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Comment by jobu | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting. As a developer I've often felt outright hostility coming from Apple developer relations, and maybe it's this lack of a partnership mentality. They generally treat end users really well, but it's like they see external developers as some sort of parasite feeding on their products. In my experience it's difficult to get actual technical help unless you personally know someone internal to Apple.

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From Apple's perspective, developers are either creating competing products or products that Apple will eventually compete with. Either way they would rather not help.

Don't forget products they just ban

My tinfoil hat theory is they allow the jailbreaking scene to persist instead of shoring up holes within a second of each jailbreak's release because they poach tweak ideas. When looking at the overlap between popular early jailbreak tweaks and features that were added to iOS over the years, this really doesn't seem farfetched.

The Apple of today does fix holes as soon as they can. But they don't really need to steal jailbreak tweaks anymore to figure out that people want to be able to change their homescreens…

There was a lot more than that which was copied, honestly. Notification center. Control center. Widgets. Low power mode. Notifications where you can reply in line. Probably hundreds more tiny quality of life things too that have made their way into iOS over the years that were first seen on cydia. Here's a list of 60 of them at least (2018):

https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/60-ios-features-apple-sto...

Oh, I 100% agree, I'm just saying Apple may not see it that way anymore.

And the arrogance and entitlement they've shown during Epic trial. Apple really believes that their OS and Store are godsend to developers, and this makes developers forever indebted to Apple for the 30% cut of everything happening through it.

I have to use mediocre Xcode, limited OS APIs, fight signing, sandboxing, lack of Vulcan, and capricious review. I need to keep rewriting churning APIs with "No Overview Available" instead of documentation. I'd rather not use any of this, but Apple keeps users hostage, because browser engines that would embarrass Safari are banned.

> Apple really believes that their OS and Store are godsend to developers,

Or, at least, their lawyers have decided that is the line of argument likeliest to lead to a victory.

Having followed Apple very closely for more than two decade and tried very hard to convince myself that was the case, their PR and Marketing are simply very aligned on this issue. Especially after Katie Cotton stepped down.

Actually I've been invited to a 2 day developer session by Apple in the UK. It was very cool and educational - 2017 I think. It was all about partnership and how Apple can help all the 20 or so apps that are out there, what different APIs and new features the Apps can use and they had team members from a variety of different areas of the business. They didn't check that my app was using RN at the time so... :D

But needless to say that is a very different XP in comparison to all the millions of engineers who don't get that chance and the dev forums are useless most of the time.

Anyways just wanted to share that as an XP as I've never heard of anyone else ever been on one of these from my tech friends.

If you're lucky you can get a WWDC lab session.

However, I suspect Apple developer relations has largely turned into a broadcast/funnel system since 1:1 support doesn't scale well to millions of developers.

Online WWDC has actually made it fairly easy to get a lab session, it's pretty nice!

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