I likewise have a fairly sunny perspective of Apple development, I even like XCode (since SwiftUI, at least… could never get the hang of Interface Builder).

But the fact that he got in to work on a music app is illuminating. The Apple audio APIs are an absolute mess. Media Player, AVPlayer, Core Audio, AVFoundation, AVAudioEngine… it's like competing teams dating all the way back to NeXT kept writing their own libs and somehow they all persisted through the iPhone era.

I spent about three months of the COVID lockdown trying to make a Shoutcast/Icecast player, it was excruciating.