If you recall, back when the first iPhone came out, the idea was that Apple itself would be the only provider of first-class software for it, and everything else was relegated to web apps.
It didn't work out for them back then, and so we got native apps and the store. But I can't help but think that Apple still sees it as a sort of compromise of their ideal vision of what the platform should really be like, and thus dev ecosystem evolution is mostly on the backburner. Just look at how long it took for Swift to appear, despite Obj-C being really dated by that time.
Re:On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
by jonhendry18 on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @04:32PM
(#25052255)
Apple used to be better about developers, I think, back 2000-2010 or so.
Re:On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
by wlesieutre on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @04:46PM
(#25052415)
Mocked at the time, but looking back it sounds pretty good. Maybe Apple needs a Steve Ballmer.
In the personal computing world, first parties can't build enough user software.
Furthermore, software availability and reliability lag third party developer and development ecosystem health. A bad experience doesn't hurt the platform today, it hurts the platform in 1+ years.
And perhaps even worse, steps to address it take effect over a 1+ year timeframe as well.
Apple's been able to leverage iOS market share into papering over the desktop reality, but they're going to find the emperor has no clothes real quickly if anything about that calculus shifts in a bad way.