Archive for July 18, 2025

Friday, July 18, 2025

Xcode Key Bindings to Make Refactoring Less Painful

Jon Reid:

Xcode supports automated refactoring. Supposedly.

In practice, the options are limited and often unavailable. You’ll right-click something, navigate to the Refactor submenu… only to find that the command you want is grayed out. It’s a waste of time.

[…]

With these shortcuts, I can try an automated refactoring in less than a second. If it’s not available, I get feedback right away — no wasted mouse clicks. And when it is available, I stay in the flow.

The one I’ve had the best luck with is Edit All in Scope (Command-Control-E), which isn’t in the Refactor menu.

Previously:

Study on AI Coding Tools

METR (Hacker News):

We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities in one relevant setting; as these systems continue to rapidly evolve, we plan on continuing to use this methodology to help estimate AI acceleration from AI R&D automation.

See the full paper for more detail.

Via Thomas Claburn:

Not only did the use of AI tools hinder developers, but it led them to hallucinate, much like the AIs have a tendency to do themselves. The developers predicted a 24 percent speedup, but even after the study concluded, they believed AI had helped them complete tasks 20 percent faster when it had actually delayed their work by about that percentage.

[…]

The study involved 16 experienced developers who work on large, open source projects. The developers provided a list of real issues (e.g. bug fixes, new features, etc.) they needed to address – 246 in total – and then forecast how long they expected those tasks would take. The issues were randomly assigned to allow or disallow AI tool usage.

I’m skeptical about the experimental design, and I suspect there’s huge variance in how much developers in the real world get out of AI.

Ruben Bloom:

I was one of the developers in the @METR_Evals study. Thoughts:

1. This is much less true of my participation in the study where I was more conscientious, but I feel like historically a lot of my AI speed-up gains were eaten by the fact that while a prompt was running, I’d look at something else (FB, X, etc) and continue to do so for much longer than it took the prompt to run.

I discovered two days ago that Cursor has (or now has) a feature you can enable to ring a bell when the prompt is done. I expect to reclaim a lot of the AI gains this way.

[…]

4. As a developer in the study, it’s striking to me how much more capable the models have gotten since February (when I was participating in the study)

[…]

5. There was a selection effect in which tasks I submitted to the study. (a) I didn’t want to risk getting randomized to “no AI” on tasks that felt sufficiently important or daunting to do without AI assistance. (b) Neatly packaged and well-scoped tasks felt suitable for the study, large open-ended greenfield stuff felt harder to legibilize, so I didn’t submit those tasks to study even though AI speed up might have been larger.

Previously:

Some of the Apps in the App Store

Jeff Johnson (Mastodon):

This blog post is about an app named Chatbot: Ask AI Chat Bot, subtitled “Built on ChatGPT OpenAI, GPT-4", by the developer Tuqeer Ahmad. If you’re not familiar with Tuqeer Ahmad, well… neither am I. Nonetheless, Chatbot: Ask AI Chat Bot is currently #23 top grossing in the Mac App Store and the #64 top “free” download according to AppFigures.

Believe it or not, the app is in the Education category of the Mac App Store. In fact, it’s #1 top grossing and the #3 top download in Education. (I would guess that’s because students are looking for ways to cheat on their homework, sigh.)

[…]

The app does include IAP, and as I’ve already noted, makes a significant amount of revenue (more than my apps!), so it seems difficult to dispute that the developer is a trader. Thus, the developer’s self-assessment appears to be inaccurate and indeed illegal in the EU.

[…]

Anyway, that’s what it takes to become one of the top grossers in the Mac App Store. On the web, I can find no media coverage, word of mouth recommendations, or even advertising for this app. Tuqeer Ahmad is effectively anonymous. And unlike the iOS App Store, the Mac App Store has no search ads. So how does this developer find customers? Honestly, I don’t know, other than stuffing the app title, subtitle, description, etc., with popular search keywords.

Paul Haddad:

WTH? How does something like [BrightScreen] even make it into the Mac App Store?

Marcus Mendes:

You know it’s a day that ends in “y” when there’s a new App Store lawsuit. This time, the issue isn’t antitrust or developer rejection complaints, but rather a class action accusing Apple of facilitating the spread of cryptocurrency scams by allowing a fake trading app onto the App Store.

[…]

Lead plaintiff Danyell Shin says she downloaded Swiftcrypt onto her iPhone in late 2024, after being introduced to the app through an online investment group. Believing the app was trustworthy, partly because it came from Apple’s App Store, she ended up transferring more than $80,000 into the platform. Then, the funds vanished.

[…]

The filing paints a detailed picture of how Apple’s own rules for crypto apps, requiring licensing, regulatory compliance, and developer verification, were supposedly not enforced in this case.

Here’s an app called School Assistant that offers an IAP called “Tip Jar - $0.99” that actually costs $400. It’s been like that in the store for at least 6 months.

Arin Waichulis (via Jeff Johnson):

It’s the same early-day digital scareware we’ve all seen before: “Your iPhone is infected with (310) viruses. Click here to remove them.” These pop-ups, seemingly always 280p quality and slapped together with stock graphics from a different reality, usually appear on shady websites as malicious ads or junk software, urging people to install a “fix” or be doomed. But one was recently spotted running as an ad on YouTube for a sketchy iPhone clean up app.

[…]

It states, “Your iphone is severely damaged by (247) virus! We have detected that your iPhone has been infected with viruses. If you don’t take any action, it will soon corrupt your SIM card, data, photos and contacts.”

[…]

From a few minutes of research, I learned the clean up application is operated by a newly formed Chinese-based company with very weak and broad privacy policies, likely created using LLMs, and ranked 50th on Top Charts in Productivity.

Thomas Clement:

The App Store is also such a cesspool. I was looking for a simple solitaire game, you’d think in 2025 the App Store would make it easy to find a simple solitaire game that isn’t a 300MB app with ads, subscriptions and extremely dubious privacy labels, but apparently no…

Previously:

App Store Study Shows 90% of What?

Apple:

Apple today announced the global App Store ecosystem facilitated $1.3 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2024, according to a new study by economists Professor Andrey Fradkin from Boston University Questrom School of Business and Dr. Jessica Burley from Analysis Group. For more than 90 percent of the billings and sales facilitated by the App Store ecosystem, developers did not pay any commission to Apple.

The Analysis Group always comes to the right conclusions.

Juli Clover:

Following a study looking into the success of the App Store ecosystem in the United States, Apple has sponsored a second study that covers the global App Store in 2024.

[…]

Developer billings and sales of digital goods and services hit $131 billion, primarily from games and photo and video editing apps like those from Adobe. Sales of physical goods and services facilitated by App Store apps exceeded $1 trillion.

How unfair it is that Apple isn’t getting paid when you buy physical goods from Amazon or get food delivered by Domino’s or Instacart. And the study points out that Apple isn’t even counting all the commerce that happens through Safari or Google Chrome! Think of how different things might be if Apple had invented the Web browser.

Apple always releases these studies before WWDC. You might think the idea is to make developers feel good about their position, but that doesn’t make much sense given the contents of the studies. On the one hand, the inflated numbers from physical goods and services are irrelevant to us. It seems like they’re padding the numbers to confuse and get the desired result. On the other hand, if you take Apple at its word that this is what we should focus on, the takeaway is basically that we’re paying huge commissions to Apple for terrible service, but they really want us to know that the giant companies pay nothing. Thanks, that helps a lot. The real audience for these studies is regulators. It’s basically FUD: be careful or you’ll screw up $1.3 trillion of the economy.

Chance Miller:

This marks the fourth report that Apple has released on the App Store ecosystem in the last week. Last Tuesday, Apple shared a report noting that the App Store prevented over $2 billion in fraudulent transactions in 2024. Two days later, Apple highlighted that the App Store ecosystem in the U.S. facilitated $406 billion in developer billings and sales in 2024.

Finally, the company released its full App Store Transparency Report with details on things like App Store user traffic, fraud prevention, and more. The emphasis on the App Store’s ecosystem comes as Apple continues to face pushback from regulators around its App Store practices.

Jeff Johnson (Hacker News):

In the same announcement, Apple brags at length about its “Investment in Developers”:

Apple invests in tools and capabilities that make it easier for developers to distribute their apps and games, be discovered by users around the globe, and grow successful businesses.

[…]

The positive tone of today’s announcement is in stark contrast to an Apple statement from 2019 addressing Spotify’s claims:

After using the App Store for years to dramatically grow their business, Spotify seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem — including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers — without making any contributions to that marketplace.

[…]

Whenever Apple or Apple apologists claim that App Store commissions are required in order to finance the iOS platform, it’s nonsense. To be clear, I have no objection to Apple having an App Store, and for placing requirements on App Store developers. What’s unique about the iOS platform, though, is that the App Store is the sole method of distribution for third-party software.

[…]

The IAP mandate applies only to a small minority of developers, who are forced to (allegedly) support the ecosystem for the benefit of the majority, who are free riders.

Nick Heer (Mastodon):

The purpose of this study — also produced in 2020, 2021, and 2023, though not last year — is two-fold. First, it indicates to lawmakers the footprint of the App Store and suggests any further regulatory action would seriously compromise the economy as a whole. The second reason it exists is to soften the impression of Apple’s commission on digital purchases, hence this part of the study and press release, emphasis mine[…] A big amount, but measured against the total estimated economy of $1.3 trillion, it is supposed to be seen as a small fraction — “less than 10%”.

[…]

The thing about the Analysis Group’s report is that it is very broad. While it does not include transactions made through Safari on iOS, things like shopping in Amazon’s app or buying airfare in Kayak’s app are factored in. Whether these purchases were actually facilitated by the App Store ecosystem is questionable to me — would someone have not bought that flight if not for their iPhone?

[…]

Apple has argued in court this commission is for App Store upkeep, developer relations, API development, and for intellectual property licensing. These are things common to all apps. Yet only those facilitating transactions for digital services are expected to pay? How is Uber — with its half-gigabyte client app updated once or twice weekly for tens of millions of users — not paying for App Store hosting and bandwidth, but indie developers are?

Previously:

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