This is all just too much Stockholm syndrome. Apple’s DX (developer experience) has always been utterly abysmal, and these continued blog posts just goes to show just how bad it is.
Proprietary technologies, poor or no documentation, silent deprecations and removals of APIs, slow trickle feed of yearly WWDC releases that enable just a bit more functionality, introducing newer more entrenched ways to do stuff but still never allowing the basics that every other developer platform has made possible on day 1.
A broken UI system that is confusing and quickly becomes undebuggable once you do anything complex. Replaces Autolayout but over a decade of apps have to transition over. Combine framework? Is it dead? Is it alive? Networking APIs that require the use of a 3rd party library because the native APIs don’t even handle the basics easily. Core data a complete mess of a local storage system, still not thread safe. Xcode. The only IDE forced on you by Apple while possibly being the worst rated app on the store. Every update is a nearly 1 hour process of unxipping (yes, .xip) that needs verification and if you skip it, you could potentially have bad actors code inject into your application from within a bad copy of Xcode unbeknownst to you. And it crashes all the time. Swift? Ha. Unused everywhere else but Apple platforms. Swift on server is dead. IBM pulled out over 5 years ago and no one wants to use Swift anywhere but Apple because it’s required.
The list goes on. Yet, Apple developers love to be abused by corporate. Ever talk to DTS or their 1-1 WWDC sessions? It’s some of the most condescending, out of touch experience. “You have to use our API this way, and there’s this trick of setting it to this but then change to that and it’ll work. Undocumented but now you know!”
Just leave the platform and make it work cross platform. That’s the only way Apple will ever learn that people don’t want to put up with their nonsense.
I don't disagree with you, but there simply isn't an alternative for pro audio developers. You go where the users are and the majority of the market (by revenue) are Mac users.
Now a lot of people may reply to this that Windows isn't that bad with ASIO (third party driver framework) or modern APIs like WASAPI (which is still lacking), or how pipewire is changing things on Linux so you don't need jack anymore (but god forbid, you want to write pipewire native software in a language besides C, since the only documented API are macros). Despite these changes you have to go where the revenue is, which is on MacOS.
> You go where the users are and the majority of the market (by revenue) are Mac users.
One of the worst things about Apple is how much time and effort they spend trying to lock you into their platform if you want to support it. There's no excuse for it. Even once they have you on their system, they're doing everything in their power to lock you in to their workflows and development environments. It's actually insane how shamelessly hostile OSX is.
This is "don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower" territory imo. I don't think Apple is actively hostile to 3P developers or tries to lock them in. I think they simply don't care - or lack the institutional capacity to care even if individual developers in the organization want to care.
The Apple developer experience is an abject horror because they believe everyone who is capable of developing high value applications for Apple devices works at Apple, or will work at Apple. 3P devs are a nuisance they tolerate rather than a core value-add for their services and devices. I assume it's less bad within Apple, but I really have no idea.
I'd argue you can see the hostility if you compare shipping to Windows vs shipping to Apple. Microsoft doesn't care if you copy over your MSVC suite into a Wine environment to build your software for their platform. Even SignTool just works. It's not necessarily trivial to do, but that's simply because the MSVC suite is a horrible mess like everything else Microsoft.
Apple explicitly disallows cross compilation in their Terms of Service. Even if you managed to get clang compiling for Mac on another Unix, even if you figure out how to get your app bundles signed outside of OSX, they'll revoke your developer license and invalidate your certs because you're in violation of their ToS. You're right they don't care about third party devs, but the amount of hoops you have to jump through for devops on Mac is almost certainly designed as a gluetrap.
Agreed.
I think Apple is actually one of the few companies that you should anthropomorphize because they have shown a long history of making decisions based on long term strategy rather than short term profits. They also react emotionally sometimes. Best example coming to mind is Steve Jobs on Accessibilty, "I don't care about the bloody ROI." I of course cheered that attitude, and still do for a11y, but that is a very human-like thing to do. Also lets not forget his hatred toward Android and vengeful attempt to kill it. Hence I don't think Apple is a lawnmower. They're more like an elephant with it's objectives and they know they're going to squash a lot of lesser life in the process but "you can't have an omellette without breaking a few eggs."
(From private conversations with people at large tech corporations, my understanding is that that provision of the ToS is inconsistently enforced. Obviously not a good place to be for independent developers, since it partly depends on if you're important enough.)
Apple is mainly a hardware company it is saying you must buy our hardware if you want to make money out of our users.
That is not being developer hostile. Apple does many other things that don't help developers but forcing their hardware is just an entry cost.
> I'd argue you can see the hostility if you compare shipping to Windows vs shipping to Apple.
Windows has had 3rd party developers built into its DNA since the beginning though. Even today, Windows goes to great lengths to maintain backwards compatibility. I think this comes from the fact that MS has always been a software first company built around market domination.
There is an excuse: shareholders. The more lock in there is, the more the champagne flows.
Trillion dollar market caps don't come for free. The Apple Tree must be watered with the blood of third party developers so our gracious overlords can Do Computing Different.
You can’t imagine how often I pine for x86 based Windows laptops with horrible battery life, loud fans, and enough heat that if I work with my laptop on my lap for an extended period of time there will be no future Scarface’s. But I’m locked into my Mac because of the dirth of Windows software.
Not to mention all of the great Android tablets that I can’t get or the much faster Android devices…
This would be a more poignant point if you had to sacrifice any of these things to get better developer experience. But you don't, you're intentionally conflating wildly different things to defend an irrational stance.
If my developer experience depended on me using an x86 machine, I would have to sacrifice all of these things
Exactly what are they suppose to do if not create their own frameworks to bear leverage their own hardware? Do you want them to use cross platform frameworks that are not optimized for their system?
My problems start long before the special APIs come into play. When we supported Mac, I just wrapped the APIs like you do for any other system. The problem is I don't use Mac, so building software for Macs is inherently troublesome. I can build and test for Windows just fine from Linux and OpenBSD. I can't for Mac.
Now you might say this is problematic, Apple doesn't want third-party developers locking their platform behind some conditionally compiled set of abstractions that ruin everything they've worked for. Putting aside how ridiculous that is given system APIs are often wrapped for normal abstraction reasons anyways, that's totally fine. But then, it's also not my problem because I'm not Apple. I don't mind supporting their platform, I'll even turn a blind eye to the audacity of charging a developer fee while offering abysmal documentation and support. But I'm not going to crawl and beg for the privilege.
> Do you want them to use cross platform frameworks that are not optimized for their system?
Just like everybody else, because it hardly matters. Outside of Apple-land, Intel, AMD and Nvidia all get along just fine with rewriting SPIR-V to their microarchitectures. CPUs get along just fine rewriting abstract instruction sets like AMD64 and the various ARMs to their microarchitectures. Code is by-default compiled for instruction compatibility. APIs like CUDA and ROCm explicitly exist for vendor lock-in reasons. There's absolutely no reason why the throughput of these APIs can't be generically applied to compute shaders. None at all. The hardware vendors just want to capture the market.
Apple isn't exactly working with exotic hardware. The M1 is yet another ARM chip, not some crazy graph-reduction machine. These standards are fine and used across a wide-derth of hardware to no real detriment. I would suggest you may over-estimate how much they actually care about this idea of "specially optimized APIs." Consider that Apple pushes Swift as the primary language you Should be Using to ship software on OSX, and yet garbage collection is still handled in software. That's not what vertical integration for engineering purposes looks like.
Again, it all hardly matters. I wouldn't mind just wrapping these APIs, they're not particularly special or exotic any more than their hardware is. But the fact of the matter is that as a non-mac user, they go through a lot of effort to ensure putting software on their platform is as unattractive as possible.
Why would I want to use software that you never tested on the target machine?
Because it's not 1982 anymore?
I didn’t buy a Mac to use your lowest common denominator untested, unoptimized application that doesn’t take advantage of my hardware to its fullest.
You're using HN right now. The web is one of many types of write-once-run-anywhere software you are critically reliant on in your day-to-day life.
And I run Safari - a browser built by Apple to be battery efficient, memory efficient and better optimized than Chrome and uses native frameworks and UI.
My computer, the processor that runs in it, the operating system, much of the software and the rest of my computer life - phone, watch, set top device, tablet work together. I can copy text from one and paste it into the other. My watch unlocks my computer. My iPad can be used as a second monitor without any third party software.
I bet you HN tested it on iOS if not the Mac and not just hope the site looks fine
I explicitly conflated building with testing not even 4 sentences into my post.
The way I see it, they mainly just aren’t interested in devs treating macOS as just another lowest-common-denominator target, which makes some amount of sense. Such software is likely to not be as nice to use as something purpose-built for the OS, particularly when considering that the dev probably never even tested the software in question under macOS, greatly hampering their ability to find and eliminate bugs.
Eh, is this worse than Windows? You develop UWP or WPF or whatever the current flavor is with Visual Studio, and use C# APIs that only exist on their platform.
On Mac, I can use bash/zsh mostly how I would on linux. The main compatibility issues come from BSD tools vs GNU, which are very simple to replace if you want. On Windows, they use PowerShell, which is totally proprietary.
On Mac, web & infra development can use completely open source tooling which can be shared with Linux.
You can still use VS Code to edit Swift (or C#), but the more "proprietary dev environments" (Xcode or Visual Studio) are probably more powerful with system level integrations.
Heck, you can use PyQT on mac if you don't like Swift or Xcode.
I don't even understand why they are following a cash cow strategy of milking their current customer base dry when they could be growing massively.
They have amazing hardware that is far superior to the competition and that they can build at very competitive prices while still making good money.
Building a PC in 2025 absolutely sucks. The prices are getting insane. Plus Windows 11 is super hated. It is the perfect time for Apple to win over people.
They just need to stop kneecaping their great hardware but the shitty software side. Just open it up a little bit. Add Vulkan support. Actually make your GPU usable. Actually help Steam to do their magic like they did with Linux, no one is going to buy games on the bloody Apple store anywhere. Show some respect to the developers.
Shareholders giving up massive growth for short term profits. So frustrating.
What I always find curious is how some of the biggest Apple supports are likely some of the same folks who were super anti-MS in the 90s.
How is WASAPI lacking? I thought the abundance of FL Studio beat producers proved that for audio work, today, Windows is completely fine.
Basically every software (except Logic) is available on Windows but users still buy Macs. Even among those users, people usually fallback to ASIO instead of directsound or wasapi backends.
WASAPI requires exclusive mode to be useable for pro applications, or else your latency will suffer and they may be doing some resampling behind the scenes.
Exclusive mode is a feature, not a bug. If the user needs the bits coming out of the user's DAW to reach the speakers as pristine as possible, then the user probably doesn't want these bits mixed with any other application. If the user needs to switch between the DAW and a Youtube tutorial, then there's probably no need for exclusive mode.
Latency is a valid concern, but is it really bad? PCs are fast now.
For a DAW running in exclusive mode, wouldn't they also have the option of setting the system default output to a virtual device that inputs into the DAW? That seems to me like it would be the most sensible way to handle mixing in YouTube or whatever.
afaik it's not possible to configure buffer size and sample rate from within a user application without exclusive mode, which actually does matter for the non-exclusive use case. iirc it was even worse where applications' streams would be resampled transparently and buffered, which is absolutely not what you want.
I don't use windows for audio anymore so I can't comment on this in win11, but it used to be that WASAPI suffered unless you set your PC in "performance" mode in your power settings whereas ASIO was unaffected.
And yes, latency matters! For live performance you're looking for < 2.5ms of one-way latency to get a roundtrip of under 5ms. After that point it starts being perceptible to players. This is not a performance floor so much as a scheduling one, and ime windows audio scheduling under dsound/wasapi was always shakey.
I see. Thank you!
They sell hardware, that shows demos well. They cannot do a demo at MacWorld because it does not exist anymore and worse, they don't care. I would suggest a jack black/school of rock appeal, but you are speaking to a company that is literally tone deaf to everything but what sells product.
There is no revenue in MacOS, there is only revenue in machines that run A free OS, that they consistently lock their loyal customers out of.
FWIW I have worked on several professional live audio productions and never heard of Anukari once. This is a pretty niche domain regardless of what circles you work in. It's really not about "X job is for Y OS" here.
> there simply isn't an alternative for pro audio developers.
Tell me you don't work on live audio without telling me you don't work on live audio. Windows has always been usable if you have a suitable ASIO (same as you used to use on Mac). Most shows will use some permutation of Windows boxen to handle lighting, visuals rendering, compositing and audio processing. The ratio of Macs to Windows machines is at least 1:10 in my experience.
Heck, nowadays even Linux is viable if you're brave enough. Pipewire has all the same features Coreaudio was lauded for back in the day, in theory you can use it to replace just about anything that isn't conjoined at the waist with AU plugins. Things are very different from how they were in 2012.
> Windows has always been usable if you have a suitable ASIO
The gold standard being RME hardware and drivers. Not a single issue ever on windows.
> Tell me you don't work on live audio without telling me you don't work on live audio.
This is pretty rude, I'm among the (probably small) subset of HN users who has developed real professional audio software.
All I can talk about is my experience, which is that in the plugin market a plurality of your revenue will be from MacOS users. My last job in this market had zero Windows/Linux users.
Now I have done a good bit of live work on Windows machines with ASIO, but I also do a bit of work there myself from time to time in venues with musicians - and I don't really know any musicians that are carrying around Windows laptops. 100% of them are using Mainstage and Ableton on Macbooks.
Agreed, you're in probably the toughtest spot.
That said, Reaper and many others have done great things with DAWs and other audio processing in C++. Maybe getting a "native" look is too difficult, but I figured I'd throw it out there.
The problem is not the application software but the operating system and hardware. Linux is arcane and Windows is permanently behind the curve.
> I don't disagree with you, but there simply isn't an alternative for pro audio developers
People used to say this about video pros too, until Apple royally screwed the pooch by failing to refresh its stale Mac Pro hardware lineup for many years, followed by a lackluster Final Cut release. An entire industry suddenly realized Windows was viable after all, they just hadn't bothered to look.
But they had to be pushed in that direction. IT actually affected their work.
In this case, the users of these tools seem perfectly ok with them and aren't going to just explore something as disruptive as an entirely different OS just for kicks.
Not sure why you started off with "but" when we are in agreement and/or you're not disputing my point - that Windows is viable but the Mac-using audio professional aren't (yet) sufficiently motivated to seriously evaluate Windows as a migration target.
> In this case, the users of these tools seem perfectly ok with them
That wasn't my takeaway from the article. The plugin is outright broken on the latest hardware, even with the workaround.
> [...]something as disruptive as an entirely different OS just for kicks
I don't think switching OSes is less disruptive than switching software packages. Cubase or Ableton on Windows is not much different from the respective DAWs on Mac OS. Modern desktop OS UI paradigms map 1:1, so switching isn't a big deal
That comment was left in haste, sorry. To clarify, I meant that in the case of FCP and movie editing software, they were almost forced to switch.
The FCP upgrade didn’t just break the main app, but the plugin ecosystem was wiped out too. (From what I read, I’m not a movie pro). And that was disruption forced upon the users.
So in that scenario, they didn’t have much of a choice.
But in this scenario, the audio apps work well and it’s just the developers complaining.
And even though I’m a developer, I would say as long as the users are happy then I can see why there is less concern about dev happiness
> (but god forbid, you want to write pipewire native software in a language besides C, since the only documented API are macros)
I've read that Zig can wrap C macros. So maybe there is some hope.
> You go where the users are and the majority of the market (by revenue) are Mac users.
You go to a different market.
There is no buts. If you make a decision that you are going to live with a framework that is hostile to your efforts, then that is really your choice to make your life harder. If you really want to make things better for pro audio devs stop enabling organizations that want to mold you into there way of looking at the world. Blog about it and let the industry know you will not tolerate non-freedom in software. The same goes for windows people. Move away from non-open source, take back control of your life and find other endeavors that support open source until the idiots get the point. Stop enabling your jailers.
The Apple DX used to be pretty great around 2010. But by now, it's laughably bad. With every additional OS update, they asked for more and more work (and expensive EV signing certificates) to keep our pro audio app working, which is why it has since been abandoned.
In fact, I'm now working on a USB hardware replacement for what used to be a macOS app, simply because Apple isn't allowing enough control anymore. Their DX has degraded to the point where delivering the features as an app has become impossible.
Also, USB gadgets are exempt from the 30% app store tax. You can even sell them with recurring subscriptions through your own payment methods. Both for the business owner and for the developer, sidestepping Apple is better than jumping through their ridiculous hoops.
With the potential criminal filings against Apple hopefully we see them back off a bit.
And yea, over the years you could tell Apple stopped giving a shit except to turn everything into an app store where they can earn 30% and it's lessened the experience.
We can hope, though Apple is the most "malicious compliance" company I can think of, so I don't doubt they'll figure something out.
The DX was certainly better. I wrote some early iOS apps and the docs were good. They have never been at the MS level though, which is what I programmed for in my day job at the time. MSDN was an achievement.
It's surely not perfect, and so much is quite horrible, but at least try to keep the facts in check. AppKit and auto layout are still working fine, they aren't going anywhere any time soon, there is no need to rewrite all the UI code.
Core Data threading? Well, it has got its pitfalls, but those are known, and anyway, nothing is forcing you to use it.
Xcode is so slim these days, it a ~3 GB download, it doesn't take an hour to unxip, and it can be dowloaded from the developer website.
Swift? It might be needed for a bunch of new frameworks, Objective-C isn't going anywhere anytime soon either.
Let's also keep in mind that the Linux desktop commits most of these offenses, but worse.
Core Data threading? Does Linux even attempt something like Core Data? How well is that going?
Swift? I remember when Linux diehards invented Vala. The Swift of Linux, but with none of the adoption.
As for UI code, Linux is finally starting to get a little more stable there. GTK 2 to 3 was a disaster; Qt wasn't fun between major upgrades; if you weren't using a framework, you needed to have fun learning the quirks of Xorg; nobody who builds for Linux gets to lecture Mac about UI stability.
Or, for that matter, app stability in general. Will a specific build of Blender outside of a Flatpak still work on the Linux desktop after 2 release cycles? No? Then don't lecture me about good practices. Don't lecture me about how my website or app was sloppily engineered because it has dependencies.
You seem to be conflating 2 different things. Apple’s OS proficiency and the associated technologies they support on their OS and Apple’s dev tools proficiency.
People use Apple’s dev tools because they are the only/best way to deliver apps on Apple’s OSes.
If we changed the situation, so that Apple Dev Tools could be used to create applications for non Apple OSes, or non Apple Dev tools were first class citizens for creating Apple apps, I bet the vast majority of people would use the non Apple dev tools to create both Apple and non Apple apps.
What’s keeping Apple Dev Tools in the game is their privileged position in the Apple OS ecosystem.
Why bring Linux up?
Are the target users for this likely to use Linux (rather than Windows) if the ditched Apple?
> Swift? I remember when Linux diehards invented Vala. The Swift of Linux, but with none of the adoption
Plenty of languages used on Linux. Why pick one that did not gain traction?
> f you weren't using a framework, you needed to have fun learning the quirks of Xorg;
Who does that?
> GTK 2 to 3 was a disaster; Qt wasn't fun between major upgrades
But they are cross platform.
> Will a specific build of Blender outside of a Flatpak still work on the Linux desktop after 2 release cycles?
Does that matter? Maybe a bit of extra work for packagers - and people can use Flatpack or Snap.
And the UI situation still has issues. If you want flexibility in language choice, GTK is the only modern-ish framework option there is. The rest are tied to 1-2 languages, bad at accessibility, look archaic, etc.
I wouldn't call Xcode slim. It currently sits at 13GB+ as installed on my drive, and that does not include the simulators which are, what, 10GB each or something? Xcode is by far the largest application I have installed on my "daily driver" Mac.
It's still compressed on disk, so it takes only 5,4 GB of space, not 13 GB+. Sure, the simulator and the iOS or the other SDKs will take more space, but those aren't needed to develop macOS apps.
On the old Mac OS, and early OS X day, the documentation was great, I dunno what happened to the documentation team.
Swift on the server is for Apple ecosystem developers, to share code, just like all those reasons to apparently use JavaScript on the server instead of something saner.
Marketing pushed for features faster than engineering could build them properly to the former standard (quality and documentation).
Ever seen the compiler support tables for ISO managed languages, Web or Khronos standards?
No but I noticed software quality went down when they added emojis
> JavaScript on the server instead of something saner
JS on the server is actually really fast and well supported. Not really sure what you're driving at here.
It might be fast, doesn't make its WATs go away.
https://blog.kevinchisholm.com/javascript/javascript-wat/
Thankfully we can thank someone with the lifetime experience of designing Turbo Pascal, Delphi, J++, C#, and his team, to have made the experience bearable.
I found some of that older documentation one day while being beyond frustrated with understanding some underdocumented iOS library APIs and it is incredible. What they have now is a joke in comparison. WWDC as a documentation strategy is terrible for people that learn from text. And it’s just a bad medium to begin with for information transfer. By its nature it’s bad at information density, and is often distracting and filled with fluff.
Yes, some of it survives on the archives, who knows for how long, always save copies of them.
I wonder if it is a generation gap, as many apparently learn coding via videos, however that it is not enough to go deep.
By the way, Microsoft suffers from the same diseas, they reduced their team size, ans unless one is coding since the 16 bit days, there are many things no one will find.
Some of it is gone forever, as they kept replacing their documentation, blogs and video platforms.
Other is still there, but you have to have actually used that in practice, to find out the Win32, or .NET Framework documentation that nowadays only gives the most recent version.
Or even Microsoft Systems Journal articles, as another example.
Google on Android is also a mixed bag, depending on what one is looking for.
Articles get removed from Apple's documentation archive seemingly randomly. However, on a good note, there are backups of the entire ADC Leopard Reference Library (available at several places online). That covers that vast majority of all the documentation Apple's ever produced. There's also the Apple II FTP archives, which have older but often less applicable documentation, but are definitely still valuable troves of information.
My belief is that taking the time to write docs is kinda like an editing process of your thinking. You start to think hard about the reasons you've written an API and how it could be better. And there's a limit to how big you can think about something as a whole so you will naturally try to modularize and layer things. Not just adding things in an adhoc fashion.
I think they threw the towel when they realize the mess they've built. In contrast you have things like RHEL, FreeBSD, etc, where there's a drive to keep things small and neat just to be able to document them.
I remember it being pretty good circa 2012 or so. The API docs generally told me what I needed to know and there were some helpful in-depth technical notes. Did they lose something in the redesign or Swift migration?
It was starting to go downhill even then. They let go a significant number of documentation people for whatever reason.
The story I have heard was that they all got shit canned. They were professional technical writers focused on telling you “why”. These days most of Apples docs are “what”, and a lot of those don’t even tell you anything. Enums without values documented. Class docs that amount to “yep this class exists”.
> Stockholm syndrome
I don't think that's apt. What you find to be "abuse" others might find to be the kind of obstacles/issues that every platform/ecosystem has.
It probably helps if you never put Apple on a pedestal in the first place, so there's no special disappointment when they inevitably turn out to be imperfect. E.g., just because Apple publishes a new API/framework, that doesn't mean you need to jump on board and use it.
Anyway, developers are adults who can make their own judgements about whether it's worth it to work in Apple's ecosystem or not. It sounds like you've made your decision. Now let everyone else make theirs.
> so there's no special disappointment when they inevitably turn out to be imperfect.
Oh poor Apple. If only they had the resources and engineers to fix that. /s
Their single biggest priority is to provide a better user experience for your customers compared to competitors.
Units sold in the smartphone world uses the same function video game consoles' market does: you simply offer a bigger and better software offerings, not just hardware.
If you, as a developer, have a worse time contributing to that ecosystem, then it is just a matter of time before the users themselves have a worse time with their device.
I take the comment above as a signal that something is clearly not working towards Apple's goals. Of course, you make your own judgements to support a platform or not, but this indicates that decision is a lot easier than it should be. In detriment of Apple's ecosystem.
All in all I wouldn't discount it.
>Their single biggest priority is to provide a better user experience for your customers compared to competitors.
I mean in late stage capitalism their single biggest priority is to become a rent seeking monopoly by regulatory capture. If they can accomplish that, then user experience is a distant concern.
Luckily it looks like apple is having some problems with that recently.
>What you find to be "abuse" others might find to be the kind of obstacles/issues that every platform/ecosystem has.
Right, that's why judges are making criminal recommendations to the US prosecutors. No abuse at all.....
The context here was DX. Maybe start a new thread to change to a new topic?
Apple's documentation used to be quite good—many useful guides, thousands of technical notes, development books quarterly—it's really a shame that they've turned their back on that. Their old docs leaned toward being overly detailed, which some complained about at the time, but I'd much prefer that over near radio silence.
Apple's also been deleting more and more of its old documentation. Much of the it can only be found on aging DVDs now, or web/FTP archives if you're lucky. Even more annoying is how some of the deleted docs are _still_ referenced modern docs and code samples.
lol and people wonder why devs like using electron front ends for their back end code, despite the memory cost. I only have so much time in the day, so I'm doing a lot of calling of c++ backend code to display my data analysis output and configuration on Electron front end. I may look into wasm someday, when that mythical "extra time" comes around
I'm constantly amazed how developers worship Apple while Apple couldn't care less about them. Bugs that never get fixed, documentation that's incomplete, wrong or non-existent, and their bug tracking is a complete joke.
It's honestly nuts that so many developers continue to try to make software on MacOS. I understand the appeal of their current hardware, and I used to even be a big fan of the user experience, but it really seems like attempting to build software in MacOS is like trying to build a house on a sandbar.
Apple has done nothing and continues to do nothing to engender any confidence in their platform as a development target.
The problem is that this could be easily applied to many things. To paraphrase:
It’s honestly nuts that so many developers continue to try to make software using a bloated JavaScript framework and thousands of Node dependencies.
That might also be true but that misses the point - programming is not engineering; nothing is done to an engineer’s preferred standard; and probably never will.
It’s like being a CNC Technician and complaining about how 90% of stuff on store shelves is plastic. A metal gallon of milk would be so much more durable! Less milk would be spilled from puncturing! Production costs, and how they go downstream, are being ignored.
(Edit for the downvotes, dispute me if you care enough, but literally nobody other than computer programmers ogles your clean code. Just like how nobody other than CNC mechanics are going to ogle the milk carton made on a lathe.)
Software engineering is not programming and is not about clean code. Using electron is building a skyscraper when you want to rest or a suspended bridge for crossing a small river. Even if you can order almost everything and you're just assembling, it is a wasteful and lazy solution.
It's very easy to understand. More platforms makes more money - your tinkertoy MacOS native frameworks aren't worth shit for nothing when Windows users will account for 90% of their customers.
Wasteful? Wasteful is whichever solution takes the most money while giving the least in return. From the perspective of any rational business, not using Electron is an opportunity cost. Any Mac user knows the truth well, the web has been a more reliable runtime than native since Mojave.
> Any Mac user knows the truth well, the web has been a more reliable runtime than native since Mojave
And we've got Sketch, Things 3, Bear, Omnigaffle and the whole Omnigroup suite, cleanshot, Alfred,... I'm not trying to defend Apple's ecosystem, but if opensource can deliver Libreoffice, calibre, VLC,... on all platforms, there's little defense for others to burden users with Electron.
> Apple has done nothing and continues to do nothing to engender any confidence in their platform as a development target.
You're missing the forest for the trees. Apple is very difficult to work with indeed, but they have a shit-ton of paying users. Still to this day, iOS is a better revenue maker than Android. Same for macOS compared to Windows. You want to make a living? Release on macOS. People there pay for software.
> Same for macOS compared to Windows.
This hasn't ever been my experience. Maybe if you're in a really specific market niche where most of the userbase is on Mac. Only 5% of users on Windows paying for the software still absolutely dwarfs 100% of Mac users paying for it. We have more sales on Linux than we do Mac.
> We have more sales on Linux than we do Mac
That's interesting, what's your product? There are a few pieces of software on Macs that I would love to pay for on Linux but the option isn't there.
I deploy to iOS, iPadOS, macOS and Mac accounts for around 25% of downloads
I don't believe this. For iOS, sure. But for MacOS? The number of people that uses Windows dwarfs MacOS.
Dwarfs MacOS, sure; but the user base has been conditioned, like Android, to never purchase anything. Why would they purchase anything, when most of their time is spent in the web browser and maybe a few Adobe apps?
iOS is 27% of the mobile market; but total revenue through the App Store in 2024 was $103 billion. For Google Play, it was $46 billion. Double the sales, from a market 1/3rd the size. Whether we like it or not, the whole open platform of Windows being a breeding ground for viruses and piracy, and the ongoing cultural expectations that set, caused a direct effect on people's willingness to buy Windows software from unknown publishers without a third party (Steam, Microsoft Store) vetting them.
I expect it's highly situational. Don't expect to sell many games on Mac. However, I do find it interesting that services like SetApp exist on Mac, but nobody has tried anything with that level of quality on Windows. SetApp also hasn't shown any interest in expanding to Windows.
Paying users is the key.
I’d imagine that people have failed to attract users who pay on Linux or windows and developers know that people use their software via piracy.
It is still better engineered that dealing with the distribution of the day, reinventing the way to do sound, graphics stack, UI, ......
Once upon a time I thought either GNOME or KDE would win, and we could all enjoy the one Linux distribution, I was proven wrong.
Then again, I have been back on Windows as main OS since Windows 7.
I don't know why you are downvoted here.
The engineering standards, and churn within the Linux desktop, are hilariously bad.
Nobody who uses it has a right to complain about how node_modules has a thousand dependencies and makes your JavaScript app brittle. Their superior Linux desktop won't even be capable of running the same software build outside of a Flatpak without crashes in three years.
As for lack of documentation, good luck pulling together all the pieces you need to write a fully native Linux application without using Qt, GTK, or a cross-platform solution. Maybe you have your own UI stack that needs porting. A simple request, fairly accomplishable on Mac. The lack of documentation on Linux outside of that privileged route will make Apple's documentation look like a gold standard. Heck, even if you stay on the privileged route, you're still probably in for a bad time.
> good luck pulling together all the pieces you need to write a fully native Linux application without using Qt, GTK, or a cross-platform solution
Isn't those the native stacks? Unless you're going for system programming. The nice thing about GTK and Qt is that you have access to the source code when you're trying to find the behavior of a component (if the docs is lacking). No such luck with AppKit.
Desktop Linux is so good today that I have not turned on my Mac in 4 years. Sorry your experience has been so bad, but for ease of programming it is a black-and-white decision. Even Windows is a less excruciating Linux development environment, modern MacOS is a veritable dumpsterfire.
Unless one does 3D development, or real time audio processing.
My Asus Linux netbook, bought with Linux support, never had the same OpenGL support level as on the Windows drivers.
And in what concerns hardware video decoding, it only worked during Flash glory days, never managed to get it working with VAAPI.
Speaking of development workflows, has Apple finally implemented a scan-resistant LRU cache within their VFS layer? Last I checked performance would fall off a cliff once you started scanning more files than can fit in the cache.
>Once upon a time I thought either GNOME or KDE would win, and we could all enjoy the one Linux distribution, I was proven wrong.
Linux users don't want one to win. As soon as one gained any traction, the users would switch just for the sake of it. It's also crazy how neither ever actually improves because they are so focused on copying whatever windows and mac are doing instead of continuously improving. The linux desktop experience isn't any better now than it was 20 years ago.
> The linux desktop experience isn't any better now than it was 20 years ago.
You can't say that with a straight face. 20 or so years ago you would barely have hardware support for anything you wanted to use, or have to go trough a battery of guides just to get 50% of your computer working. Nowadays you just boot a live environment and likely 99% of your computer works out of the box, even tough your OEM gave ZERO shits about linux support.
Wi-fi was between impossible or pray it works and use a bunch of disparate of cli commands to properly join a network. Nowadays I see linux being casually used on random machines without a single problem regarding Wi-fi, and the GUIs for managing it are as cromulent as what you get on other OSes.
X kept being patched to make it do modern things it was never meant to do, thus creating a huge technical debt that is finally being payed off with proper wayland implementations.
Linux audio went from a complete turd to best in class with the "merging" (more of a complete rewrite but with full backward compatibility backed in) of pulseaudio and jack into pipewire.
It's now easy to acquire random linux desktop apps, and they keep working between upgrades! What a concept! Developers are actually finally having a decent time developing apps for desktop linux. Maybe it's no WIN32 but hey, you can run those too with WINE and PROTON trough Steam, Lutris, Bottles and so on :)
I could keep going... Honestly, just give it a try if you haven't in a while.
Thing is many of us actually do, as it happens we have to reach out to GNU/Linux deployments on a daily bases.
So audio is the best in class, how many industry DAWs support Linux, and are used at any random audio studio? Not that many.
The netboook I had until 2024, never handled our router without issues, rebooting the wlan daemon was a common activity during "heavy" downloads, like e.g. a new Rust version.
What works without issues on my place are Android/Linux, WebOS/Linux, and Sony/Linux (BlueRay).
Proton is Valve's failure to nurture developers to target GNU/Linux, even though Android/NDK has the same technology stack for game development, and Sony's OrbitOS is close enough with its FreeBSD roots, even with its proprietary 3D API.
>You can't say that with a straight face. 20 or so years ago you would barely have hardware support for anything you wanted to use, or have to go trough a battery of guides just to get 50% of your computer working.
Sure on weird hardware, but it you had something that was decently supported like a thinkpad, everything mostly just worked, same as now. A lot of your "linux improved..." stuff doesn't matter to end users for the most part. It's nice that they're growing the tent, but it doesn't change the fact that actual desktop experience hasn't improved much, despite it having been "year of the linux desktop" for the last 20ish years.
Have you programmed using the Windows APIs?
For example there are over a dozen ways to define a string and you constantly are having to convert between them depending on the API you are using.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp_questions/comments/10pvfia/look...
> Networking APIs that require the use of a 3rd party library because the native APIs don’t even handle the basics easily
This is nonsense. I've been a professional Mac and iOS developer for well over a decade, and even in the days of NSURLConnection, I've never needed a 3rd party networking library. Uploading, downloading, streaming, proxying, caching, cookies, auth challenges, certificate validation, mTLS, HTTP/3, etc. – it's all available out of the box.
Yeah NSURLSession is great and I always find whatever library I’m forced to use clunkier than using it directly with some helper methods.
I think people forget how horrible embedded (including mobile) programming was before the iPhone SDK came along. I just posted about this[1], so I won't repeat myself here, but TLDR: developing for the iPhone is a breath of fresh air compared to how unnecessarily difficult embedded and mobile development was (and in many cases still is) on other platforms.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657086
Oh please, every platform and programming environment has undocumented apis, workarounds and hacks.