Apple Developer Update | Hacker News Reader

Apple Developer Update

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52 pointsJeremy102641 comments

Only Apple can get away with something like this. "Hey guys sorry we where down for days but now everything is fine again enjoy"

No aftermath report. No details on anything.

Can they really get away with it? Will people actually put up with this kind of treatment?

iOS 7 is requiring lots of work from app developers, to both fix what ios 7 broke in their app and to make their UIs fit in with the new design language apple is pushing. (To be fair, there are new APIs some apps are benefiting from).

Developers response to the need to do a lot of work for no gain? "This is a great opportunity!"

Anyway, it comes down to who has the power in the relationship. Though both parties are obviously necessary, the devs need Apple more than Apple needs the devs. Add to that the fact that the biggest devs are making tons of money, what's the point in rocking the boat?

I've been rewriting my code through Apple System 6->System 7->System 8/9->Carbon->OS X->PPC to Intel->iOS. Honestly most of my memories dealing with Apple have been deprecation and rewrites.

Every time Apple touts some new technology, I think to myself that they'll be sunsetting it in 5 years or whatever. I'm coming to terms with nearly the entirety of the code I wrote the last 24 years being useless. I highly recommend to anyone getting started in software development to only use open source and cross platform tools.

My own theory for why most software projects can only reach a million lines of code is that this is the limit of entropy. Think of it as, what's the largest boat that you can safely bail out with a bucket of water?

Your apps will be quite a bit smaller on Mac OS than say, Windows or Linux, or else you'll find yourself keeping up with changes more than making stuff. And I don't believe deprecation is a necessary evil to innovate or pivot. Apple could and should do much better in this department.

This is my current frustration.

I have a Macbook from 2008. It can't run the newer OS X. I was looking into doing a little iOS development this weekend. Turns out, newer Xcode requires newer OS X. I could upgrade to, I think, Lion. But I'd still have to upgrade to Snow Leopard first. And with Mavericks coming out and obsoleting Mountain Lion, I'd get what... a few months use maybe?

On top of this, I can't even run the latest iTunes to sync with my iPhone 5. My perfectly fine Macbook is about as useful as a doorstop right now. I mean, a Core2Duo with 2GB of RAM is outdated. No one will dispute that. But these aren't the days of Pentium vs 486 or 386. It's pretty silly and arbitrary.

As long as Apple owns the best platform in terms of potential profitability for developers, yes.

You mean the one where people can't be sure that their app will even be published once they finish developing it?

That's the one! It's a feature (for the users) not a bug.

  > Will people actually put up with this kind of treatment?

Dramatic much? Some services were offline for a few weeks and that inconvenienced some developers. Nobody's getting beaten or abused. Life will go on. The extreme horror and PTSD that some may feel over a service disruption will fade in time, like tears in rain.

FWIW the details, such as they are, came earlier:

In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.

I was amazed they did that. To admit almost anything was very un-Appley.

I wouldn't mind them opening up a little more.

Member Center is one of four services still not back up again. "Everything" is not fine yet, and they haven't stated anything to that effect. Why don't you wait for the issue to be resolved before expecting a post-mortem?

QQ Noob!

  Only Apple can get away with something like this.

Yeah, you're right. And that's because of their behaviour the other 364 days of the year.

Broke the screen on my iPhone, they replaced it for free. Lost a plastic insert on my headphones, they replaced it for free. My Earpods stopped working after a few months and they replaced them for free. The logic board on my MBP stopped working, they replaced it for free.

So yes. Only Apple can get away with something like this.

Apple does get a free pass. I don't think anyone would deny that. But come on. They treat their customers pretty darn well.

Up to a point. If there is a technical issue the inevitable result, at the genius bar at least, is to reimage the Mac every time without attempting to diagnose the problem.

It's like doing a heart transplant without working out what is wrong with the heart.

Inevitably the chain of events that caused the issue to occur will happen again and nothing ever ends up ultimately resolved.

Case in point: recently someone came to me as a last resort after refusing the genius bar "wipe the machine" solution. The problem was a runaway process in an HP provided print driver (pdf2pdf) due to a bug. The outcome was to flatten the machine and start again. When the user got home, they were to be told to install the HP driver software again from the CD with their printer. Now that would just cause it to happen again straight away.

My solution:

1. Actually bother to use Activity Monitor to work out what is going on (beyond the average Genius Bar staffer).

2. Google it (also beyond the average Genius Bar staffer).

3. kill the process, install updated driver. Duh.

It makes me wonder how many people have been screwed. You've just been bought off with free kit because they can't make a lasting product [1]

[1] MBP logic board failures are very common, as are earpods. I'm on my 3rd logic board for an MBP and around the family, the 9th (!) set of replacement earphones. Whereas my Lenovo T61 and Sennheiser earphones are both 6 years old with no problems...

Most of the services still don't work for me. Can't generate certs/profiles, no forums. I get redirected to the maintenance page from most of the links with very few exceptions. Also no response from customer support so far. Based in Ireland, if that matters. No, it's not a browser cache issue and no, I'm not a new subscriber.

I seriously don't understand why would a security breach take weeks to fix. Complete re-write (if that's what they're doing) is never a good response to a security breach. Let alone that you keep a whole army of developers and their businesses almost totally paralyzed for weeks.

This is wrong on more than one level.

Same here. I've got the feeling Apple is very arrogant. They seem to think all developers just love Apple whatever they do. But my trust in Apple is gone.

Fortunately this year there will be a lot more to choose from: Android, Windows, Firefox OS, Ubuntu, Sailfish. And even some 'open' phones. I'm seeing a lot of companies stepping away from Apple these days. Too expensive when there are good alternatives.

And when you are writing company apps market share of an OS isn't an issue.

It is more often a matter of choice of the next tier in the "supply chain", i.e. my customers' choice, not my own.

I still love Apple's hardware, as well as their design decisions in a broad sense. Everything they do almost never disappoints in terms of novelty and coolness.

The only fundamental question in this context is, is developer lock-in part of what makes Apple Apple? I doubt so.

I don't think there is any developer lock-in. As you are saying it's the customers choice. When customers have more choice they can choose to go for an OS without Apple-control.

There is a lock-in. We invest a lot of time in learning an ecosystem with a very specific programming language, quirks, rules, practices, problems - oh, and the AppStore approval process. On top of that, one day we suddenly discover we also depend on the availability of Apple's cert server.

Customers/consumers are not locked in in this regard, and generally they don't care whether or to what extent developers are.

They can, but they aren't really. Why would any consumer anywhere care if the apple dev forums are down for 2 weeks. Nobody knows, cares, or has any reason to know or care. less than 1% of people likely. Readers of HN do not account for all buyers of smartphones as it happens.

Think I've got access to everything but the bug tracker, which I reported to Apple.

Can't generate certs/profiles, no forums.

Cert generations and forums are both working for me here in the UK, and are up according to their status page. Perhaps worth contacting their support to ask about your access? Have you tried curl or similar just to check?

Re the forums, I do find SO far better than the apple dev forums in terms of quality of answers, at least for released SDK questions.

I too am curious as to what exactly has gone wrong, but there are a few possibilities which could explain the delays. I doubt Apple will ever come clean. They shouldn't be rewriting code save essential security patches, but then perhaps they've had to upgrade some frameworks or libraries to get security patches and were so far behind that this required extensive rewrites of their code-base?

I did notice that they lost some certs generated near the interruption as well, so perhaps their backups situation is a mess (really they should have had nightlies leading to no data loss), and perhaps they had an accretion of ad-hoc services running on servers that were never restarted or rebuilt, leading to chaos when they had to rebuild them all at once and try to restore from clean backups. That could take quite a while to sort out.

Given the number of developers using these services daily, I'm really surprised as well at how long Apple took to handle this.

> Re the forums, I do find SO far better than the apple dev forums in terms of quality of answers, at least for released SDK questions.

It's just unfortunate that one can't ask questions under NDA on StackOverflow.

Apple really should just allow this, as their forums are complete garbage even when they are working.

Apple is not really the best when it comes to online services. iCloud still suffers from a lot of issues, MobileMe flopped and many of their sites still run on very, VERY ancient code.

This is a serious question: Can someone explain, why this takes Apple - who have "unlimited" resources - this long to fix?

Get a copy of "Mythical man month". Btw, where did you get an idea, that Apple has limited resources? What I hear is that they have really small teams.

They have $150 billion in the bank. If that's not "unlimited", what else is?

sigh Get a copy of the MMM and read it. TL;DR: adding more people to a project won't necessarily help make it go any faster and often will slow it down.

Immortality, I say half-seriously, since you can't spend time faster than anyone else.

You can't add more people to a project without slowing everything down. What else would you spend your money on, esp if you have enough that investing it may actually give you a higher ROI? You'd be well-advised to play the long game.

Serious answer:

A) Apple may not have "unlimited" resources:

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/04/12/apple-announces-leopard-delay...

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/04/02/apple-scuttlebut...

B) Instead of just getting things up and running ASAP, Apple may be taking the longer, harder road by rebuilding a significant portion of their systems completely, in order to prevent this from happening again. Basically taking the long view:

http://www.cultofmac.com/236547/apple-confirms-that-dev-cent...

That is straight from the horse's mouth.

Do we know exactly why the timeline is what it is? No. But we do know that Apple has stated that they are completely overhauling the systems, and that they do not have unquestionably unlimited resources. Additionally, if it is true that they are pulling engineers from OSX to ship the latest version of iOS on time, then not only do they not have unlimited resources, but even fewer than they would otherwise have without a major code revision about to ship.

There's no real urgency... this isn't really costing Apple any money.

Throwing more resources at a late project makes it later.

Nine women can't make a baby in a month.

And just because you're Apple doesn't mean throwing a billion dollars at a major security breach will fix it completely and correctly in less than a week.

Does anybody have an ETA on when Program Enrollment will be back up?

Only Apple knows that.

It's currently estimated as '1 Apple', which is a bespoke time unit, roughly equivalent to any amount of time between 1 minute and 45 days.

EDIT

In case anyone is wondering, '2 Apples' is strangely equivalent to an infinite amount of time. It is for this reason that '3 Apples' has never been measured; it may be possible to record it with the new Mac Pro.

Geeky tangent:

Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. - H2G2

This is purely arrogant! Think of other such popular services they were much more concern about thier FREEMIUM users comparing to paid services like AppStore dev centre.

At least they should disclose why it is taking too long for restoring every services.

WTF, That's all I can say.

No Honestly, I'd appreciate it if you can shed light on this, imagine it was a smaller company like github, or dropbox, they would have come forward and explained things, CEO or CTO would have posted to their blog, explaining what happend and what the plan was, Apple does not even have a link to that status page from their developer.apple.com page.

Such explanations make people feel better - but don't actually solve the problem. Apple's focus is do it, do it right, and don't involve anyone who doesn't facilitate getting it done.

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