Sunsetting AppCode
Anastasia Kazakova (Hacker News):
Since the release of AppCode 1.0 11 years ago, we’ve been applying our expertise to make coding for iOS/macOS more enjoyable. We’ve had many accomplishments, including first-class C++ support (from which CLion, our cross-platform C/C++ IDE, was born), an extremely fast release of initial support for the new Swift language, and finally, Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile technology, which combines our passion for Kotlin with our knowledge of mobile technologies.
While we’ve had some growth in terms of adoption, we didn’t reach the market share we had hoped for. We believe that the time has come to sunset the product and focus our efforts in other directions.
I’ve used this IDE on and off for many years. It’s got so much stuff that put it way beyond Xcode. At the same time, it was also lagging in some respect, and Apple’s speed of change with its tooling was probably hard to keep up with.
Some people will dearly miss it but never quite made it big enough in the Swift development community to become mainstream. It got close, though, especially a couple of years after it first launched.
Competition in this area is a good thing, but with Xcode being so good and VS Code’s support for Swift getting better every day, it’s an extremely tough market to enter with a paid product.
The reasons behind subsetting AppCode make sense, but the Swift tools ecosystem will be poorer without it.
Previously:
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I actually wonder whether this isn't a mistake. When Apple is forced to make side-loading / 3rd party app stores available, they might claw back revenue by making XCode very expensive. At that point, AppCode could have a thriving business.
Since I often write negative comments about Apple, kudos to them for this: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/us/california-national-forest-iphone-rescue.html
I was very sad to hear this news. I’ve been using AppCode for the last year and have loved it. It has made coding way more enjoyable and efficient.
AppCode makes Xcode feel like TextEdit in comparison. I would have easily paid double for it, if it meant keeping it around.
Xcode has become a terrible IDE to work with, IMO. I get constant false compiler errors in multiple projects. Navigating through code is cumbersome. It doesn’t even have indentation indicator lines to show what code block you’re in. What year is it?
I wish Apple would really open it up to third party developers to make addons/plugins, since they don’t seem to be interested themselves in making it into a delightful IDE.
