> complaining after the fact that Apple is not sufficiently incentivizing you to maintain your code that runs on and is distributed by their operating systems is bizarre to me.
Let me tie things up a bit for you then. To repeat myself; I'm not complaining! I don't pay Apple a dime anymore, not for services nor hardware. I had a brief, happy stint as an iOS dev in my nascent, foolish years as a programmer and moved on. I find it hilarious that Apple can't do the bare minimum to support my software after I wrote it and paid them to publish it. It's part of the reason I refuse to build apps that aren't for the web anymore; native dev is for chumps. It is a literal waste of time.
> I personally like that Apple trims the fat and keeps things ship-shape.
Out of every commercial OS, Apple ships the most complex kernel and largest install size (on iOS and MacOS). If you think it's for "[trimming] the fat" then I struggle to see what fat they're cutting off. Most of the time, we're getting things depreciated like OpenCl and 32-bit libraries that users actually depended on to a certain degree, with no replacement besides proprietary alternatives. Seems like they're cutting off lean to me.
For chrissake, we're talking about a company that ships a mandatory 7gb AI model with every iOS install. Apple's "smart defaults" direction is just a load of cons, and I say that as someone that thinks Microsoft's model is imperfect too. But Microsoft doesn't get half the flak Apple does because they commit to third-party cooperation instead of treating it like an existential threat. They cooperate with Nvidia when Apple refuses to talk to them, they work with Khronos when Apple refuses to answer their letters, Microsoft seems to actually want their OS to compete. Clearly Apple wants to shelter theirs from competition.
> Your personification of a corporation is bizarre too.
I don't believe I characterized them at all. I said Apple's real excuse is not that they don't want depreciated or unprofitable apps (they can change that at-will by supporting old runtimes and allowing sideloading) but really that their defacto control over the iPhone is threatened. Unless you think copying over old dylibs and enabling sideloading is fundamentally impossible, I don't see how I've cast them in any particular light.
Nobody in this thread is foolish enough to say Apple has some outstanding commitment to queer values, quality apps or protecting user privacy. We've all watched that roof collapse over the past decade, we know money is king. My point in the last comment is that Apple's lack of transparency over which charges are necessary and which are arbitrary will be the end of them. It's a charade, and several countries (including the US) launched investigations to remediate it. Apple cannot persist with their current direction, and they refuse to admit they're wrong.