Comment by Quothling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Quothling | Hacker News Reader

I once had to setup an Apple developer account to have one of our municipality apps shown as ours. I'm not sure why that was considering all our other apps never needed that, but it was what it was. It was a pretty terrible experience. First I needed an Apple account, and since I didn't really want to use my private one, I needed to create one for work. I couldn't create an "organisation account" so it was tied to me. Luckily we had an old iPhone waiting to be thrown out, so I could use that. Then I had to wait for days to have Apple confirm who I was, but this was basically just Apple calling the person I had listed as my boss and then having him say yes. I hope they did more research than that, but I'm not sure they did, and the people who called us were even worse at English than us so it was hilarious to say the least.

Then we had to set up payments, because for some reason you need to pay money to have an Apple developer account. Whatever, in the budget of an entire city of 60.000 people, that's not even going to show up anywhere, right? Well... Since it's a foreign subscription and since Apple has no way of doing this as a B2B purchase that can be easily registered with our local tax agency, it had to go under yearly reviews. It was also only possible to pay with a credit card which again tied it to something the organisation would need an actual person to renew and since organisational credit cards are tied to people, and since people change jobs, and since you need to be in actual human contact with Apple to change owners... well you can imagine how much fun that was.

This was some years ago, so maybe things have changed, but out of any of our 300+ enterprise IT solutions that I ever worked with, Apple was the only one that was this horrible. To be fair, I'm a developer, I'm not sure how I ended up with the task and maybe these things are simply more common in the operations side of IT than I know.

> This was some years ago

This is probably worse today, they're all the time throwing more roadblocks to avoid people to publish apps in their "ecosystem", except if you're a large US company that can easily handle the paperwork.

I have never understood how Apple gets away with it and even more than that gets a huge amount of love. Whereas, if Microsoft just looks at you wrong, pitchforks are out. I'm not cheerleading any company here, but it has been frustrating in my career where people absolutely refuse to touch or even consider anything Microsoft related but love their Apple computer. Apple is probably hundreds of times more agressive, more stubborn, and moat building than Microsoft. Microsoft's dev tools are some of the most open in the world for a big company, certainly more so than Apple and Google.

As an Apple user, the experience is generally fine, especially when compared to Microsoft.

Most of the complaints about Apple seem to have come from devs. And in contrast, Microsoft [in]famously loves developers (Balmer on stage...)

I was an Apple user and even fanboy for many years. I left because they ignored macOS and then started making it iOS like. I have far less issues on Windows than I do on macOS.

Apple sucks dealing with anything that doesn't have their name on it. External monitors have terrible support because Apple refuses to implement a specific protocol making that nice, like everyone else does. You basically have to use Apple's monitors or their overpriced officially supported LG monitors they sell in the Apple Store if you want an integrated monitor experience. Several other issues with Apple exist with peripherals. I have to make special router settings in my home because my partner's work Macbook can't switch between the mesh network. My partner also had to get IT to give her admin access so that she could rename iTunes because it was the only reliable way to keep iTunes from opening every time her non-Apple Bluetooth headphones connected. Search about what it takes to rename an app like iTunes. It is literally insane.

Apple's entire stock in trade is "computing as it should be". Their stuff is the coolest platform ever to exist, which means that developing for their gear is like getting into Studio 54: only the hottest and coolest are allowed in, permitting anything less would tarnish the club's reputation. Which sucks for most devs but it's part of being the coolest.

Microsoft just wants to dominate. They don't care if the UX is garbage, as long as the user doesn't have a choice.

> Which sucks for most devs but it's part of being the coolest.

What if we determine that the "coolness" motivation is a scapegoat for anticompetitive behavior?

AT&T could have argued the same thing but I'm not sure if the coolness of their infrastructure would have saved them from a breakup.

> only the hottest and coolest are allowed in, permitting anything less would tarnish the club's reputation

It's kind of a cult in other words, personally I'm not part of it and not afraid of blasphemy when I see stuff broken.

It would be kind of a cult, if Apple products weren't more pleasant and joyous to use by far than any of the alternatives.

Experience is subjective I'd say, I certainly disagree with that after using the old iPhone of my wife for a year to not make more ewaste. I found the whole thing buggy and confusing, I finally got rid of it after an error loop when installing apps meant that I had to format it again to fix it.

I'm sure most users do love it though, to each their own. There's certainly enough space for all kinds of products and all kinds of consumers.

They aren't. I find them worse by far than any alternative.

Sorry, but I use Mac and Windows computers (by job requirement). Windows is and has always been clunky and difficult to use. Maybe you don't feel that, but it is a fact. I wound't spend any time with windows if I had a choice.

That's not a fact. That's your an opinion.

In my opinion, macOS has an horrific UX especially for power users. It's so bad that there is a cottage industry of third party developers creating apps to refine the bad out of the box experience with macOS. Most macOS users buy several of these apps and it's just an accepted part of the culture around Macs.

Windows isn't great and has other issues but I think it has a better UX overall.

I'm in the same camp but I do think MacOS has the best interface on a screenshot, it's when I'm actually using it that I find mountains of problems.

I think the whole thing is organized on how good it would look to screenshot rather than usability.

There's ample room to criticize either OS, and given the opportunity I'd avoid either both. Nobody I've ever met will unilaterally defend stock MacOS. You criticize Spotlight, they say "buy Raycast!" You mope about window management and they tell you to install Rectangle. You get jumpscared by the Apple Music popup when you put on headphones, and a concerned user will always chime in with the registry command to disable it. It's a jack-in-the-box of modal advertisements and sophisticated service clients.

On Windows, I get the APIs I want like Vulkan without arbitrary software restrictions. It's also a ghoulish wasteland of service integration and user hostility, but at least they let you do what you want. That sort of immediacy is probably why a lot of users prefer Windows even if it's arguably poorly-designed.

> Maybe you don't feel that, but it is a fact.

Facts normally come with citations. Do you have anything better than your opinion to cite?

This sounds it's coming from 2006 when we would laugh at the mess that was Windows Vista.

Only the hottest and coolest allowed in? Let me share the good news with the thousands of developers making Bible apps and Clash of Clans clones.

> Whereas, if Microsoft just looks at you wrong, pitchforks are out.

Not to nitpick, but Microsoft looking wrong at you is more like the Eye of Sauron looking wrong at you.

Just pointing to the gigantic amount of dark patterns on Microsoft products, especially Windows.

Apple's iOS and macOS have very similar dark patterns, but they go unmentioned. Yes, Windows has been making some really bad decisions with the Windows and Edge products, and it is really annoying. But at least their dev tooling is top notch, and you can easily interact with actual Microsoft employees in their repos. It's a nice experience.

> Apple's iOS and macOS have very similar dark patterns, but they go unmentioned

So you agree pitchforks should be out both for Apple and Microsoft.

Count me in.

Yes, I agree. But Microsoft should recieve some kudos for VS Code and .NET. What they've achieved is quite astounding. No one else has done what they have with the transition of .NET. Although, there is definitely an argument that it should have been cross-platform since the beginning.

I don't understand why these companies make the OS level decisions they do though. They make billions. You think they could relax and try to capture users by making them happy instead of kidnapping them.

> how Apple [...] gets a huge amount of love.

The wind is changing.

If somebody dared to write a comment on HN criticizing Apple in the 10s, downvotes rained down on that comment. HN's policy is to downvote to express disagreement, among the other things.

That's not been the case anymore since a few years. This very thread would have been nearly impossible 10 years ago, maybe 5 years ago too.

It's because Apple doesn't have users, they have fanboys. Apple customers aren't there because of the quality of the product, they're there because they've been convinced that Apple is cool.

I think you mistyped the URL - this is Hacker News, not Slashdot. Let's keep the discussion intelligent and not bother with the mud slinging or other insults.

An interesting observation is that users of Apple products rarely go out of their way to insult others based on their choice of hardware / OS, while users of Android (and Windows & Linux to a lesser extent) seem to get quite needlessly enraged at the Apple users. No one is forcing Apple products on you guys, chill out.

As someone who uses iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, Mac, and FreeBSD on a daily basis, I believe all of them have their pros and cons.

On topic: Apple used to quite strongly prefer (and tell) developers to use web apps when appropriate instead of a native app. As someone that has helped many companies develop apps - the biggest complaint about not having a native app is that they won't be listed in the App Stores without one.

Many of the apps I've helped develop could be web apps, but, companies really want to see their app in the App Stores.

What are these new roadblocks?

From a North American perspective, the only thing I can think of that has changed is Google now requiring DUNS numbers for business accounts (while Apple has required them for a very long time, for business accounts).

It's still the same, I had some error loop on the iPhone when setting up a developer account and their support just didn't understand what's going on until something like 6 months after, it somehow worked suddenly.

It's as random as ever, it might work straight away or you are unlucky and hit some of the random bug in this process and it'll fail for a long time

I believe governments and nonprofits are eligible to have the $99 Developer Program membership fee waived, not sure when this started but it is not super new.

If you were doing it today it’d probably be much easier from the enterprise procurement side. They often give out single-use virtual card numbers per service now.

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