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Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

Completely agree. Apple has nothing but contempt for its developers, and treats them like indentured servants. "Oh it took 10 years to get your app working right? Well, it doesn't work right anymore after yesterday's patch."

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Also you're an open source and free project? If you want donations we're going to need a cut of that. Doesn't matter that you're providing our OS with functionality (for free) that we can't or won't create on our own.

Is this true? That can't be legal.

Yes, he says it right in the post. They had a donation link in the about section that Apple forced them to remove because the payments weren't going through the app store payment system where they get a cut.

It might be worth appealing that rule by claiming that the payment is a donation and optional.

That would be an instance of very talented developers sinking even more of their time into Apple's despicable platform.

There's a lot of very undespicable people using the platform, unfortunately…

I would say not. Supporting a tyrant and a fascist by giving them your money is also despicable.

If you buy your stuff used that's fine IMO.

That could be said for any platform these days. It's certainly not specific to Apple!

Microsoft broke a lot in the past few years when they got rid of their dedicated QA department(s) but they are very keen of fixing backwards compatibility issues. I can still run my desktop application that I compiled in 1998. Try that on a Mac.

Try running 16-bit visual basic, which I was still writing as late as 2000, on a Ryzen and your analogy falls to bits. I remember the entire win16 to win32 porting effort that had to go in. APIs are never stable forever.

Change is the only constant and I've learned to embrace it where possible or suffer later.

That would actually work fine on Windows 10 32bit. It still has NTVDM and can run 16bit and DOS programs.

I guess Windows doesn't break their compatibility almost ever. Linux doesn't break user-space, but of course the libraries you depend on might change in a few decades.

I've actually spent about 25 years writing software on Windows, mostly desktop. Stuff breaks all the time and getting it fixed is nigh on impossible even if you happen to be a partner with contract.

What is claimed to be backwards compatibility is only partially true; reality is that bugs and their workarounds will exist forever.

As for Linux and breaking userspace, that's the kernel interface which is stable, not the whole distribution. I really wish people would report that honestly. NT's API is stable too. It doesn't mean Gtk and ComCtl32 doesn't have abhorrent stability problems and bugs in them.

The issue is, on all platforms, the thousands of libraries each containing hundreds of calls and data structures.

There are some old games I can't get to work on Windows 10 which worked fine on Windows XP. Amusingly, what usually ends up working best is wine.

There's a 2004 article about this by Joel Spolsky that can be found here[0]. Obviously it is a "tad" out of date (and I don't work on Windows so I can't comment on the situation right now), but it seems that at some point Windows cared deeply about backwards-compatibility.

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

Untrue, Microsoft is much much more open (yes it hurts to say that) in that regard.

No, but Apple does it worst, and the fact that other companies do it doesn't excuse them in the the slightest.

It's completely untrue in my experience working with WWW, GNU, and POSIX. Compared to Android, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, and many other platforms I've developed for, I feel supported and catered to, and if I have a problem or a question, there is an actual human on the other end to guide me, politely and helpfully.

Developing for Windows back in the day, it was about halfway there. I had zero ability to communicate back to the platform owners, but I rarely if ever felt shit on, disrespected or disregarded. In contrast, on Win32, I felt like everything I wanted to do had already been considered ahead of time, thought through, and there was an existing and elegant solution available.

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