Apple Is on Defense at WWDC

Re:Apple Is on Defense at WWDC by JimDabell on Sunday June 08, 2025 @10:40AM (#44217287)

I don’t hear many iOS developers clamouring for VS Code. They mostly just want Xcode fixed. The only mention of it in those two articles is somebody wanting “AI goodies we see with IDE’s like VS Code and Cursor make its way (natively) into Xcode.” But there are many wanting a better Xcode.

I’m not sure you can point to Cocos as a motivating factor for Apple, and it certainly wasn’t sudden. It got popular very early on and plateaued. I remember building apps with it for iPhoneOS. SpriteKit didn’t come along until years later.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple Is on Defense at WWDC by JKCalhoun on Sunday June 08, 2025 @10:49AM (#44217345)

I'm not in the loop then if you say iOS devs just want Xcode fixed. You could be right. You would have to weigh that against devs that are not even testing the iOS waters because they see Xcode as a barrier, are more familiar with their VSCode Cmake ecosystem.

A new framework like SpriteKit requires at least a year (an iOS release cycle) before it sees WWDC ... and then a shipping iOS. My recollection is that this is pretty close to the timeline I described where Cocos starts to show up in abundance in the iOS apps submitted and as a result a team is spun up at Apple to create what ends up being SpriteKit.

You'll have to educate me on the plateauing of Cocos. If it did plateau pre Sprite-Kit, what replaced it?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple Is on Defense at WWDC by JimDabell on Sunday June 08, 2025 @10:54AM (#44217382)

> A new framework like SpriteKit requires at least a year (an iOS release cycle) before it sees WWDC ... and then a shipping iOS. My recollection is that this is pretty close to the timeline I described

It’s not. Cocos got popular in the iPhoneOS 2.x days. SpriteKit came along in iOS 7. We’re talking about a period of five years, not one or two.

> If it did plateau pre Sprite-Kit, what replaced it?

Plateau means it stayed flat, not that it went away. Nothing replaced it. It just didn’t keep getting more and more popular.

[ Parent | on HN ]