wilshipley

See, my thinking is if enough of us get “special favors” then the special favors will become the norm.

Sorry, “for everyone” was intended to mean, “the flaws I’ve identified hurt Apple, some customers, and some developers” not “100% of customers are hurt by the flaws.”

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I’ve spoken with an Apple SVP about the compatibility issue and it's huge, you’re right. My suggestion to them at the time was to boot apps out of the app store that don’t stay up-to-date.

But there’s a gap I can’t solve, which is Apple doesn’t want users paying more just to keep their apps running on new iPhones.

As a datapoint, though, iOS apps have a LONG shelf-life. I have an iOS app I shipped with iOS 7 and it still runs on iOS 13.

With macOS, yes, we’re all angry because Apple finally made good on its promise to deprecate 32-bit apps after like six years of warning us. And, yah, I lost 60% of my games on Steam and I’m upset about it, but also I like my machine being way more responsive (loading both the entire 32-bit stack and the entire 64-bit stack at once meant a ton of memory pressure and swapping), and I like that Apple doesn’t have to maintain to entirely different codebases and can fix bugs and add features once not twice.

And it’s not like 64-bit apps are a new thing — if you’ve submitted an app to the Mac App Store you’ve been required for YEARS to have it run on 64-bit machines.

It sucks that Steam didn’t enforce this as well — not because they should do Apple’s bidding, but because it would have been a mitzvah to Steam’s customers who just lost a lot of games.

-Wil

This would be what I’d aim for, absolutely.

I talked to some indies who do this for apps they sell outside the App Store, but none of them did it with App Store apps. I believe they indicated there were obstacles to doing it with the App Store (as it is). I’m definitely not an expert in this — I’ve never had a subscription app.

-Wil

I’ve been using NeXTstep since 1988 and have influenced the course of its history quite a bit over the last 32 years, as it found its way into Macs and then iPhones.

I don’t think it’s undignified to tell Apple they are going down a road that’ll hurt everyone.

You assume nobody at Apple will listen to me. I don’t.

-Wil

I argue it’s in Apple’s interest to support native developers or there will soon not be any third-party software that’s exclusive to Apple, which is NOT in their interest.

I’m appealing to their pocketbook.

-W

All the solutions and hacks I’ve seen from other companies to simulate discounted upgrades have been a mess — that’s not my verdict, it’s the verdict of the developers who have tried it and found themselves stymied by Apple’s byzantine rules and limited App Store.

-W

They don’t know that, actually, because I haven’t decided I’ll stay in the App Store.

-Wil

Nice to meet you.

-W

Thanks!

-Wil

My argument wasn’t for ruining the web. It was saying, look, there are a ton of apps out there that are written (usually using emulation layers) for basically all platforms, and if Apple kills off all its native, independent developers, those are the ONLY apps that will exist.

At that point, there won’t be much reason to buy Apple products. Of course, Apple says they have the best products and ecosystem, blah blah blah. (And it’s an ecosystem I largely like, to be fair.) But Apple should not become so arrogant that they think customers will flock to buy their products based only on the Apple’s own software.

Innovation comes from the small, independent developers. The first web browser for Mac OS X, the first PDF viewer for Mac OS X, the first image viewer for Mac OS X, and the first video barcode scanner on ANY platform were all created outside Apple.

Also, Pages and Keynote are rewrites of Pages and Concurrence (apps created by Lighthouse Design for NeXTstep) done _by the some of the same people who did the originals_.

It’s easy once you the hit mega-billion-dollar success level to forget how many of your products and ideas didn’t come from inside your company. But also fatal.

-Wil

I buy a lot of $60 games for my PS4 every year. There’s a market for quality, but the owners of the platform have to support it. Apple has instead fostered a race to the bottom.

-W

I responded to some of these in a different response, I’ll edit it a bit here, but my points are the same:

The subscription model fails in a lot of ways, for everyone. For example, my next app is an interior design / home control app. How would the customer feel if they stopped paying and didn’t have access to their house any more? Most people would be pissed.

I don’t want to hold my customers’ data for ransom and cut them off if they stop paying me my extortion money.

Also, I estimate about half the people who buy version one of my app will enter their floorplan into their computer, place their furniture, be happy, and never use the app again (until I upgrade it to offer home control, as well). If those users just pay like a buck each and cancel after the first month, I’m not going to make my money back for the six years I’ve put into this app.

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New stuff:

I’d argue that it’s much more important Apple let developers put out one-time-per-customer, timed, fully-functional demos.

Developers with successful products are already incentivized to keep updating them. What I’ve found again and again is that version two of a product will do better than version one.

Adobe’s been selling Photoshop since I was in college, and it’s not like they didn’t upgrade their app. Same with Intuit / Quicken.

-Wil

The subscription model fails in a lot of ways, for everyone. For example, my next app is an interior design / home control app. How would the customer feel if they stopped paying and didn’t have access to their house any more? Most people would be pissed. I don’t want to hold my customers’ data for ransom and cut them off if they stop paying me my extortion money.

I’m pretty sure we can do micro-subscription already — I could ask Apple to just charge $1 a month, that’s pretty micro. (I don’t think we can do pennies, yet.) But that model doesn’t really work for all types of apps.

For instance, I estimate about half the people who buy version one of my app will enter their floorplan into their computer, place their furniture, be happy, and never use the app again (until I upgrade it to offer home control, as well). If those users had the option to just pay me 5 cents for the month they used the app, I’d have to get 16 million of these users to make back the money I’ve put into this app.

That’s not really feasible.

-—

My point with the web is that pass-through web “apps” on iOS are the same as pass-through web “apps” on Android, so Apple is losing a competitive advantage if they kill of their native developers.

If you’ve got Slack or Chrome or a banking app or a finance app or a health app on your iPhone, you could be running the exact same app on Android. So why did you spend extra on an iPhone? Apple needs to treat its independent, native developers better because we are the only ones who are making products that are Apple-only, and show off all the cool things iOS and macOS can do.

-Wil

I was also one of the people who lobbied for the original App Store. Obviously, we won that fight. (But also I knew more people at Apple back then.)

-W

Honestly I prefer a curated store. I’ve had discussions with people who work at the Apple App Store about having only curated apps show up by default, but anyone “rejected” from the curated list can still put their app up, they just have to give the direct App Store URL for people to find their app.

I’d love this, myself, as a customer and as a developer. But, also, I’m arrogant enough to assume I’d be one of the curated.

-Wil

That $30B number is meaningless on its own. You don’t know how many people it’s going to or how it’s divided amongst them.

Also, they’re not paying us at all. They’re taking 30% of our gross for the privilege of having an entry on their store, and then they run ads against us.

Customers hate subscriptions, and small developers don’t like them much, either, because they create the expectation that the app will be upgraded very regularly.

This expectation is fine for companies like Adobe, who are going to be cranking out a new version on a regular basis. But it’s onerous to a smaller developer.

My understanding is Apple is now discouraging developers from using the subscription model unless their app has periodic new content / updates, but I haven’t confirmed this yet.

-Wil Shipley

I'll drive the Tesla every day, as I do with my Lotus. Why drive a boring car to work?

-W

No, they originally delivered 2-speed cars that were locked in 2nd gear -- and now they're replacing that gearbox with a one-speed gearbox that's a lot stronger.

They increased the power of the engine while waiting to fix the gearbox, and found the car now accelerates fine with only one gear.

-W

The comments on this forum are awesome. I wish the whole intertron were like this.

-Wil