News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why Amazon got out of the Apple App Store tax and other developers won’t.

Re:Why Amazon got out of the Apple App Store tax and other d... by VonGuard on Saturday April 04, 2020 @12:40PM (#22779380)
Apple's been like this forever, it's only gotten much worse since the late 2000's and the launch of the iTunes App store. Even in the old days, when Mac Classic existed, Apple would change its mind about stuff for developers all the time. Anyone remember OpenDoc and how that was gonna change the world? Apple's favorite thing to do is tell developers it's got the next big thing (Newton), next big language (remember Swift?), or the next big tool (AR). They hand this out to devs, devs eat it up, and like 1 or 2 years later, they either spring said thing like a trap no one can escape from, or they just give up on it and act like it never happened and move on, leaving developers with useless new skills.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Amazon got out of the Apple App Store tax and other d... by npunt on Saturday April 04, 2020 @02:51PM (#22780522)
If we're going to mine ancient history, lets put up a disclaimer that any company that exists for a 40+ years and is trying to invent new things is going to change their mind about stuff. If they didn't, they probably wouldn't be very good at inventing things.

There's context to consider with Apple in the 90s, which was weeks from bankruptcy. Here's SJ's rather famous response at WWDC 97 to why OpenDoc was killed, and a little later on he describes his opinion of Newton [1]. Hard to disagree with the sentiments.

Killing OpenDoc and Newton was a way to keep the company alive and prepare for the next big thing. 4 years later, out pops the iPod. 10 years later, the iPhone.

[1] https://youtu.be/yQ16_YxLbB8?t=3025

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Amazon got out of the Apple App Store tax and other d... by Grustaf on Saturday April 04, 2020 @02:11PM (#22780161)
I’ve replied to your baseless statements about swift already below, and as to AR: nobody knows what will come of it but apple most definitely haven’t abandoned it. They keep increasing their investments into ARKit and even added a Lidar to the ipad last week.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Amazon got out of the Apple App Store tax and other d... by xenospn on Saturday April 04, 2020 @12:51PM (#22779471)
Where did Swift go? it's still front and center.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Amazon got out of the Apple App Store tax and other d... by VonGuard on Saturday April 04, 2020 @01:25PM (#22779771)
It's still here, but people were so excited about it when it came out, and some folks actually thought it'd be usable on other platforms. Here were are years later and it's just a niche language for iPhones. Everyone who was excited about it seems to have stopped being excited because it's 100% Apple only. Like all their stuff. I mean, is there anything better than a completely closed source programming language?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Amazon got out of the Apple App Store tax and other d... by Grustaf on Saturday April 04, 2020 @02:09PM (#22780142)
Are you serious? There is an entire industry around swift, countless blogs, podcasts, books and websites. Interest is growing steadily and people are more excited than ever. It’s open source and has a very engaged community around it’s development, anyone can propose changes to it.

And of course it’s not 100% apple only, apple themselves have invested a lot in swift on linux, and others are working on swift for windows and webassembly. You couldn’t be more wrong actually.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Amazon got out of the Apple App Store tax and other d... by Avi0n on Saturday April 04, 2020 @01:45PM (#22779971)
Swift is not closed source, it’s open source on GitHub. In addition, Swift currently runs on both macOS and Linux. There is a pull request open that introduces Windows support which I believe will be released with the next point version of Swift.
[ Parent | on HN ]