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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

Apple would have been avoided by developers if they weren't part of the smartphone duopoly. The tools and processes are just that bad.

Now Google has decided to make theirs even worse than Apple at least when it comes to publishing in the play store.

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The sad thing is that Apple seemed more inviting to developers before they got high on the App Store cut.

Every boxed Mac OS X came with a second disc containing the SDK (Xcode has always been an unstable cow, tho). They used to publish tech notes that explained how the OS works, rather than WWDC videos with high-level overviews that feel more like advertisements.

Back then they've at least made attempts to use some open standards, and allowed 3rd parties to fill gaps in the OS, instead of acting like a Smaug of APIs.

Because they were coming out of being at the edge of bankruptcy and needed any help they could get becoming profitable again.

My graduation thesis was porting a visualisation framework from NeXTSTEP into Windows, Objective-C => C++, because my supervisor saw no future on keeping the NeXT hardware in our campus, if he only knew what would happen a few years later.

Apple has always resented 3rd party developers, right back to the Apple 2 days. They saw them as capturing value that they had created.

They said it in the Epic vs Apple litigation, something along the lines of "we create the entire App Store market", like the 3rd party developers aren't.

Video with ELI5-level overviews that feel like an ad - these do sell. A disk with SDK does not.

The problem is all three companies - Apple google Microsoft - are making their platforms worse. It’s a symptom of low competition and immense concentration of capital / labor.

Is that actually true for Microsoft? How they've evolved .NET and VS Code is amazing. You can make a PR on Microsoft's repos, someone actually pays attention, you get to talk and worth with Microsoft employees, and they merge things in.

Microsoft is leaps and bounds more open than Google and Apple when it comes to development tooling.

It might be true on developer tools. For them I was talking more about Windows, Teams, etc

That is one part of microsoft, yeah, but then you also them making various parts of windows worse to try to squeeze every penny out of people, and where that fails, doing things like ads for apps in the start menu

MS directs all of its hostility toward the end user, Apple spreads it around to everybody.

Apple is still orders of magnitude worse in every vector though. The bully everyone from users, employees, to suppliers.

The Wintel coalition was anti-competitive to an extreme degree. It may have faded to the background at this point but they were caught red handed multiple times using their market dominance to utterly destroy innovative alternatives.

It doesn’t excuse Apple’s behavior, but imo they still have a long way to go to challenge the track record of MS and Intel.

All those things were done under Gates and Ballmer. When Nadella stood up on stage in his first year as CEO under a big banner that proclaimed "MS (heart) Linux", I said "I'll believe it when I see it." Well, over the next decade or so, I saw it, and now I believe it. Microsoft under Nadella just plain behaves differently (and much better) than they used to behave under Gates and Ballmer.

Not only is dotnet development is the benchmark to aspire to (IMO), i'm not sure you could name another corporate project that comes even close. Is there a way to globally see github project activity by rank? All of dotnet is MIT. They literally have public meetings and take public notes. What other corporate project has this?

None that I know of. It's really impressive. Although, they really should have made .NET cross-platform from the beginning.

I even advocated for a previous company to try and find someone from the .NET project to help lead a similar but smaller tech transition.

The MS dotnet debugger is not open-source - you can legally use it only with VS and VS Code (you could always give Samsung's open-source debugger a try, but it has certain limitations: https://github.com/Samsung/netcoredbg/issues/194#issuecommen...)

They are, however there are plenty of things to complain about, and you won't find any praise from developers that bought into WinRT reboot, and how it was managed since Windows 8, with tooling rebooted multiple times and left to rotten, me included.

Microsoft developer tooling is usually pretty great IME. It's being a user that mostly sucks

The Swift ecosystem is pretty amazing too. I've made several PRs and got them merged into Swift Parser while exchanging ideas with Apple employees fruitfully. The only big caveat is there's no guarantee your work will ever be merged into Xcode, meaning most Swift users won't benefit from your work because of Apple's opaque gatekeeping.

On the repos and tools that have funding sure, or you can have them reject that they are maintaining things, put out a github repo, fail to review anything or merge anything but build it so its really hard to expand without them, and then close the product down in five years or less.

Microsoft's developer relations are highly variable: they are great in some areas (C# and .NET Core continue to be fantastic, Visual Studio's debugger is second to none, going back to gdb after it is like banging rocks together to make fire), and awful in others (if I want to write a GUI application in Windows, what should I do to be on the idiomatic happy path? Microsoft: shrug, try one of these half-dozen half-baked frameworks. No we won't tell you which one, and that doesn't matter because it'll be deprecated in three years anyway).

This is better than the story from Apple and Google, who are just terrible consistently, but there is room for improvement.

This has been my experience as well. All code that doesn't need a UI feels good to write, but as soon as you try to make anything that doesn't run in the console you are met with so much boilerplate and bad tooling that I start dreading waking up.

I've had to make a couple of side projects for my company and I've tried WPF, Blazor, MAUI, and Winforms.

Blazor is the best out of all of these but even it has tedious boilerplate and unintuitive state handling.

MVVM makes WPF and Winforms a hassle, and customizing the looks of components is a nightmare, where some seemingly universal attributes will either get misapplied or outright ignored.

MAUI is a nightmare to work with. Cross compilation is both slow and opaque which makes it impossible to debug and since you are interfacing with the xcode compiler as well you are forced to debug using divine inspiration and hoping it works. We tried to make an RTC AR POC app a while back and it took me 2 weeks of trying different ways to make iirc arkit or webrtc to compile with dotnet and the result was us giving up and just making the iOS version in swift/using xcode instead. I think this is why I still have fond memories of xcode because despite all of its flaws it was noticeably better than trying to cross compile an iOS app from dotnet

I personally loved my short stint as iOS developer despite Xcode's flaws. Swift is a great language, and Apple has some really nice API's.

Xcode was great in the early Mac OS X days. It turned to crap when it became Apple's moat for iOS developers.

You mean Project Builder. Once they unified it into Xcode, stability and performance started decreasing every year.

Aren't Google just matching Apple with the signing and notarization bullshit? Except Google is free?

Almost free, you need to pay 20 euros/dollars once, if you are going to publish on the store.

Yes, but this doesn't mean we should put up with it. After this comes into effect in 2027 or so, you won't be able to install an app on your Google-certified phone without Google knowing, just like on iOS. What happened to user control?

Oh I know and I absolutely hate it. I can't think of a good argument for these changes. They're just not worse than what has always prevented me from owning IOS devices

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