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Comment by higherpurpose | Hacker News Reader

Adopting Metal for reasons of extra performance is one thing. Completely eliminating OpenGL ES support from iOS has no excuse other than shutting off Android, so that would be a pretty nasty move from them. I hope they don't do it. Forget about Android users - it's iOS developers that should be crying foul if Apple intends to do that, as it will force them to live in an iOS-only world whether they like it or not.

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"as it will force them to leave in an iOS-only world whether they like it or not."

I think you meant "live", but you could get leave to work in there as well. It would certainly take a lot to convince me to develop something for the iOS ... gated community.

> It would certainly take a lot to convince me to develop something for the iOS ... gated community.

Like the chance to make decent money? Gotta give Apple credit, their users are willing to shell out cash.

Emphasis on the word "chance". You could spend quite a bit of effort developing an app only to find out that Apple won't approve it, or perhaps requires unacceptable changes.

Hence my emphasis on "gated community". Some people like the trade-offs in this business model (earning money does have its attractions :-), I personally don't.

Who said anything about completely eliminating OpenGL ES? SceneKit writes to OpenGL, OpenGL views are pervasive, WebGL is turned on in Safari, CALayers are OpenGL backed. Metal just lets you tweak the render pipeline.

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