Jay Peters (Slashdot):
But in July, Apple reversed course and approved UTM SE, and earlier this month, it added the words “PC emulator” to guideline 4.7, which is seemingly why iDOS 3 has now been allowed on the App Store.
Filipe Espósito:
As for iDOS 3, the app is available for iPhone and iPad on the App Store and costs just $0.99. It requires a device running iOS 12 or later.
Chaoji Li (via Craig Grannell):
It has been a long wait for common sense to prevail within Apple. As much as I want to celebrate, I still can’t help being a little bit cautious about the future. Are we good from now on?
Rui Carmo:
This is great fun–and I’m a bit sad that it took me all of 10 minutes to get Windows 95 running very snappily (if a little buggy) on it, and yet I still cannot “legally” run legacy Mac OS versions on an iPad.
[…]
Again, Apple is still, ironically, the main reason why we cannot have nice things on the nicest hardware on the planet.
See also: Mac Power Users Talk.
Previously:
App Store Emulator iDOS iOS iOS 17 MS-DOS
David Barnard:
For almost 16 years now, tweet after tweet, blog post after blog post, I’ve implored Apple to do better by developers and App Store customers in a million different ways. And implied (if not said directly) that if they didn’t, the impact would, over time, lead to dire consequences. From developers abandoning the platform to regulation destroying it.
But quarter after quarter, year after year, services revenue grows. And that growth has added hundreds of billions if not a trillion plus to Apple’s market cap and given them the breathing room to continue building some of the best hardware and software (and more recently video content) on the planet.
Apple is doing exactly what Apple is supposed to do: create value for shareholders.
I think those of us who’ve been around for a while were so used to Apple being near death that we didn’t appreciate how durable its duopoly position actually was. We should have, because we were there for Microsoft’s bad behavior, poor products, and antitrust scrutiny and saw how it remained incredibly influential and profitable. Yet our commentating was not really about telling Apple how to maximize shareholder value. We expect more of the company. It says it’s about creating great products and being a good corporate citizen and has a history of doing so in many respects. It’s still worth thinking about how to do that and imagining how the world could be better, even if it seems like no one’s listening.
I’m not even sure anymore if the reputational damage I perceive actually matters. Sure there are grumpy developers, who, like me, are especially loud here on Twitter, but for every one of those there’s another teenager excitedly building their first app. Power users, pundits, and those terminally online might agitate here and there, but it’s not like they are leaving for Android in droves. And I don’t get the impression the average iPhone user knows or cares.
Part of me does still feel like this is the classic story of a company on the way to decline. More focused on profits than user/developer experience and building great products.
Laura Laban:
Where would we [developers] have gone to? We have no other viable options to have the people use our creations.
And the fact that it’s increasingly harder for users to switch platforms isn’t going to make this any better in the future.
Rob Jonson:
Gripping the app world in a vice makes sense for Apple. Monopolies are super-profitable.
It doesn’t make sense for society which is why we need government regulation.
David Barnard:
I didn’t say I was wrong about the potential for my suggestions to make the App Store a better experience for users and developers. I said Apple did a great job maximizing shareholder value, while still making some improvements to the App Store.
I didn’t say Apple shouldn’t be regulated. I said that the threat of regulation, which I have cited over and over, seems unlikely to have much of an impact given how masterfully they are maneuvering around regulation now that it’s actually happening. Though we’ll see how that plays out.
[…]
I’m going to keep advocating for App Store changes that I think will better serve both users and developers over the long haul. Apple cares more about their App Store revenue than I do, so of course they aren’t going to do many of the things I suggest, but that’s not going to stop me from making noise.
As I said in a follow up tweet, this was about me making some level of peace with the facts on the ground, not saying it’s the state of the world I prefer.
Ryan Jones:
Yep. I just find it sad, budging an irrelevant amount for them would be massive for the world. When is the time to budge a little – only once they reach the most valuable comp...? oh wait.
Wade Tregaskis:
What should Apple’s gross margin be? During their golden age (the return of Steve through the iPad) it was about 28%. For most of the Tim Cook era it was more like 38%, but since COVID it’s jumped up to closer to 48%. With Apple’s product price inflation at an all-time high (especially re. RAM & SSD), and given they apparently can’t find anything better to do with all that profit than just buy their own shares, why don’t they just lower their prices and have more & happier customers?
René Fouquet:
These new Pixel phones and the Gemini features look very tempting. If I weren’t this stuck in the Apple ecosystem I might have gone full Android for a year. But there’s just too much stuff I’m sharing with my wife: Find My, Shared Photos Library, Airtags, calendars & reminders …
It should give Apple executives pause that a once die-hard Apple fanboy has pivoted so much. Of course it won’t–they are too busy counting the money they’ve extorted from devs and creators. But in a couple of years we may remember this time as the beginning of the end of the once mighty Apple. I’m beginning to lose hope they’ll be able to turn this around.
Dimitri Bouniol:
As much as I enjoy doing it, Apple has gotten to the point where writing an app for their platforms is increasingly bad for our businesses. I’ve spoken with many potential users of my app who are on Android, and refuse to buy an Apple device due to how Apple portrays itself. Apple is doing itself no favors burning the bridge of the last few supporters of the company, which are likely the developers that helped propel it to where it is today.
Christina Warren:
People like me are too deep into the Apple ecosystem to ever reasonably leave. Until/unless they fully neuter macOS, I’m here for life. And I’ll realistically never use Android. But the next generation of users might use an iPhone, but they also rely on the web and services from other companies. They use Chromebooks. They don’t have a reason to “root” for Apple the same way I did as a kid. And that’s how platforms change and ecosystems fall off.
[…]
Already we see how these sorts of policies play out poorly for Apple: the Apple Vision Pro is so far, an expensive flop that has very few apps and has made its devs very little money (I’ve talked to many. Only a few have done “well”) and most are wholly unwilling to even build an app for it. These policies and decisions have downstream effects. There are consequences. Apple might not “see” them b/c they still print money, but they exist.
Microsoft has spent the better part of the 15 years trying to win back developers and users post Vista. Sometimes succeeding (VS Code, which is just good software), sometimes failing (Bing), often fumbling with bad decisions (Recall), but despite being THE platform for games, people use Steam, not the Microsoft Store. People buy PS5s more than Xbox (and I love Xbox but it’s true). When vibes shift, users find alternatives. And they find them fast. Winning people back takes much longer.
Damien Petrilli:
Well, there is another thing where developers were wrong: the native stack doesn’t matter.
Users don’t care which tech stack is used as long as your product works. They won’t ditch your app or service because you are using react or flutter or it’s a web wrapper.
You can’t change Apple but you can change your tech stack and make Apple platforms just another target.
Previously:
Update (2024-08-14): Louie Mantia:
Endless growth isn’t achievable, yet every step they take toward increasing profits does two things. It makes them less likable and more monopolistic. Apple was a better company when they were an underdog.
[…]
But since 2008, the services they provide in exchange for those recurring fees and percentage cut haven’t improved much. You’d think with all that services revenue, they’d invest it into making the developer program better.
René Fouquet:
So I thought about what kept me in the iOS ecosystem. Watch out - long post ahead!
Update (2024-08-17): Matt Birchler (Hacker News):
At first, it was fun and exciting to see the company that had been struggling finally showing everyone that they were legit, but somewhere along the way it stopped being as fun. Record revenues and profits felt like a form of validation for all of us for a while, but today they feel less like something to cheer about.
[…]
No single action makes them the bad guy, but put together, they certainly aren’t acting like a company that is trying to make their enthusiast fans happy. In fact, it seems Apple is testing them to see how much they can get away with.
[…]
And to be super clear, I think the vast majority of folks at Apple are amazing people doing amazing work, especially those in product, design, and development. There’s a reason that I use their products and there’s a reason I care enough to even comment on all this in the first place. The problems all stem from the business end of the company and I don’t know how to convince them that reputation matters.
[…]
It’s a pretty dark place to be when Apple’s biggest, long-time fans are hoping that the US government will step in to stop them from doing multiple things that they’re doing today.
Update (2024-08-19): Federico Viticci:
On the latest Connected, I argued that it almost feels like there are two Apples within Apple: the company that designs the hardware products and operating systems I still love using, which I find superior to most alternatives on the market today; and there’s the business entity, which is antagonizing developers, creators, governments, and, in doing so, alienating customers who have been supporting them for years.
Kyle Hughes:
I wonder if I have a blind spot by focusing on Apple platform development: does software quality really matter? The more I interrogate the idea, the more I think the answer is no. The iPhone is an all-time global status symbol, which is why we associate its flavor of software with success, not vice versa. Many inefficiencies can be overlooked by following in Apple’s wide wake. It may be a coincidence that the most valuable company is also the one craftspeople identify with.
They also identified with it when it was losing a billion dollars per year. And sometime in between then and now is probably when its software quality was the highest.
Antitrust App Store Apple Business iOS iOS 17
