Apple’s Mistake (2009)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Not me (caveat: I worked at Apple). Clumsy is the word that comes to mind with regard to their handling of the AppStore. I see little or no evil intent
> Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software.
That's a bold statement.
I'll be more nuanced. My impression is that Steve Jobs treated 3rd party software on "his devices" as a necessary inconvenience. He preferred the software he had a hand in, the software developed in house.
To me that is enough to explain Apple's approach to the AppStore.
So maybe it's accurate to say they do understand tooling, and that negates the need to understand software as long as they stick to a world they control.
(and same continues today. My wife has recognized the sound coming from my office when, every few months , I try to copy photos from my work-mandated iPhone to my windows pc. It's a few hours of screaming, then I give up)
It's tricky. If they don't provide key software for Windows to work with their hardware devices, they'll be blamed for it and called an evil proprietary company (which, fair enough. Just let me plug it as USB storage if you want to avoid that particular reputation :).
On the other hand, if they make their crucial software on Windows half assed, some people like myself at least, will be wary of touching anything Apple with 10ft pole. It May be that working strictly in Apple ecosystem makes for better experience, but that's not my world so I'm not tempted to dip my toes in any more than I have to).
It was not. Though at least it did the job, which was rare enough (then again I’ve had to use sonicstage, now that was some bottom-tier irredeemable garbage).
I’m pretty sure iTunes was at its best when it was SoundJam and got worse every time it got touched afterwards, until Apple managed to declare software bankruptcy… and replace it by something worse than it’d ever been.
Safari is quite ok.
Nothing replaces Excel however - literally nothing.
As has been said before, its the world most widely deployed programing environment.
It’s curious to note, then, how utterly peculiar of a programming environment it is: it is a first-order (pre-LAMBDA) purely functional array dataflow language with a sometimes-graphical interface and little to no capacity for any kind of abstraction.
Because of the last point, I would perhaps call it half a programming environment (if programming = make a computer do stuff + assemble simple doings into larger ones, Excel only does the first part). This is alleviated by a clever choice of basic datatype: a two-dimensional array of crufties over which scalar operations (usually) propagate automatically; this affords a rich set of operations that are not so low-level that the absence of abstractions or side effects would be crippling and at the same time not so high-level that you’d have an impulse to drill down into their inner workings and change something. In particular, you can’t store these arrays as elements inside other arrays: the layering is impermeable.
That this is a clever choice of datatype has been noticed elsewhere: witness APL, MATLAB, or even in some sense SQL. Among of all of these, though, Excel is distinguished by how very little it can actually do from a programming perspective (as opposed to a practical perspective or even a primitive-counting perspective). It’s almost like someone sat down and decided to see how little programming functionality a practical tool could contain to still qualify as programming, ditched everything else, then slashed half of the result.
But if it’s a shamelessly minimal programming language (if it qualifies as one at all), it’s quite striking to consider how rich of a programming environment it is. You get intermediate results. You get visual indication of where the values used in the computation came from. You get help for every function as you type it in. You get to change the inputs, or any other detail, and be dropped into an impeccably updated state of your program. You get to see your changes propagate, live, without messing around with REPLs, reloading notebook cells, or restarting hung servers. You get more IDE for your money than CLion and Mathematica combined. On a computer from 1997.
I mean, of course Excel is cheating. If you read papers on “visual programming”, and “differentiable computation”, and “provenance”, and “incremental recompilation”, and all the official names for all that jazz I just described—you’ll see that Excel avoids all the hard problems the academics are struggling with by not having the respective features. (It’s well known that everything gets easier in a purely functional language or without first-class functions, for example.) It even insulates the programmer from the problems of naming and of factoring (and thus avoids having to provide attendant features) by not allowing names or factoring.
Now, I’m not saying that Excel is somehow lacking in features or that it is a pleasant programming environment—it both has a tremendous amount of features and is a pretty miserable programming environment past a very low complexity ceiling. But, for all that is holy, why isn’t everybody trying to figure out how to cheat even harder?
The 1st-party software quality is a big part of what keeps me around. Possibly the main thing.
[EDIT] Oh, and the Terminal is one of the best there is. It's very good. Others may have more features, but it's far from minimal, yet manages to have lower input latency than most (which tells me Apple's got their priorities straight)
The only thing that I loved, but has become slow and buggy is Grapher. Grapher is a hidden gem, very few applications come close for quickly visualizing a function.
I should probably take the time to RTFM for that stuff, after more than a decade on the platform. Every time I find another little Apple utility, I end up getting something out of it.
And Xcode. It's always been bad. Messages on Mac? An embarrassment which gets worse with every MacOS update. Spotlight? A meme-level failure of a software product, which can single-handedly consume hours of CPU time to "index" files after every update, then fail to find an application, not even some crazy-hidden file, matching an exact string text search.
Safari is ok, but in the scope of how reliably fantastic modern browsers are, it's still the worst. Not just in standards support & standards correctness, but the application itself.
The most impressive part is that itunes was absolute garbage, and music managed to be worse. Quite a feat really.
It’s blended spreadsheeting with presentation in a free infinite canvas is the best notebook app I’ve met.
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
>Interface Hall of Shame - QuickTime 4.0 Player -
I'd say this is the struggle of every big firm. I like and contribute to open source, but I will almost always prefer whatever is built in house because the ease to influencing it's development to satisfy my needs is orders of magnitude smaller. Secondarily, when we build software outside of our host domain (as a business) it breeds innovation.
Thanks for layering some context on top of PGs thoughts.
then in the same breathe, please tell me who understands it.
Not that I think apple falls particularly in either category but there’s a difference, the ability to realize and change.
I do wonder how many amazing products and companies never got started or failed because of their fickle and Kafkaesque review process and their 15-30% revenue cut. For me personally, I've had to nix several business ideas and product features because it was too dependent on Apple's whims.
But that's just Apple being Apple. What really blows my mind is how Google blindly followed Apple. Google could have carved out such a valuable market. No developer fees! Clear and consistent review process! No taking 30%! Instead they blindly walked into the ditch with Apple. Talk about a lack of vision...
At least MS made some decent money on Windows. Google has to pay its competitor Apple more than it makes on Android if you extrapolate what came out during the Oracle lawsuit.
Difficult to change a business model if it's working quite well (financially). Long-term thinking and short-term bonus payments don't align.
Kudos for your decision to leave.
The honest truth is Google culture never existed, they just had most people fooled for a long time.
1. Lots of pressure for google products and services to become standalone businesses
2. Too much imbalance of power between business teams and engineering teams within Google Play. The business teams just saw it as copycat App Store and the engineers and product leads didn’t have the influence to overturn this. In some ways this is against what the broader Google culture was thought to have. (Eng/prod > bd).
3. Androids existence as a defense and not as an opportunity to create the future. Android has always been this and it’s engrained culturally.
Imagine if Ford could make 30% profit on selling cars, and didn't even have to manufacture the car.
Fortnite alone is worth hundreds of millions to Google. There's a reason they're willing to compromise any supposed principles they had over it.
Then there are additional effects, like how their control over the Play Store impacts their advertising opportunities on Android.
But at the top, for a public company, the only culture that truly exists is the next quarterly report. Once you're on the "must show XX% quarterly growth" treadmill, your decisions will be dictated by strategies to further that. Unless you have a crazy person at the top willing to burn money and investor sentiment (e.g. Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Jobs. Google doesn't have crazy founders running it anymore, which is why Google Bets are kind of a joke, and why the company continually kills stuff that you need to be in the long hall for to make a success (e.g. gaming studios, red studios -- they finally got a hit Cobra Kai -- and killed it, etc)
That's why some of the earlier comments about understanding Apple's App Store behavior as "good intentioned" is off. That MAY have been the original reason behind Jobs wanting it, to gate keep the platform and protect brand image and quality, but it is NOT the reason for charging high fees today.
Apple made $72 billion on App Store revenue in 2020. Their total revenue was $274 billion, so 26% of all revenue came from the App Store. That is the reason for the inertia in keeping the Store exactly the way it is.
The App Store's purported benefits to the platform: security, quality, etc could all be maintained for a fraction of that. Apple is not spending $72 billion a year on store maintenance. It's very clear this is about money, not high minded principle.
Android is only a defensive play for Google not a profit center
Surely there must be a typo in one of these words? I can’t imagine 25 humongous ones being loose change for any business.
https://www.engadget.com/2016-01-21-android-22-billion-in-pr...
This is their total net income between 2010 and 2016.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-...
They pay Apple a reported $18 billion a year to be the default search engine on Apple devices.
Say Google does the right thing. Enables great apps, charges 4% instead of 30%, everything goes well.
What does Apple do in response? If they do nothing, Android eats their market share. That's kind of the point, isn't it?
But that means they can't do nothing. They'd have to respond in kind; do the right thing too. Which means it's not a competitive advantage for Google. All they do is lose the 30% they're getting right now.
Even worse if Apple is foolish and the move actually succeeds, because then Android gets a real monopoly instead of this duopoly fig leaf they each use to claim they have competition.
This why duopolies are just as bad as monopolies if not worse. We need real competition and barriers to entry low enough that someone without a vested interest in the status quo can actually enter the market.
I guess the question is how many phone consumers buy apps (or pay for content in those apps)? And if paid app availability improved (or got worse for their platform), would that affect the next phone they bought.
Android as a platform is completely at odds with Google as a business, and will continue to be so as long as Google's is only revenue stream is online advertising.
Google had an internal product called GoogleBase that was a huge "database" of "all products" based on Bigtable. Unfortunately, the whole thing had been misrepresented by the original managers, who moved to another project, and the dozens of engineers on the project were all struggling.
I asked Larry Page about this at a meeting, and he said, "We'll get back to you" and someone did and I responded, but there was no feedback, and eventually, a hundred person years later, it was all cancelled.
It was stressful for me and unproductive.
I bet you a dollar his bonus is directly, or indirectly tied to Play store revenue. Companies destroy themselves from the inside due to misaligned personal vs. organizational incentives.
so why not just make a web app?
That only explains Apple's approach until Tim Cook became CEO. They've had more than a decade to evolve behind that mindset. The iPhone is more than 5x older now than it was when PG wrote this article. Jobs can't be blamed for much anymore. If Apple is still stuck in his vision of apps on iOS, that's on them now.
Jobs’ decisions (if not necessarily his decision making process) are very much part of the company’s DNA, pretty much all the executives remain Jobsian picks.
Plus it’s hardly been a failure in the market, and it’s not like direct competitors are disrupting the status quo, so from a business perspective what’s the incentive to change?
> The iPhone is more than 5x older now than it was when PG wrote this article.
And it’s never been more successful. Apple’s market cap’s grown by more than an order of magnitude since that essay.
That feels "evil" pretty fast, for someone trying to get his software published. Software that only works on their platform, that you could only develop with hardware they supplied.
The emails between Steve, Eddy and Phil seem to say differently. https://9to5mac.com/2020/07/30/internal-emails-show-how-an-a...
On my 1st London iPhone dev meetup there was a single representative from Apple: a biz dev guy! He asked a single question, when I commented the review process is annoying (compared to anything we had back then).
So, in retrospect, Apple encircled the whole ecosystem from the get go and wanted 120% of all the money that could be extracted. And they executed on it rather flawlessly.
If it somehow proved Steve Jobs wrong and some indie company made popular beautiful software, Apple would bend over backward to acquihire them, sell off (read. kill) the product, and get them making beautiful software for Apple. Of course, back then, it was a dream for so many to get noticed by Apple and end up working there.
Don't try to minimize the bad faith moves from Apple by calling them "clumsy". SJ (and proved through documents released from the Epic trial) absolutely treated everything as a zero-sum game and was exceedingly ruthless in getting what he wanted. On the one hand, yes, the iPhone App Store was just an expansion of the iTunes/iPod platform they had started and found worked well. Yes, it also simplified, what at the time, was an insanely complex web of mobile app markets that carriers themselves didn't truly understand the potential of. All would have been fine if they approached it with an open mind and listened to feedback.
The main issue and feelings of "evilness" that so many people express about Apple, is that they so quickly used the App Store process as a weapon against anything that showed signs of stealing market share away from them. For example, around the start of the iPad, so many interesting book store startups launched, (ie. comic books, out of print books, etc.) and I loved it. However, SJ wanted his iBooks platform and through draconian changes in App Store policy, shut them all down over night. Sorry, but there's nothing clumsy about that that. It was very intentional, and very much directed at Amazon's Kindle, regardless of who got hurt along the way.
Developers tried, repeatedly, to give feedback about ways to improve the App Store, time and time again. Instead, Apple closed feedback forums, canceled Q&As at WWDC, and followed up with more App Store policies against speaking out and essentially made it a privilege to work with them.
I loved woking there, I really did, but we shouldn't minimize these feelings of evilness that so many developers express. Their intuitions are right and they deserve to get as much visibility for their pain as possible. Keep in mind that essay was coming from the perspective of a VC who was dealing with a lot of his startups struggling with the App Store and him trying to get Apple to listen. If that meant being dramatic with words like Evil, so be it, but in the end, surprise, it didn't really do anything heh.
Every iOS developer I know views the app store as an asinine hurdle that they have to clear, standing between them and their users. They never see it as something helpful. They certainly never see it anything like the way Apple's marketing portrays it. The process of releasing an update is stressful because you just never know whether they'll reject your app over something minor that you consider perfectly normal or even intentional.
Oh, you fixed a critical bug? Too bad, we've typed the word "sex" into the search field and turned the safe search off, and naked people came up. You have to change your ToS to disallow that for us to consider approving your update.
Evil in its absolute form rarely exist.
Most evil are created by those who think themselves as so righteous.
My definition of evil includes hypocrisy.
Most of these so called "clumsiness" has been here for years. Most of the current strategy of services revenue growth started in 2014. We are coming close to a whole decade. I think we have given enough benefits of doubt to Apple.
I have been suspicious of Google even in 2005 when they started building their own browser, it took the whole world 10+ years to turn their view from media darling to privacy invading company.
These days, as a dev, I really don't trust Apple at all. I would never even think of making a product for any of the Apple platforms. As a freelancer I've stopped taking any iOS/macOS projects too. It's not the 30% but Apple's attitude of controlling their turf like the mafia under pretended moral superiority.
As a user I'm as cynical as I've ever been. I use macOS and Windows on a daily basis, and for dev work I generally prefer macOS over Windows. But I'm always running at least a major macOS version behind and never buy any 1st gen Apple product. I simply expect their stuff to fail in one way or another. I've been bitten way too many times to trust them. Nvidiagate, Radeongate, Yosemite, iPad 3, iPhone 4, etc, the list is very long.
Just weeks ago, my wife's Macbook Air (a 4 year old machine) started having issues with the keyboard and trackpad disconnecting. Apple's authorized repair services* say they want to replace almost all the parts (pretty much excluding the screen) and the repair cost is almost as much as buying a new Air.
* Apple Mexico doesn't really do repairs here like in the US so you're forced to go through one of those services.
Or right now, the Apple TV has been suffering issues with Atmos for the past couple of months. There's a thread in Apple's forums with 14 pages of users complaining which keeps growing even though posts are deleted by the mods constantly.
I had a Mac 512K, and later a Mac SE/30, where I ran A/UX. I would never, ever buy any Apple product, today, under any circumstance.
Apple has always had a much more wholesale replacement strategy than other manufacturers. Even back in my CompUSA days, when I was the "Mac guy" in the shop, the other techs lamented how much easier my job was. There was a whole range of problems that Apple classified as a full system swap, where someone like HP would have replaced one or two components.
They're still replacing screens, depending on the break. I had a screen replacement last year on my 12. It was just the screen. I believe they're more conservative about screen replacements though, and have a deep enough supply of refurb devices the math might just work out that it's faster/cheaper to just hand the consumer a new device.
Do you feel the same way with all large consumer corporations or just Apple? Another words, how is Apple different from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix, or Adobe?
Adobe... I don't love them either but I don't think they go around waving a moral banner as if they were saving the world.
Netflix I don't know, I'm just an end user and I'm really happy with their service.
Edit: sorry, I meant this as a reply to GP question but I'll leave it here.
Exactly. That is the big PR difference between Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. That is why forcing out Katie Cotton was a bad idea.
Wow. They're still doing that? They were doing the same to hundreds of iMac users with slightly out-of-warranty displays going bad ... 16 years ago.
But Apple's growth in market value since – from $175B at the end of November 2009, to $2.73T today – at least raises the possibility that Apple wasn't making a "mistake", from the perspective of Apple shareholders, managers, & employees.
Maybe once you've reached a certain powerful 'commanding heights' via other strategy & technology, the optimal enterprise strategy is truly to bully developers, & take their lunch money for yourself.
Still a drag on human progress & welfare, sure.
You could start with any social media company and in my opinion, they surpass anything Apple has done as far as a “drag on human progress & welfare”.
Also, without an explanation of why "in your opinion" "any social media company" is worse, you're just declaring a personal bias - and vaguely, too. (Is social media company Snapchat more destructive than Apple's App Store policies?)
If you have some larger grudge against some specific social media companies, why not write it up, with reasoning & naming names, in an appropriate place? Why only allude to it, to make Apple's destructiveness seem smaller?
There are studies that show social media causing mental health issues and issues with spreading misinformation, many have shown up here on HN. I was stating my opinion which should be obvious, but maybe it’s not, every comment where you type into a comment text box is an opinion. I don’t have a grudge, just think the contributions to humanity by social media companies are far less than the problems they cause.
The hypocrisy on HN is funny sometimes, many times articles/comments about startups are about monetizing and charging customers more, raising capital, etc. and then for large companies they charge too much and it’s a “drag on human progress and welfare”?
For a balanced view, you could do worse than starting with a search for "social media" on Google Scholar. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=google+scholar+social+m...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/16/faceboo...
Does it excuse them somehow?
Are you sure App Store dynamics don't, overall, increase the power of the worst social platforms?
Basically highlighting the issues of capitalism unchecked.
Initially it can be beneficial to society - I'm confident in saying Apple empowered individuals and other companies in the early years through to pretty much around the time this article was written. For all it's flaws it was an overall force of good for society, for humanity... it didn't suddenly stop doing that, but changed focus, and started to erode it.
Over time a market winner, or winners are picked, and then it seems to be just a matter of time until user exploitation starts, without natural pressure to produce the best product, with the best experience, for the user beyond basic tolerability; it slowly devolves into a venture into wealth extraction as the people who originally cared enough about the companies original values either leave, retire or die. Finding ways to lock in users, creating artificial dependence and tricking people into subscriptions are all just optimisations on this path to wealth extraction from the average person.
It sounds a bit conspiracy theorist when I read that back, but it's hard to say it's not true... this just seems to reliably happen to these incumbent corporations.
The App Store since 2009 has directly resulted in the creation of Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, WeChat etc.
Not sure how you can argue the world hasn't progressed since then.
But also: those successes are attributable to mobile apps in general, not Apple's self-serving policies.
Plausibly, all of these should be possible as zero-install web apps – but as Apple (& others) have started raking in the App Store money, their investment in competitive open web technologies that could match proprietary-platform native-apps has languished.
Further, the App Store's market power is now being used to limit the functionality of such apps – banning competitive payment mechanisms, or entire classes of disfavored speech and content, or product benefits that compete with Apple offerings.
And the App Store plus iOS power is being used to torpedo the business models of Apple competitors – as with the changes in tracking defaults that have kneecapped Facebook revenues, mafia-style.
Does local protection rackets deserve credit for every business that manages to pay, & survive, their shakedown?
Worth noting that this was basically what Jobs offered developers initially and everyone hated it.
It's good some effort was plowed into both, at different timescales!
But currently, the App Store's monopoly/monoculture abuses are retarding progress. The App Store deserves credit not for creating or enabling the social app listed in the ggp – but instead for capturing more of the value of those innovations for AAPL owners & insiders.
No evidence of this what so ever.
We have no idea what the present would look like if the app store was more open.
Yup. That's more or less what's happening or Oracle right now. They'll profitability soldier on for a while due to the massive amount of legacy servers running Oracle databases at companies all over the world. But, every $BIG_CORP out there has on their roadmap a long-term plan to either drastically reduce their spend on Oracle products, or more often, eliminate it entirely.
Hyperbole much? I guarantee there are plenty of companies doing giant transaction rates happily and stably on their big Oracle.
And plenty of ERP customers who are resigned to staying on their Oracle platform for the foreseeable future, even if only because the competitors are just as greedy shark as Oracle.
From time to time we start an initiative to do so (i.e., when there is a new set of executives at a certain level).
However, as the awareness of the actual scope and cost of migrating away becomes clear, the effort is dropped. It's technically possible, but also risky and no one wants to practically pause other development while it occurs -- which makes sense since that would probably be fatal.
Something comes along, that makes it feasible. It might be something surprising. And then, all of the sudden, there's no way to respond - because Oracle the company is so entrenched in the business model of profiting from locked-in customers, that they can't develop a novel response to a novel threat.
Oh, I hope you’re right, but am dubious. The F500 (and G500) is wedded to legacy systems, for good reasons, a marriage that even extends to new deployments.
Also, they purchase 3rd party applications at a regular basic to make sure new customers/hostages are always coming in the front door.
You can believe this if you want. But $BIGCORP does not have the same license agreements that you and I see. There is a lot of momentum to stay on Oracle and companies have had decades to migrate away. Some have, most haven't and I think not much is going to change in the next decade.
[] I'm literally telling a coworker we can't do what she wants to do with a Oracle DB server because the license doesn't allow it. Then I get an email from a VP that states we have a special license that does specifically allow it. I'm left wondering how many other companies have special licenses.
And every one I’ve heard of considers Oracle a predatory vendor and they want to stop using them.
They do things like charging you per CPU to run Java and even though you only run it on four CPUs you theoretically could run it on your entire VMWare cluster so they charge you for 10,000 CPUs. Which is ridiculous so they’ll give you a unique license for their software and they’ll bundle it all together so it isn’t a la carte anymore so even if you stop using 40% of their software you pay the same amount.
Oracle’s business model seems to me to be to extract every nickel from their customers until they can figure out how to stop using their software. It’s why there are dozens of open source Java distributions now and it’s why things like MariaDB exist.
Ok, but talk is cheap. If you want to know what people actually want, ignore what they say and pay attention to what they do. Oracle's revenue and net income have been pretty steady for at least the past 5 years. Unless they've found some major new revenue stream, it certainly doesn't look like their customers are leaving in droves.
Finding new revenue streams is exactly what Oracle has been doing.
Take just one example - Java. Created in 1995 by SunOS, officially made open source in 2006. Purchased by Oracle in 2009.
Demanded ludicrous runtime licensing fees in 2019.
Want another example? MySQL.
I know first hand of a handful of large cap companies completely shedding themselves of Oracle and have heard of many more that plan to.
Companies partner with massive vendors like Oracle and jump through their hoops to remain in support contracts because it enables them to defer some liability and satisfy various regulatory checklists.
Think about a database instability scenario for an online retailer, and consider if you'd rather be the CTO who is to blame for self-hosting, or the CTO who can defer blame onward to the vendor. It's an unfortunate reality in many "enterprise" environments.
Self-hosting is certainly not the only choice nowadays, there are many other companies offering managed databases/other cloud products.
It's unlikely that even Oracle would pay to make someone whole after a data loss incident. But the reality is that the ability to blame Oracle or another black-box product from some vendor instead of your in-house instance of some open-source project (that no one outside of engineering has heard of) has real career-altering value to stakeholders. Maybe unjustified, but the effect exists nonetheless.
PG is an Apple relative to the majority. His investments create waves in agency of others with or without their informed consent.
The antitrust bill Y com signed onto is to help get “web3” on devices.
True antitrust would be requiring unlocked OS agnostic hardware. We’ll have to settle for VC backed NFT market places, since that is who will flood App Store agnostic OS’s with options.
$BIG_VC has a new metaphor to sell. BOINC2.0!! I mean; web3! They’ll sign up to improve the status quo for them. No need to push for open devices; they’re fine with the OS monopoly.
The things that have changed aren't strictly upgrades or downgrades. Apple's approval process is much quicker than it was in 2009, but instead of sitting on a bug fix for four weeks, now they reject you with no explanation while 20 other apps doing the same thing Apple is angry about make millions on the store.
>They get away with maltreating developers, in the short term, because they make such great hardware. I just bought a new 27" iMac a couple days ago. It's fabulous. The screen's too shiny, and the disk is surprisingly loud, but it's so beautiful that you can't make yourself care.
I feel the exact same way with the 13" iPad Pro I bought last year. Amazing hardware, but it feels like computing in a straitjacket. Even jailbreaking it only goes so far to fix the underlying problem, which is that playing by Apple's rules is a genuine roadblock to a lot of pro app developers who are accustomed to selling direct-to-consumer.
However, I don't think Apple actually cares. The iPad Pro exists for exactly one kind of customer, and one kind of customer only: professional artists. As far as they're concerned, people who want proper developer tools, the full Adobe or Autodesk suites, or what have you can just give up the touchscreen and cellular modem and buy a Mac.
>With Apple that seems less the case. When you look at the famous 1984 ad now, it's easier to imagine Apple as the dictator on the screen than the woman with the hammer.
...Did Paul Graham consult with Tim Sweeney on #FreeFortnite?
[0] Also, the submission title should probably have a (2009) in it...
That's precisely what drove me away from apple laptops a few years back and back to linux for my home computing. I was running an (only somewhat) older machine and every update ate more hard drive space and hurt performance. And because apple made it, it was damn near impossible to upgrade either the hard drive or the memory.
But, it is beautiful hardware...
Maybe with the coming XR paradigm shift, things will change?
As it is, when Apple fucks up (which is often!) I survey the "competition" and decide that, no, I don't want to take on four new problems for every one I avoid.
I guess that's what you get with a market of this shape, having very few viable options, all mutually incompatible, plus all tied in with perverse incentives from other parts of their various vertically-integrated behemoth-corporations—even Linux suffers from what sure looks like some fire-and-motion action from Red Hat, I assume aimed at keeping them on top in the support & consulting game. Ubuntu tries something similar off-and-on, but just aren't as good at executing on those plans and have mostly failed.
Really, one of the most remarkable things about Apple is that they do a good job of aligning most of their own incentives with things that provide some kind of significant benefit to users, even if it's arguably only as a side-effect.
Apple's Mistake (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7344783 - March 2014 (56 comments)
Apple's Mistake (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6329991 - Sept 2013 (8 comments)
Apple's Mistake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1081514 - Jan 2010 (25 comments)
Apple's Mistake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950751 - Nov 2009 (269 comments)
So I had to pay Apple $100 to open a developer account. Then sign a bunch of contracts. Then register an app ID and generate certificates. Then bundle the app and submit it to appstoreconnect. Then wait for a bunch of automated checks to pass and tell me that the app ID is missing entitlements. Then figure out what that even means, attempt to fix the entitlements, and run through the submission again. Then set up testing groups and invite my brother to test the app. Then I have to "submit" the app for approval for testing. And a couple days later finally get approval from Apple so that I can start testing it. And that's the short version; there were a bunch of nonsensical Xcode quirks to deal with.
For context, I've been an iOS developer for a decade, and it still took me the better part of a weekend to get through it all, even though I know exactly what to expect. And this is so one fucking person can try an app for me.
I hate Apple. I don't know how else to put it. I don't think they're evil, I just think they don't give a shit about their developers. Did you know their bug tracker is private? I'll find some weird behavior with, let's say UITableView or something, and spend all day trying to figure out what subtle thing I'm doing wrong using their comically poor documentation. And then somewhere buried in Stack Overflow I'll find someone saying "oh yeah that's a bug in the framework, I submitted a radar 2 years ago". So there's some bug that they know about, and I'm not even allowed to see that. It feels hostile on their part, and it makes me feel hostile on my part. I think Paul Graham was right.
Maybe it could be a per-project toggle whether having a "what's new" section is necessary (though on second thought toggling that off might become the new norm leading back to the good old useless changelogs).
iOS isn't a developer's platform and if it were, developers probably wouldn't be interested in it very much, since what developers want more than any API, tool or system is users.
Not that they couldn't focus on users better, or couldn't support developers better w/o impacting users negatively. They could and should, IMO.
Apple has pretty much fixed the issue this post is concerned with (very slow app review process)... but it took several years -- checking the internet, it looks like ~2016 was the general turning point, so around 7 years after this post. It shows just how little the developer experience matters to developers if you have users.
But for users of niche apps that are no longer supported by developers this is rather problematic and requires to stay at older MacOS versions.
Broadly speaking, I feel that we in the tech community tend to erroneously assume that what’s good for developers must also be good for users. That’s not necessarily true. Developers are ultimately just businesses looking to extract revenue from users —- we should expect the relationship between developers and users to be adversarial to a certain extent.
It is, in the sense that a reasonably-good iOS developer experience is necessary but not sufficient. What Apple does prioritize is giving developers a large, vibrant, and engaged audience for their work in exchange for a 30% (or 15%) cut.
With iOS, Apple has crossed the threshold of who needs who. Now app developers need Apple way more than Apple needs them.
In many cases, one app to do thing X is mostly as good as another app for the same X. There's no bargaining power to be had unless you're a huge name.
As a developer, you're not leaving the App Store unless you're leaving mobile app development entirely. It'd be commercial suicide (for most) to do that.
The level of control both Google and Apple have in their mobile OS' (only Safari engine being allowed on iOS is an example) makes it much harder for something else entirely to grow outside their ecosystem and them slam them from the left flank, like the web did to MS' dominance.
I'm not entering into the debate whether such technical restrictions are have good (and benign) reasons, but they absolutely keep the control much tighter than it used to be the case on the desktop in Windows heyday.
I can't think of any.
The fact that it uses a subset of web technologies that Apple deems acceptable is a technical detail.
When regulation comes in to force Apple to lift their anti-competitive practices though... Developers and companies will definitely flock to the web, for many good reasons, just like they did on desktop.
The lack of notifications is actually one of the biggest reasons. Many app developers abuse notifications so much that I’d rather check uber eats tracking screen every 3 minutes than enable notifications for that app
Thank goodness.
I don’t need to add de-cluttering my parents’ phones with respect to every website they’ve visited in a year to my Christmas tradition of unfucking the family’s devices. If I want notifications from a website, I’ll give them my phone number or email.
Push notifications are a fucking cancer. It's bad enough disabling them from native apps but I definitely do not want web apps sending them. For every one legitimate user of push notifications there are a hundred (conservative estimate) spam/junk users.
I don't think he did.
As an entrepreneur, when I held the iPhone 4s in my hand ~10 years ago, I saw only possibilities. In 2022 when I hold my iPhone 13 in my hand, I see a known quantity with all the use-cases permanently ossified. I don't dare to dream about what is possible. Only Apple can truly move this platform forward. I'll be a passive observer.
This is not how I feel about the Mac, and I think Paul's post accounts for the difference. I really feel if I have a great idea and execute I can meaningfully impact the trajectory of the platform.
There is no doubt the iPhone and the iPad will continue to be commercially successful products. But now, 14 years after the launch of the App Store, that feels like such a poor measurement of their net-new impact on society. The magic is gone.
That’s a pretty vain example, but there are a lot of opportunities opened by having a sensor that can create 3D models of nearby surfaces in everyone’s pocket. And that’s just one sensor Apple has added to their phones over the years.
Curious to know which app she used for that?
The difference between then and now is that EVERY use case was changing. As smart phones have "mastered" to the common ones, the real change is happening at the edges and it's crazy what other industries are doing with the platforms.
Many of us work in such a way that we get summoned every morning at 9 to line up and answer "what did you do yesterday that justified 10% of your paycheck and what will you do today that justifies 10% of your paycheck?
Turnover among executives is considered a crisis. Turnover among developers amounts to whining about our disloyalty and companies screaming at the government to increase immigration.
We are a commodity. A valuable one and hard to obtain one to be sure, but that is it.
Apple understood that and won and developers primarily build for Apple now.
Yep, fast forward to now and it seems that they got it right. Nobody left. Not the users, not the developers. It turns out we really are like musicians
Shareware rose, fell, rose again, fell again.
Somewhere in the lulls there a developer could publish their software either through small ma-and-pa publishers (I have experience with Casey & Greene, Inc. if anyone in the Mac community remember them) or through AppStore/Steam, etc.
At one time publishing meant boxes, floppies, ads in magazines, 15% royalties. A designer at that time, as an example, could sell a font for good money. Fonts though became commodities, the big players (Adobe) moved in and one thread of an era came to a close.
CD's replaced floppies and this too had an impact on the industry as well.
AOL and the masses coming on-line obviously had a huge impact (and shareware rose again then — ID Software).
Again the big players moved in: LucasArts, etc. Quality games were expected to have cut scenes. Everquest and the world-building games that followed required teams of artists such that the indie developer once again was in descension.
The iPhone made waves. The AppStore though quickly became a race to the bottom (in price) as a new generation of users came to expect software to be free (like their Facebook and SnapChat).
So I don't know, I don't put a lot of blame on Apple in this regard. The industry has been a very dynamic one. One thing I have come to expect about the software development ride though is to never expect it to be the same ten years out.
Therein we see the commodificafion or the mass consumerization or appification or whatever neologism of software, at least for smartphones.
Business history is replete with those whose products were once at the top and / or dominated the industry and yet are now irrelevant.
One of the worst things about the App Store is that there are very few "labors of love" there - very few (if any) quality free-to-play games that don't try to aggressively monetize in-app transactions, very few "shareware" style apps that rival paid subscription apps in quality. There's no real way to quantify what might have existed, but we do know that there were many shareware developers in the early 2000s that wouldn't touch microtransactions with a ten foot pole - where did they go?
I think, in part, all this is due to the App Store process being so wildly unpredictable and exhausting. If you develop something useful, it may be rejected on a whim; the only developers who aren't discouraged after that, are the ones whose investors pay them to not be discouraged, may reach out via backchannels to ensure that rejections are escalated, can fund a pivot if necessary, and in turn expect outsized returns. And so every app becomes optimized for monetary return - which, of course, makes Apple extremely profitable.
It's a really sad situation.
amazon still reigns, but ppl got the see the pipes pumping biomass from the poor souls that have to deal with their ugly end.
IMHO, this marked their high point, and the same will happen to apple.
How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?
Maybe in a vague secondhand sense? Mac developers have pretty much always been a tiny, tiny niche, and I've heard plenty of complaints from them.
This is partially why Electon has spread so far I think - developers like working on Macs (because it's basically "linux with a nice gui" for all practical purposes) meaning that if Microsoft wants developers to use VSCode - and not get used to non-Microsoft products - they need to get to where the developers are.
But in those case the devs are the users.
A beautiful SDK won't save you, I've heard stores about how good the BeOS API was, or how wonderful development for various other failed devices/technologies was.
But if you're trying to keep a dying platform alive, you need to reduce friction, and making a good SDK is a way. And Macs were dying for many years ...
What is puzzling is the screen. Lenovo does not have high DPI mate screens and their non-mate screens are way more reflective compared to Apple offerings. Why cannot they order screens from the same vendor as Apple?
> Matte displays feature a light-scattering antireflection layer
You can turn any glossy screen into a matte one, but not the other way around.
Admittedly, it seems like my laptop has a case of the Mondays because it's an unusually bad day. But none of that happens with Linux on my desktop.
Also, with the M1 chips Docker is excruciatingly slow and having to resort to Rosetta is an unattractive alternative.
Personally, I don't get why Linux isn't the standard. But then basically every tech company out there is Mac first or Mac only so realistically I'm probably the problem.
In my interactions with app store review, it's usually resulted in a terse response that required some guessing to fully understand. In some cases, we simply gave up because it was too hard to get real answers from someone.
Recently I learned that Waiting-on-Hold-as-a-Service is a thing.
According to the newspaper (I forget which one — lots of dead trees around my apartment), there are companies that hire people to do nothing but wait on hold on customer service lines. When the person on hold is next in line, if the company has a paying customer, they switch the call over to them. If not, the person who's been waiting on hold all that time drops the call and dials in again, sort of reserving a spot for the next paying customer.
The rate to get straight through to the IRS is $1,000 to $5,000. I think it's a monthly subscription. A bargain for lawyers and accountants and such.
The Google thing waits on hold for you. But you still wait.
These services connect you immediately because they have people who have already done the waiting.
Apple’s responses often leave a lot to be desired, but at least you can use support forums and emails with a good response rate.
Note that I don’t think this is the fault of the IRS at all - they are woefully underfunded and understaffed.
Mind you I suspect people who fiddle their taxes have a different opinion of them.
I think it can be argued that Apple has never been developer friendly, but these days it is painfully difficult to ignore.
And I think this is a huge mistake, I would not be surprised if Microsoft end-up eating their lunch again.
It can be difficult to imagine but even IBM and Coca Cola are going do disappear into oblivion at some point.
Apple is not dead from a financial standpoint. But I'd go as far as to call it an incredibly healthy zombie.
What do we think its value would be today if it had been more developer-friendly in the ensuing 12.25 years -- higher, lower, the same? I truly don't know. But either way, a "huge mistake," from Apple's POV, is something that appreciably affects the bottom line. And Apple's insane valuation is face value evidence that anything about its corporate strategy that we view as a huge mistake is probably not.
Perhaps there's a case that what Apple has done is a huge ethical mistake, but we'd have to make the case for that very differently.
And that’s after a 7:1 split in 2014 and a 4:1 split in 2020… money isn’t everything, but they are clearly finding some success via software, which is the fastest growing part of the company of late.
Personally, I have plenty of my own gripes with Apple, but ever since switching to their ecosystem 13 years ago I’ve felt like I hopped off a creaky freight train and onto a high speed maglev.
Paul suggests that Apple is “evil”, as if the company is immoral and intentionally aiming to harm a group of people (in this case, the App Store developers). I don’t see any “evil” intent here, and think that Apple intended to develop a feedback loop to incentivize App Store developers to improve quality control.
It’d be difficult to obtain, but what would be interesting to see is a graph of the following data points:
- The frequency of moderate to high-severity client-side bugs released for the same app to Google's Play Store and Apple's App Store.
- If there were ever times where Apple has tightened or loosened their approval process, the before and after on the frequency of client-side issues.
Although app developers have no control over the app approval process, one way to mitigate turnaround time risks in fixing issues is implementing as much logic as possible server-side (of course, there are definitely times where this isn’t feasible).
Getting a 30x return for a company at scale is a phenomenal outcome for any VC. Seems like Apple did something right.
- Oracle only 2x market cap [0] (from ~$100B to ~$200B)
- Microsoft only 10x market cap [1] (from ~$200B to ~$2,000B)
Apple with its 30x increase is an order of magnitude more than Oracle and 3x more than Microsoft.
But App Store ham-fisted rules made me distrust and resent Apple. I've stopped using Apple-only languages and frameworks as much as I could, and as a user I'm looking to leave the platform entirely (which unfortunately after a over a decade of using, I'm locked into and resent that too).
> They're so attracted to the iPhone that they can't leave. But they're looking for a way out.
I know hindsight is 20/20 and all, but there's a much broader point that could have been made here about "what happens in a world in which entire software distribution chains are at the mercy of one or two megacorps?" Now that would have been a remarkably prescient gripe, and a much more accurate guess at the "mistake" Apple was making (if you can call the current backlash a "mistake"?)
It also isn't auto-upgrading to HTTPS, which is a smaller issue, but just kind of surprising for someone with PG's tech stature.
A normal app goes through these stages: 1- Free. If it's good, it will receive good reviews, which will make it more popular 2- Paid
The first stage is an investment on the part of the developer. He invests his time and effort. But many developers only find out that it's impossible to move to (2) once it's too late (reviews can't be ported to new apps)
Well, not until 2016 when Apple began to offer ads in the AppStore -- as though that was a good thing for indy developers.
And a couple years later, when Spotify keeps getting pushed down the list: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/09/technology/ap...
This is why we're going to develop for Spotify's API first.
It take times, years and sometimes decades, but developer love is critically important for a platform.
Not matter how broken the App Store was at launch, it was much better than anything that was available at the time, smartphone business was really messy and completely unfair for devs.
>>> Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would.
Again though... I think the point is that Apple could have a better review process that A) values the developer more and B) shouldn't take as long. I agree with that.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/296226/annual-apple-app-...
woody_harrelson_drying_his_tears_with_money.jpg
Carry on.
Ah...the heck with it. I should have known better than to stick my oar in here. I'm nuking the comment.
I'm not happy, too.
I deleted a paragraph in this response about a conversation I had -just this morning- with a friend that owns a fairly substantial company, that does a lot of its manufacturing in China.
I won't go into it, but China has their own "rules," and they have the muscle to enforce them.
Anyhow, the question driving everything now is "Security?". How do you deliver non-dangerous software to innocent people? What is the (un)fashionably libertarian answer on this anyhow? Let them eat blackmail?
The libertarian and bog standard answers agree in this case = you don't need to know how, we don't need you to be the decision maker.