipping away culturally, and is worth calling out.

> They do produce some really nice tools and APIs. I can’t knock what they provide developers.

I wish that were true. But Xcode today feels like a bloated, buggy mess. It crashes regularly, and sometimes it lags so badly writing swift code that it drops keystrokes. It feels like permanently beta software, where the team never has time to fix the bugs in the last version before they’re rushing the next version out the door.

Working in javascript and rust sets the bar for tooling and documentation much higher than Apple seems currently able to reach.

It pissed me off as a non-iOS developer that it doubled in size overnight because of the ARM stuff. I'm not even writing Mac Apps, I just need the system libraries so I can install Homebrew GCC and get on with my work.

afaict Apple has never had respect for the developer, the user sometimes, maybe, but often they would make choices for you because it was The Apple Way, and any other way was left to languish.

Sometimes The Apple Way was awesome, sometimes, meh.

Mac developers have been bitching about Apple for 30+ years. There are lots of valid criticisms. At the same time I find the "Apple takes us for granted" complaints a little hollow.

I think a lot of developers discount the platform and think it's all their apps that bring in iOS uses. This was more true in the 90s on the Mac. The platform Apple provided was good but it was the third party software that really made the platform what it was.

There's a handful on Windows applications I remember today. It's only because I used them all the time. On the other hand there's a ton of Mac apps I remember candidly even though I used them far less frequently.

The iOS platform of 2021 is not the Mac platform of 1995 or even 2001. Apple moves more iOS devices in a quarter than they moved Macs for the entirety of the 90s. Third party apps a an important part of the iOS platform but they're not the primary driver of device sales.

The iPhone without then apps that run on it is somewhat interesting, but is largely a novelty; they happen to provide a platform on which I can conveniently access Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok, Lyft/Uber/DoorDash/Instacart, or Flippy Unicorn / Geometry Racer. Many people said Windows Phone's UI was amazing--I even know stanch Apple people who said that--and pretty much everyone I knew thought Palm's WebOS was better than iOS in myriad ways... but I wouldn't even consider buying either of those devices because I wouldn't be able to use the apps I use literally all day every day. Hell: apps are so important that before Apple introduced the APP store, like 50% of the few people who owned the original iPhone (which had potential, but did kind of suck) were jailbreaking it, so they could do something as simple as play a game, as Apple had seriously shipped a phone without even a copy of Snake. The iPhone would merely be an "extravagance" for most people... were it not for the apps that it has managed to get to develop often uniquely for their platform (something I would argue is done using anti-competitive lock-in strategies, and at the extreme disadvantage of the user, more than simply by good engineering).

The iPhone without then apps that run on it is somewhat interesting, but is largely a novelty

Others might have a different perspective. For example, personally I use an iPhone because the following are my requirements in descending order of priority:

1. I now need a smartphone running one of the two major platforms.

2. I do not want anything to do with Google, ever.

3. I don't like a lot of what Apple do but they aren't as bad as Google.

I do use a small number of third party apps on my iPhone, because they are now a practical necessity to function as part of society without extreme restrictions. For example, I do not want to spend 20 minutes trying to navigate a phone system with bad voice recognition in a noisy environment just to pay for 30 minutes of parking, nor do I want to break the law, and that leaves exactly one other option in many of the places I visit: use one of the well-known parking apps.

Other than using those few essential apps when I have to, I mostly use my phone as it was when it came out of the box: for communications, as a poor-but-present web browsing device, and as a general tool with a useful camera, mic and light.

Why do you need one of the two major platforms if not for apps? Without your parking app available for example on iOS would you still pick the iPhone? Or would you settle for Google and Android? Without third party apps the iPhone would just be a feature phone with a very nice web browser.

Now there's probably people that get away entirely with just the built in set of apps but I bet that's eroding day by day as more and more things require or are greatly simplified by apps, like banking, parking,eetc .

Yes, the small number of essential apps are why I need a smartphone on one of the two dominant platforms. As you say, it's mostly for "official business", and those apps are invariably free and typically provided by or used with some "official" organisation. I don't need them often, but when I do, there may be no sensible alternative any more.

If it weren't for those, I think personally I would be quite happy to have more of a "dumbphone". A digital Swiss army knife is a very useful device. A poor imitation of general purpose computing is not, and something like a laptop or a desktop workstation is a more suitable tool in that case.

Ask yourself this, then. Would you be content to replace your iPhone with an older iPhone that fulfills the same needs? Maybe an iPhone 6S for a half-decent camera by today's standards? Or even an iPhone 5c? If you only need it for essential needs, how basic should an iPhone be?

No, I wouldn't use a much older Apple phone.

One of the things I really dislike about Apple is that they don't give clear statements of how long they will provide software updates and in particular security updates for on each product. For a device like a phone that is inherently connecting to external networks all the time, I regard those updates as essential. There also seem to be some vulnerabilities inherent in the design of older iPhones that have been addressed in newer models.

Another thing I really dislike about Apple is that iOS Safari lags behind everyone else in the industry when it comes to new features and supporting high performance pages. Regardless of why you believe this is the case, again an older device that either no longer gets updates or is unlikely to get many more is a liability.

Finally, while the camera on older iPhones might be half-decent by today's standards, I prefer one that is actually decent.

I'd gladly go back to my iPhone SE (2016) if I could downgrade it back to iOS 13, where it was able to do both turn-by-turn navigation and music playback when using wired CarPlay.

The only reason I bought a new iPhone was because that functionality stopped working reliably under iOS 14, and it effectively became and either/or proposition, which wasn't acceptable.

Absolutely - till this year I was rocking an iPhone 7+ as my daily driver. If the screen didn’t crack I’d have kept it for another year.

I put on a screen protector, gave it away to a friends kid, and I hear he still uses it.

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