Apple has not changed its policy in over a decade: they don't care about software devs, they don't want you to release your stuff there, and only the biggest companies who are willing to throw dev after dev at the problem get to participate in the walled garden.
Screw 'em, release your software on Windows and Linux and don't look back.
There is only one platform to support: macOS. I can target all supported Mac users 100% of the time. Windows is similar and is also one OS to support and one can target their Windows software to Windows users 100% of the time.
> Screw 'em, release your software on Windows and Linux and don't look back.
How do you define Linux support especially when you cannot guarantee supporting all Linux users and distros?
Binary Qt and GTK apps compiled even 10-15 years ago often still work, and do so on almost any distro. Games are a bit more iffy, depending on if it used SDL or not; and Steam on Linux has made great effort to make the (admittedly few) older Linux binaries remain alive (and if Steam doesn't, the community has).
I don't see this as an issue. Using Linux implies a level of competency from the customer, and I'd rather help a competent Linux customer try to get my stuff run on their odd distro (ex: Alpine) than help an incompetent Windows or OSX user. One gets me a customer for life, the other just reminds me that hell is other people.
That hasn’t been my experience at all. Also, the desktop Linux market is minuscule. It is an order of magnitude smaller than the macOS market. There’s a reason commercial software vendors don’t usually bother with it.
That isn't good enough. It is not a guarantee of full OS support and you are forced to select a limited set of distros that you can support despite them all running a Linux kernel.
That is not the case with Windows or macOS which the majority of users have been using for their Desktops for decades. [0]
> I don't see this as an issue. Using Linux implies a level of competency from the customer, and I'd rather help a competent Linux customer try to get my stuff run on their odd distro (ex: Alpine) than help an incompetent Windows or OSX user.
Why should one always assume that their customers are kernel engineers or know what a compiler is to get their GUI app running on their system? I would not give free or paid support on unsupported systems, especially when the Linux user-base is vanishingly tiny.
If your software can be run by tech-illiterate users on Windows / Macs and they are paying for it, that is a much better outcome than wasting hours helping one Linux user run your software on an obscure distro either for free or paid.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
* You have to setup the binary to build N times (done automatically if you use the tools apple provides while apparently not caring about developers)
* In this case you have to setup a non-standard UI toolkit, which obviously is going to make things harder, and make that build universal as well. Qt claims to support mac and iOS so I'm surprised that doesn't happen by default
* Codesign, which is a trivial step
The hardest part here is just the "I don't want to make a native app so I'm going to build an entire 3rd party UI toolkit", which is not an argument that apple doesn't care about devs.
you only do that for the final build. It does prevent unscrupulous malware distributors, since there's now a paper trail linking it back to you if you did bad.
Of course, this could be abused by apple to gatekeep, and it doesn't prevent the user from downloading the app and bypassing this security measure (so does not in actual fact stop all malware).
You seem to think "codesign" is the trivial step: it is not. Many many times that entire step has made it to the top of the front page on HN, on how many dev teams simply cannot get this to work right consistently, and will break in ways that cannot be debugged using the tool output or the documentation.
Nobody has this level of problem on Windows: I just sign it using a valid cert, and its done. I don't need to buy a Microsoft-made computer or need to run Visual Studio or pay Microsoft $100 a year and then still have random reports of Windows users being unable to run my binary; however, HN has popularized countless stories of devs being forced to buy a Mac (which means no OSX in a VM, no OSX build farms, very spotty CI<->OSX integration), having to pay Apple $100 a year to notarize the signing (which they can also refuse to do, without recourse), having to use XCode (at least for the signing step), and they still have situations where the binary is not being signed and/or notarized, or OSX will randomly fail to run the binary, or it actively prevents users from running the binary without telling anyone why, but giving scary messages to non-tech users anyways.
I'm sorry, but how the hell is a trillion dollar company getting this wrong? Apple has broken priorities, and shilling/fanboying for them on here is not going to fix the problem.
IMO, a lot of the UI things apple has introduced in the last few years have been attempting to get the people making apps for iOS to also make them for macOS in a way that isn't just an iOS app running on a larger screen.
I guess the alternative is that everyone continues making these horrific apps built on top of chrome wrappers like electron, bring Sun's vision of everyone shipping a single crappy app to every platform.
> I'm sorry, but how the hell is a trillion dollar company getting this wrong? Apple has broken priorities, and shilling/fanboying for them on here is not going to fix the problem.
I'm sure you have a solution then? One that doesn't require the alternative of "every app must be from a central store that reviews and approves every app"?
> shilling/fanboying for them on here is not going to fix the problem.
Name calling and personal attacks doesn't help anyone, and it certainly doesn't inspire me to think you're willing to argue in good faith.
Also, yes, I have a solution, the same solution everyone eventually follows: they switch back to Windows, they get angry at Microsoft for whatever reason (Microsoft comes up with a good one every 7-8 years), and then they switch permanently to Linux.
I used Linux as my primary, and only, desktop OS from when Windows 95 started shipping on PCs in 1996 to about 2015, where I allowed Windows back into my life. My laptop is a MBPR that very quickly proved that OSX is not, and never will be, prod ready (to my credit, I made it a year and a half before I gave up); it then got swapped to Windows, and ran that way for a few years until it now runs Linux.
From my vantage point, Linux adoption on the desktop is an Eternal September, and I'm fine with it. Everyone makes it here sooner or later if they're serious about computers and/or software development.
The solution to fixing Apple, however, is doing what Microsoft did: quiet fired/force retired Balmer, promoted a strong candidate from within, and let him right the ship; Apple needs to replace Tim Cook with whoever their equivalent of Satya Nadella is.
In my experience this varies a lot between projects and developers. Some Qt apps are great (Krita comes to mind) but just as many are quite janky. Of course AppKit/UIKit have their fair share of bad apps too, but generally if developers have gone as far to commit to building their app with either (especially AppKit, which is the less accessible of the two) they take extra care to produce a good product.
Qt being for most intents and purposes usable only with C++ and Python likely impacts this, though. A lot of devs aren't particularly keen on either language, especially with the extra headaches that come with shipping a user-facing multiplatform Python app that reliably runs everywhere.
Furthermore QT on macOS literally links to and renders the same controls as AppKit under the hood, so while you can definitely use it if you want (e.g for cross platform benefits) your claim that it “nails” platform specific UI is just incorrect. They are fundamentally the same thing in this case.
You appear to have this irrational idea(and hatred…?) about how macOS/iOS developers work but don’t appear to truly understand what you’re talking about.
Anecdotally any single-platform launch on HN will be on macOS.