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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

Focusing on iPhone users and and not iPhone developers probably was/is the right thing to do.

iOS isn't a developer's platform and if it were, developers probably wouldn't be interested in it very much, since what developers want more than any API, tool or system is users.

Not that they couldn't focus on users better, or couldn't support developers better w/o impacting users negatively. They could and should, IMO.

Apple has pretty much fixed the issue this post is concerned with (very slow app review process)... but it took several years -- checking the internet, it looks like ~2016 was the general turning point, so around 7 years after this post. It shows just how little the developer experience matters to developers if you have users.

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> Focusing on iPhone users and and not iPhone developers probably was/is the right thing to do.

Broadly speaking, I feel that we in the tech community tend to erroneously assume that what’s good for developers must also be good for users. That’s not necessarily true. Developers are ultimately just businesses looking to extract revenue from users —- we should expect the relationship between developers and users to be adversarial to a certain extent.

> iOS isn't a developer's platform…

It is, in the sense that a reasonably-good iOS developer experience is necessary but not sufficient. What Apple does prioritize is giving developers a large, vibrant, and engaged audience for their work in exchange for a 30% (or 15%) cut.

This is even true on desktop with Apple deprecating and removing features with new OS releases. The assumption is that developers will take care about it.

But for users of niche apps that are no longer supported by developers this is rather problematic and requires to stay at older MacOS versions.

Didn’t Apple used to let you run a VM of your laptop? I swear I used to run a VM of a 2011 laptop to use niche software.

One cannot run 32-bit Intel binary on Apple silicon even via VM. I suppose VM vendors may eventually support that via emulation, but it will take a while.

You sure can. Parallels has supported this since its first M1 version AFAIK. I'd be surprised if UTM/QEMU doesn't support this as well.

Yes you can. Here’s a link for Snow Leopard on an M1. I use parallels to run windows 7 on an M1.

https://youtu.be/a6FdLON1Nlk

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