I'm not sure what Apple can do here; Pandora's box is open and it won't be closed. It felt like there was a flood of app releases in the early 2010s during the gold rush. I can't even imagine it now.
They will not. Why would high revenue be a reason to hire more?
They look at margins and they want to optimize them, not use better margins as a reason to pursue smaller margins. Small time indie developers and businesses that earn them less than millions a month in fees are not worth their time. They’re solving this by automating more telemetry, not by hiring more junior and senior reviewers. They don’t want to take a loss on small devs.
I suspect Apple knows that most of their revenue comes from the top 500 casino games for children. They probably get all their reviews fast-tracked to keep them happy.
Most (by quantity) of the rest is apps that are free and don't make much money from IAP and just monetize with tons of ads. Apple doesn't get their beak wet on those so they know that even a few million more spent on reviewers wouldn't make a big difference in their own revenue.
> I suspect Apple knows that most of their revenue comes from the top 500 casino games for children. They probably get all their reviews fast-tracked to keep them happy.
Trust me they know, that's why every single marketing page on the appstore (do not take my word for it, go check it) almost only talks about either education or productivity apps.
Or they could focus on a better developer experience (like more testers/faster turnaround) which will drive even more people to their platform. The extra investment might be worth it.
'Optimize' here seems to mean abusing the very developers who produce software for their devices. This is just greed and imho proof that markets are not self-correcting.
Hire more reviewers. Apple is making a shitload of money from App Store sales (and of course by scamming its users in many creative ways). They'd better spend it on making developers happier, not on thickening the walls of their garden.
They don’t make a shitload off the small apps like the synthesizer from this post. They aren’t going to introduce more expensive Cupertino and Cork reviewers to help that category of dev. They’re a business and will automate instead of have small time earners occupy more time on reviewer desks.
A lot, they _can_ do almost whatever they want with their own AppStore and own business model. Including making good on the anti-trust lawsuit they've got for a decade around the world and let go of their monopoly.
We shouldn't make it sound like they _have to be_ the bad guys. Even from a business standpoint they're slowly losing the grip on their market and getting back some goodwill wouldn't be a bad thing.
There is a surge of vibe coded apps in the iOS community.
Some of them are good - generally by musicians or sound designers who couldn't code.
Many are utter trash, designed by developers who have barely any musical taste and simply told Claude to make some glitchy reverb pedal or groovebox. They use AI to write the copy for the app store and leave the UI as default (navy with fixed width headers, often looking like more like a spreadsheet than a synth). Sometimes trying to charge as much as $30 for it. It's a scourge but on the upside, most of them have now got their dopamine fix and moved onto something else.
I've been waiting about two weeks for the last review for my app, I got one rejection and that took 20 days. It's a bit of a bummer but there isn't anything I can do about it.
I've got a couple PWAs I deploy off of my tailnet and use on my iPhone and iPad.
I have encountered no issues (using IndexedDB for user data) so far. If you approach database sizes larger than 1GB I believe you might run into quotas.
I would have to test that because that is concerning but I have apparently solved that problem by accident by syncing my IndexedDBs with an API server when a connection is available.
You need their permission for External TestFlight distribution anyway, otherwise you need to add everyone to the App Store Connect account to forego their reviews.
Currently suffering through rejections just to get a client’s app into the first rounder of testers’ hands.
Depends on the reason. "Bullshit" is in the eye of the beholder.
I don't think that they reject for branding issues, in the TestFlight review (like they do, for the App Store -I have had my app rejected, because it had the word "finder" in its name). For example, if you change the color of the Sign in with Apple button, it will get rejected (in the App Store review -I don't know if they would reject it in the TestFlight review).
They do, however, look for things like private API access, crashes, and dodgy behavior. Even if a code path is TODO, it shouldn't crash. I just fill those with NOP functions.
First rejection they ask me to take a video of the app working (and they explicitly ask for a real iPhone although I did it in the emulator and it passed). Isn't that the whole point of their review to do it themselves?
Then now they ask me for documented authorization of each radio listed in the app. I keep pointing that there is already apps with the same data source as mine (radio-browser) and they keep replying the same thing.
Each round takes days or a week.
I don't think humans were involved in any part of this process (except me). I guess I will have to fake it somehow.
I have a previous app approved and I must say the process was actually better than what I had anticipated back then.
The title is too friendly to Apple. Sure the flood of apps is making their lives harder, but also remember that they choose to force everyone through this and you have to PAY them to do their job this badly.
It's more than that, they choose to do the absolute least they can and pocket immense profits. In 2021 the judge in the Epic case called them out for only having 500 reviewers now it's 2026 and they still only have 500 reviewers.
I m waiting for weeks to just enroll in their developer program, that i have paid for. Are they deliberately stalling everything to stop people from putting more stuff in the app store? I m going to go ahead and release the android version and make sure to badmouth apple to their users. life is short
> My app was REJECTED from submission FOUR TIMES in row. Always same reason (eg. my app is “design spam” and “duplicates existing apps” and it is createed using “app generation template services”) as shown bellow in screenshots. Which is obvious nonsense.
You can feel the entitlement across the room from the developer. They seem to be unable to conceive that outside of their bubble there can be a real case of AI spamming that same look and feel, even if they did it by heart.
Looking at his work, it's clearly modelled after Serum (which even the article describes as "a sort of Serum 2 for iOS") so I am not sure why they think this suddenly deserves a white glove service here.
The App Store is also flooded with Synth apps, so regardless of the UI being the trigger here, I would imagine the category itself has been flagged as spammy and now has a higher bar of entry.
If anything I would use this as an opportunity to reskin and try to stand out, they're giving you a blueprint of what will perform better on the algorithm if you avoid that look if you think about it.
First, I am not trusting them at face value. They are building a copycat of Serum and most likely could be doing some level of vibe-coding themselves.
Second, to your point, say we trusted them, it's a chicken or the egg problem. After all the trash entered the space it became flagged and a scale/moderation issue.
I'm not sure why Apple needs to be policing who gets to compete for a given functionality. Malware? Yeah, for sure, police it. Non-functional software? Maybe, if it's really bad. That's more or less a scam.
But simply because you're solving the same problem others are? No, that's horrible overreach. We have copyright and patent law to deal with outright copies. It's not Apple's place.
“Just try an alt store” is a condescendingly flippant comment - there is near zero market for iOS alt stores and most people in most countries have no access either.
There is also near zero market for more Synth Apps at this point so I'm not sure what you want here.
It's like when the App Store started, someone made a Flashlight App and it was cool. We sure had enough of that by now. Now that AI turned everyone into a maker and the bar is lower in a world of abundance, it's only natural that things shift in terms of expectations for distribution.
This is how new markets take shape too, YouTube became so trash that now platforms such as Nebula came out as a business.
I’m genuinely not sure if you’re doing a bit, especially after explicitly calling out the “entitlement” of the development.
Is “we don’t think there’ll be a market for this” a defensible reason to disqualify an app from the App Store? What’s even your point? You are just looking to be argumentative and pretty clearly have no interest in actually discussing this.
I wouldn't describe it as entitlement. I think one of the issues I would have if I was in this situation is that the developer membership is paid for and the service provider (Apple) is actively refusing to let you engage in part of what you did pay for (the ability to publish apps on the App Store). You can bet that Apple won't give you a refund of that membership fee.
They provided reasons and it is within the terms of service of what you paid for, they were also able to appeal, and I suggest you check the app and the reference app to which the claim is being made against.
I mean they are entitled to it in a way. You pay Apple 99 Dollars a year to be able to distribute your apps on the store. Why should apple care if it is design spam or a duplicate of an existing app? Most of the apps available in the store would check those boxes too.
> You can feel the entitlement across the room from the developer.
Apple felt they were entitled to insert themselves as an all powerful gate keeper in program distribution, the least they could do is not be shit at it.
For those of us who believe in free markets, yeah we should be entitled to sell more or less any legal software. It shouldn't be Apple's place to police it. Europe had the right idea breaking their app store monopoly.
Apple's app review process has always been a silly game. I have a music playing app, and every actual screenshot gets rejected in review for "displaying copyrighted content" (album art). And the terms of review say the screenshots must come from the app, not be mockups. So dumb. I have a fake music collection of fake artists and albums that I load to generate screenshots ... colossal waste of time.
>It was over a month of back-and-forth, so I threw my hands up and released it audio-only for now. What we will do is bundle the MIDI build into the binary so both AUv3s install.
Oh, so they are trying to do a soft bait and switch; where an app developer makes an app, splits its functionality, and sells both on the app store. They hope that someone buys the first app, which is missing basic functionality, not realizing they have to buy a second app to get the additional expected features. Like if you buy a video converter app that doesn't let you convert to an MP4 unless you buy a second "MP4 version" video converter app. Scummy behavior, glad Apple blocked it.
"About 80% of the reviewers on my team were former Apple retail employees. Many were Geniuses, the people who fixed your phone at the store. The other 20% came from elsewhere. They came from bartending, tree trimming, and tech."
"When I was there, a new app got about 13 minutes. An update got about 6. Those 13 minutes cover every localization, every screen, and every purchase described above."
This is why app review is a joke, and why the App Store is full of crap and scams.
According to Shoemaker, Steve Jobs demanded that Apple review every app, but Jobs resigned from Apple only 2.5 years after the App Store opened. More than 15 years later, it's clear that the App Store has outgrown the expectations of the dying Jobs.
A company I'm familiar with had their app rejected for "App does not contain means to delete accounts"
Then all subsequent ones were rejected "Developer provided test account stopped working"
Logs show that the tester used the "delete my account" function..
As the only customer service available is an uncaring LLM, the only solution that worked was to keep the "Delete my account" button in the app, and make it a NOP on the server side.
This is my experience with app review. They’ll flag things as the exact opposite of what they are in reality. It’s like Apple intentionally hired the worst people to randomly gatekeep the App Store.
We “solved” this by making the delete my account button send you a confirmation email to the email associated with the account. Reviewers can press the button, but they can’t receive the confirmation email, so the account does not get deleted.
Apple and Google are a mobile cartel, they need to be broken up.
This is absurd.
If people want the editorialized 'safety' of an App Store, they can use it, that's fine, but there's no reason to stop people from buying apps for their phone from wherever they want.
Have just submitted two new apps last week and they’ve been published 2 days later. Updated them a couple of times this week and that also took around 2 days.
Not sure if it’s because I have a good track record but I only had been rejected a couple of times and even then I just had to submit a screen recording of me playing with the app to make it pass the review process.
By 2028, captcha will be dead and to log in to a site you’ll need to give a hot take that an LLM wouldn’t generate…
One thing before you enter… Was it true that Treyvon Martin was safe at home and his girlfriend convinced him to go fight George Zimmerman? Explain how that changes the narrative you were told repeatedly.”
I am more interested in the fact so many people are spamming the app store. What are they hoping for actually? If you can write a prompt for it, anyone can do it. There's no value in an app like before. I think those times are over.
Maybe the "democratization" of it will bring in fresh ideas. Maybe not. But anyway basically no one will make any money or have any success off these vibe coded apps.
Tens of millions of people finally have the ability to make apps. So they are.
But for billions of people it's still way too high of friction for now. Especially on mobile and iOS. So they download apps.
There's still success to be had too. Distribution is all that's ever really mattered. If you have money to advertise or authority in some niche... you can get users and customers, no matter the slop.
Most of the new people making apps will learn that the hard way like the rest of us, but some will succeed.
You have to rebuild/reinstall the app every week if it’s not published to the App Store. Vibe coded iOS apps are basically worthless if you don’t publish them via the App Store. I would bet much of the flood would be avoided if you could permanently install your own vibe coded apps.
In a land of commodified apps, the platform has all the power and the dev has none. Like at this point, they could up their cut to 90% of revenue. There would be an outcry and many devs would leave. But in the end getting even 10% of the revenue of an app you whipped together by telling claude to "make an app, no mistakes" is too good to refuse.
IOS is such a dream for virtual instruments: Cheaper than desktop versions, portable, plenty of choice. But the web is getting better too. Plenty of excellent music apps there. The App Store is not the future and it feels good.
Couldn’t help myself, asked Claude for the most iconic post complaining about developing Apple software every year since iOS came out.
2007 — John Gruber, "WWDC 2007 Keynote News"
This was his reaction to Jobs telling developers to build web apps instead of real ones. Its best-known line: "If all you have to offer is a shit sandwich, just say it."
2008 — Fraser Speirs, "App Store: I'm Out"
The battle lines were drawn when an Apple representative reviewing submissions for the App Store rejected a program called Podcaster for duplicating iTunes. Speirs then vowed never to write another iPhone app for the store "as currently constituted." Runner-up: the anger over the SDK's secrecy agreement (NDA), which Apple dropped in October after admitting it placed "too much of a burden" on iPhone developers.
2009 — Paul Graham, "Apple's Mistake"
Graham wrote that the App Store is an ongoing karma leak. Pair it with Joe Hewitt quitting the Facebook iPhone app the same month: "I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process."
2010 — Lee Brimelow (Adobe), "Apple Slaps Developers in the Face"
This was about rule 3.3.1, which banned apps built with cross-platform tools like Flash. Brimelow ended it with: Go screw yourself Apple. (coverage)
2011 — Readability's open letter to Apple
"We believe that your new policy smacks of greed," wrote Rich Ziade, Readability's creator. Apple reversed itself within days. (coverage)
2012 — Marco Arment, "The Mac App Store's future of irrelevance"
His target was the new sandboxing rules: "leaving is often a better option, or the only option, for the affected developers". Runner-up: Wil Shipley's essay arguing the Mac App Store needs paid upgrades.
2013 — Ken Case (Omni Group) on OmniKeyMaster (the weakest year)
Omni tried to offer discounted upgrades to Mac App Store buyers and had to back down: "My apologies: I'm afraid we will not be able to offer upgrade pricing to our Mac App Store customers after all." (coverage)
2014 — Jared Sinclair, "A Candid Look at Unread's First Year"
His sales numbers set off the "indie apocalypse" debate. Runner-up: Apple ordered PCalc's calculator widget removed while featuring it. Apple then backed down possibly due in part to the firestorm of press and social media criticism.
2015 — Bohemian Coding, "Leaving the Mac App Store" (Sketch)
Gruber's verdict on it: "The Mac App Store is rotting, at least for productivity software."
2016 — Bogdan Popescu, "Dash and Apple: My Side of the Story"
Apple shut his developer account. He published a recorded call in which they want me to write a blog post in order to restore my account. One caveat for your article: Apple said the account was linked to almost a thousand fraudulent reviews.
2017 — Matt Gemmell, "Damage"
His thesis: "No company has done as much damage to the perceived value of software, and the sustainability of being an independent developer, as Apple."
2018 — The Developers Union open letter
It asked Apple for free trials for apps and a "more reasonable revenue cut." (coverage)
2019 — Daniel Ek, "Time to Play Fair" (Spotify)
Spotify's CEO compared Apple's rules to inviting you to a match on our ping-pong table and then forcing you to play blindfolded while we change the rules throughout the game.
2020 — DHH's Twitter thread about the Hey email app (archived on hey.com)
"I will burn this house down myself, before I let gangsters like that spin it for spoils." Probably the most famous thread in this whole history.
2021 — Kosta Eleftheriou's thread on scam apps
It opened with "The App Store has a big problem": copycat scam apps were outselling honest developers while Apple took its cut. (coverage)
And this is what happens when your phone is not a general purpose computer that can run any program you wish, either written by you or somebody else. People need to stop rewarding Apple for this behavior, and instead buy devices that support free operating systems. Somewhat ironically, one of the best options is Google's Pixel phones with Graphene, Lineage and other "custom ROMs."
> Somewhat ironically, one of the best options is Google's Pixel phones with Graphene, Lineage and other "custom ROMs."
And people also need to stop thinking in general-purpose computer at the OS layer. A Pixel is no good to me either for precisely the same reason: it is, based on its feature set, not an (ultramobile) general-purpose computer.
Wait but it is? I compile and run software even on stock android phones. You can even a enable a full built in linux shell in android developer options now.
> The only thing that makes it not a general-purpose computer is the omission of an onboard compiler.
I was talking about the design aesthetics of a handheld general-purpose computing device, i. e. one that within its device-class is not overspecialized. That's largely hardware design, which obviously can't be altered as easily.
A compiler? As long as the machine let's me install all the software I need (later), and without any permission torture from "sideloading" hell, I'm good.
I mean you've got a chap in this very discussion for whom the Pixel is enough cos he can run his compilers. But to me a Pixel, or any similar feature-downgraded device, is utterly undesireable; shipping one with a compiler out of the box is not even a consolation prize, lol.
Neither Android nor Graphene have a tenth of the musical instruments, effects, sequencers, etc. available to them that ios does. The closed nature of the App Store allows a software ecosystem beneficial to audio software developers. Eliminate that, eliminate the reason for developers to create these instruments.
There are no perfect platforms, there are only tradeoffs. The iOS tradeoff apparently is preferred by these developers.
> The iOS tradeoff apparently is preferred by these developers.
Could be a bit of momentum. Androids audio stack started out with a completely incompetent latency of near 500ms back in 2012, was made a bit less terrible through the years, and only becoming acceptable in 2021 [1], still near 2x of iPhone from over a decade before.
iOS does not have a tenth of the musical instruments, effects or sequencers that Windows VSTs have.
It's a turtles-all-the-way-down situation. I've toured with musicians before, and they are not jamming on iPads or plugging their DAC into an iPhone. They're running full-fat computers, real Omnisphere presets and the total Melodyne suite, not the pedestrian trial versions that the App Store sells.
> The closed nature of the App Store allows a software ecosystem beneficial to audio software developers.
Why is that? Valve has sold plenty of games to Linux gamers and now has its Steam Machine, etc. So commercial software on open platforms is definitely viable.
199 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 18.8 ms ] threadI don't disagree with the critique of Apple's policies, but boy this made me roll my eyes.
They can absolutely afford to hire more.
They look at margins and they want to optimize them, not use better margins as a reason to pursue smaller margins. Small time indie developers and businesses that earn them less than millions a month in fees are not worth their time. They’re solving this by automating more telemetry, not by hiring more junior and senior reviewers. They don’t want to take a loss on small devs.
Only way they change course is via regulations.
Or that more reviewers might lead to more apps which lead to more revenue.
Most (by quantity) of the rest is apps that are free and don't make much money from IAP and just monetize with tons of ads. Apple doesn't get their beak wet on those so they know that even a few million more spent on reviewers wouldn't make a big difference in their own revenue.
The rest of us, we just have to wait our turn.
Trust me they know, that's why every single marketing page on the appstore (do not take my word for it, go check it) almost only talks about either education or productivity apps.
Hire more reviewers. Apple is making a shitload of money from App Store sales (and of course by scamming its users in many creative ways). They'd better spend it on making developers happier, not on thickening the walls of their garden.
Apple make a shitload of money from the app store in general, including app developer subscriptions.
The review process is already semi-automated, and hiring a few hundred human reviewers of all kinds would be a cash flow rounding error.
You're not sure what they can do?
1) hire more people 2) let people buy apps from wherever they want.
A lot, they _can_ do almost whatever they want with their own AppStore and own business model. Including making good on the anti-trust lawsuit they've got for a decade around the world and let go of their monopoly.
We shouldn't make it sound like they _have to be_ the bad guys. Even from a business standpoint they're slowly losing the grip on their market and getting back some goodwill wouldn't be a bad thing.
Some of them are good - generally by musicians or sound designers who couldn't code.
Many are utter trash, designed by developers who have barely any musical taste and simply told Claude to make some glitchy reverb pedal or groovebox. They use AI to write the copy for the app store and leave the UI as default (navy with fixed width headers, often looking like more like a spreadsheet than a synth). Sometimes trying to charge as much as $30 for it. It's a scourge but on the upside, most of them have now got their dopamine fix and moved onto something else.
Doesn't apply to alllll apps - but flagging it in case you hadn't recently looked into it.. web apps can do a lot and don't charge 15%.
It's probably no coincidence that the only allowed browser engine on iOS doesn't provide proper PWA support.
I have encountered no issues (using IndexedDB for user data) so far. If you approach database sizes larger than 1GB I believe you might run into quotas.
I don't know if that's true though.
Oh the irony too...
https://youtu.be/p1nwLilQy64
Don't let Apple catch you doing that. Good way to get your account banhammered.
Currently suffering through rejections just to get a client’s app into the first rounder of testers’ hands.
I use TestFlight almost from the start of a project. Great way to involve non-tech folks, and work out UI design issues quickly.
Depends on the reason. "Bullshit" is in the eye of the beholder.
I don't think that they reject for branding issues, in the TestFlight review (like they do, for the App Store -I have had my app rejected, because it had the word "finder" in its name). For example, if you change the color of the Sign in with Apple button, it will get rejected (in the App Store review -I don't know if they would reject it in the TestFlight review).
They do, however, look for things like private API access, crashes, and dodgy behavior. Even if a code path is TODO, it shouldn't crash. I just fill those with NOP functions.
First rejection they ask me to take a video of the app working (and they explicitly ask for a real iPhone although I did it in the emulator and it passed). Isn't that the whole point of their review to do it themselves?
Then now they ask me for documented authorization of each radio listed in the app. I keep pointing that there is already apps with the same data source as mine (radio-browser) and they keep replying the same thing.
Each round takes days or a week.
I don't think humans were involved in any part of this process (except me). I guess I will have to fake it somehow.
I have a previous app approved and I must say the process was actually better than what I had anticipated back then.
Meanwhile on Android updates are just flying through.
https://apple.com/app-store
> Every week, nearly 500 dedicated experts around the world review over 130K apps.
And they actually updated that in the middle of last year, it's not just something they forgot, it used to say:
> Every week, over 500 dedicated experts around the world review over 100K apps.
You can feel the entitlement across the room from the developer. They seem to be unable to conceive that outside of their bubble there can be a real case of AI spamming that same look and feel, even if they did it by heart.
Looking at his work, it's clearly modelled after Serum (which even the article describes as "a sort of Serum 2 for iOS") so I am not sure why they think this suddenly deserves a white glove service here.
The App Store is also flooded with Synth apps, so regardless of the UI being the trigger here, I would imagine the category itself has been flagged as spammy and now has a higher bar of entry.
If anything I would use this as an opportunity to reskin and try to stand out, they're giving you a blueprint of what will perform better on the algorithm if you avoid that look if you think about it.
Or just try an Alt Store.
Second, to your point, say we trusted them, it's a chicken or the egg problem. After all the trash entered the space it became flagged and a scale/moderation issue.
The larger problem is the bad actors.
But simply because you're solving the same problem others are? No, that's horrible overreach. We have copyright and patent law to deal with outright copies. It's not Apple's place.
It's like when the App Store started, someone made a Flashlight App and it was cool. We sure had enough of that by now. Now that AI turned everyone into a maker and the bar is lower in a world of abundance, it's only natural that things shift in terms of expectations for distribution.
This is how new markets take shape too, YouTube became so trash that now platforms such as Nebula came out as a business.
Is “we don’t think there’ll be a market for this” a defensible reason to disqualify an app from the App Store? What’s even your point? You are just looking to be argumentative and pretty clearly have no interest in actually discussing this.
So far in the U.S., that’s not an option. You likely already know this, which makes it a flippant argument.
Apple felt they were entitled to insert themselves as an all powerful gate keeper in program distribution, the least they could do is not be shit at it.
Oh, so they are trying to do a soft bait and switch; where an app developer makes an app, splits its functionality, and sells both on the app store. They hope that someone buys the first app, which is missing basic functionality, not realizing they have to buy a second app to get the additional expected features. Like if you buy a video converter app that doesn't let you convert to an MP4 unless you buy a second "MP4 version" video converter app. Scummy behavior, glad Apple blocked it.
"About 80% of the reviewers on my team were former Apple retail employees. Many were Geniuses, the people who fixed your phone at the store. The other 20% came from elsewhere. They came from bartending, tree trimming, and tech."
"When I was there, a new app got about 13 minutes. An update got about 6. Those 13 minutes cover every localization, every screen, and every purchase described above."
This is why app review is a joke, and why the App Store is full of crap and scams.
According to Shoemaker, Steve Jobs demanded that Apple review every app, but Jobs resigned from Apple only 2.5 years after the App Store opened. More than 15 years later, it's clear that the App Store has outgrown the expectations of the dying Jobs.
Then all subsequent ones were rejected "Developer provided test account stopped working"
Logs show that the tester used the "delete my account" function..
As the only customer service available is an uncaring LLM, the only solution that worked was to keep the "Delete my account" button in the app, and make it a NOP on the server side.
This is absurd.
If people want the editorialized 'safety' of an App Store, they can use it, that's fine, but there's no reason to stop people from buying apps for their phone from wherever they want.
Not sure if it’s because I have a good track record but I only had been rejected a couple of times and even then I just had to submit a screen recording of me playing with the app to make it pass the review process.
One thing before you enter… Was it true that Treyvon Martin was safe at home and his girlfriend convinced him to go fight George Zimmerman? Explain how that changes the narrative you were told repeatedly.”
Maybe the "democratization" of it will bring in fresh ideas. Maybe not. But anyway basically no one will make any money or have any success off these vibe coded apps.
But for billions of people it's still way too high of friction for now. Especially on mobile and iOS. So they download apps.
There's still success to be had too. Distribution is all that's ever really mattered. If you have money to advertise or authority in some niche... you can get users and customers, no matter the slop.
Most of the new people making apps will learn that the hard way like the rest of us, but some will succeed.
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/webmidi/
2007 — John Gruber, "WWDC 2007 Keynote News" This was his reaction to Jobs telling developers to build web apps instead of real ones. Its best-known line: "If all you have to offer is a shit sandwich, just say it."
2008 — Fraser Speirs, "App Store: I'm Out" The battle lines were drawn when an Apple representative reviewing submissions for the App Store rejected a program called Podcaster for duplicating iTunes. Speirs then vowed never to write another iPhone app for the store "as currently constituted." Runner-up: the anger over the SDK's secrecy agreement (NDA), which Apple dropped in October after admitting it placed "too much of a burden" on iPhone developers.
2009 — Paul Graham, "Apple's Mistake" Graham wrote that the App Store is an ongoing karma leak. Pair it with Joe Hewitt quitting the Facebook iPhone app the same month: "I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process."
2010 — Lee Brimelow (Adobe), "Apple Slaps Developers in the Face" This was about rule 3.3.1, which banned apps built with cross-platform tools like Flash. Brimelow ended it with: Go screw yourself Apple. (coverage)
2011 — Readability's open letter to Apple "We believe that your new policy smacks of greed," wrote Rich Ziade, Readability's creator. Apple reversed itself within days. (coverage)
2012 — Marco Arment, "The Mac App Store's future of irrelevance" His target was the new sandboxing rules: "leaving is often a better option, or the only option, for the affected developers". Runner-up: Wil Shipley's essay arguing the Mac App Store needs paid upgrades.
2013 — Ken Case (Omni Group) on OmniKeyMaster (the weakest year) Omni tried to offer discounted upgrades to Mac App Store buyers and had to back down: "My apologies: I'm afraid we will not be able to offer upgrade pricing to our Mac App Store customers after all." (coverage)
2014 — Jared Sinclair, "A Candid Look at Unread's First Year" His sales numbers set off the "indie apocalypse" debate. Runner-up: Apple ordered PCalc's calculator widget removed while featuring it. Apple then backed down possibly due in part to the firestorm of press and social media criticism.
2015 — Bohemian Coding, "Leaving the Mac App Store" (Sketch) Gruber's verdict on it: "The Mac App Store is rotting, at least for productivity software."
2016 — Bogdan Popescu, "Dash and Apple: My Side of the Story" Apple shut his developer account. He published a recorded call in which they want me to write a blog post in order to restore my account. One caveat for your article: Apple said the account was linked to almost a thousand fraudulent reviews.
2017 — Matt Gemmell, "Damage" His thesis: "No company has done as much damage to the perceived value of software, and the sustainability of being an independent developer, as Apple."
2018 — The Developers Union open letter It asked Apple for free trials for apps and a "more reasonable revenue cut." (coverage)
2019 — Daniel Ek, "Time to Play Fair" (Spotify) Spotify's CEO compared Apple's rules to inviting you to a match on our ping-pong table and then forcing you to play blindfolded while we change the rules throughout the game.
2020 — DHH's Twitter thread about the Hey email app (archived on hey.com) "I will burn this house down myself, before I let gangsters like that spin it for spoils." Probably the most famous thread in this whole history.
2021 — Kosta Eleftheriou's thread on scam apps It opened with "The App Store has a big problem": copycat scam apps were outselling honest developers while Apple took its cut. (coverage)
2022 — Judgment call The most-seen post ...
And people also need to stop thinking in general-purpose computer at the OS layer. A Pixel is no good to me either for precisely the same reason: it is, based on its feature set, not an (ultramobile) general-purpose computer.
And there is no legitimate reason for that omission, whatsoever.
Our computers are intentionally crippled so that we need to ask permission for what to do with them.
I was talking about the design aesthetics of a handheld general-purpose computing device, i. e. one that within its device-class is not overspecialized. That's largely hardware design, which obviously can't be altered as easily.
A compiler? As long as the machine let's me install all the software I need (later), and without any permission torture from "sideloading" hell, I'm good.
I mean you've got a chap in this very discussion for whom the Pixel is enough cos he can run his compilers. But to me a Pixel, or any similar feature-downgraded device, is utterly undesireable; shipping one with a compiler out of the box is not even a consolation prize, lol.
There are no perfect platforms, there are only tradeoffs. The iOS tradeoff apparently is preferred by these developers.
Could be a bit of momentum. Androids audio stack started out with a completely incompetent latency of near 500ms back in 2012, was made a bit less terrible through the years, and only becoming acceptable in 2021 [1], still near 2x of iPhone from over a decade before.
[1] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2021/03/an-update-...
It's a turtles-all-the-way-down situation. I've toured with musicians before, and they are not jamming on iPads or plugging their DAC into an iPhone. They're running full-fat computers, real Omnisphere presets and the total Melodyne suite, not the pedestrian trial versions that the App Store sells.
Why is that? Valve has sold plenty of games to Linux gamers and now has its Steam Machine, etc. So commercial software on open platforms is definitely viable.