

Apple's Mistake (2009) - kunai
http://paulgraham.com/apple.html

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namenotrequired
Original discussion when this was first submitted:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1081514](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1081514)

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salem
So I guess the question now is, has this changed much since 2009?

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mtdewcmu
It didn't take long for Apple to accept the app of my recent former employer,
and AFAIK, they have been accepting updates. So Apple might have gotten better
about turnaround times.

I feel that Apple is generally not all that friendly to developers: they make
it hard to just start hacking on your device, with lots of bureaucratic hoops,
app signings, developer accounts you need; you can't do any development
without a Mac; they make little or no effort to ease the transition to their
platform for developers new to Apple development -- there's only one
programming language that's credible to develop in, and it's one that no one
else in the industry uses; documentation is spotty and there don't seem to be
a lot of good books out there. They obviously have a lot invested in
ObjectiveC, and it goes way back to before they had a platform that stood to
attract lots of new developers, so I get that it would be impractical to just
drop ObjectiveC as the core language. But they could definitely do more to
support standard scripting languages as viable alternatives to ObjC. I gather
that they flirted with Python (or was it Ruby?) for a while, but then they
dropped it. Google clearly did developers a favor by using Java and Linux as
the platform. I'm not that personally fond of Java, but it's way better than
some language that's totally bizarre and used by only one company (I'd make
only one exception, if that company happened to be Microsoft, because MS has
been big enough for long enough to create their own language, and I don't
think they'd ever force something like ObjC on you anyway).

I'm reminded of something I do like about Apple development -- I like that
it's fully POSIX and BSD compatible, even on the phone. And they integrate and
encourage popular open source libraries. But I'm not sure if they did that to
cut developers a break, or just to save themselves time by using stuff that
was already available.

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dgreensp
In hindsight, I think Apple did an impressive job with the App Store, in their
usual style of building a brand-new kind of thing and actually doing a bang-up
job of it. It took a few years to really get into shape, and I don't like
everything about it (the 30% cut is steep, and I'd like to install a non-Store
app once in a while). However, a software store is a legitimate business and
not some philosophically-unsound intermediary, and there are many human
factors that go into software that are relevant here.

The most impressive aspect of the App Store is that a _human_ ensures a
certain level of quality of _every_ single app in the store. While a few
clauses in Apple's guidelines get the most attention in the blogosphere (like
ability to access adult content), the bulk if it is actually mundane stuff
like: The app doesn't crash if there's no Internet connection, or if the
connection drops. The app doesn't have other glaring bugs or usability issues.
It's compatible with some range of OS versions and devices. And so on. It was
ambitious of Apple to try to scale a curated store to hundreds of thousands of
apps, but they hired lots of people and they did it.

The store is also a much better experience than any previous way of buying, or
even discovering, software. You can easily pay with one click; the download
begins instantly; and the installation happens invisibly. Remember filling out
credit card forms online just to buy a $5 app? Imagine that process on a tiny
screen. Remember installers? Uninstallers? When shopping, you can browse
titles easily, and you can get an idea what you're buying. The organization
and user interface, while often criticized, are better than anything
comparable that I know of (game console stores; old shareware sites), and of
course the selection is much larger.

One final point to note is that most hackers, as much as they love hacking
around with technology, don't have the desire, experience, or attention span
to produce a polished app with a decent user experience, and for those that
do, it necessarily takes many many hours. So some of the hurdles Apple puts up
(like registering for the developer program) should be put in perspective. On
the other hand, I absolutely think the iPhone could stand to be more hacker-
friendly and easy to mess around with.

In summary, I think of the App Store as an Apple innovation and a very daring
one. Like many Apple innovations, many parts of it seem obvious (and maybe
are/were) and yet are hard to do and weren't done previously, or weren't
integrated. Apple's always trying to integrate stuff, which tends to reduce
choice at a technical level but vastly improve the experience of using the
product (...if only it weren't the trade-off it was). The canonical example is
making both the hardware and the software for a computer, but there's an
endless list of smaller ones (like deciding the sound card is part of the
computer).

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mtdewcmu
You sound like an Apple booster. One company providing both software and
hardware is the way it works most of the time. I think the real innovation was
the unusual openness of the IBM PC.

