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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

We need to can this "passive media consumption" nonsense with respect to Apple. Do you know any musicians? Pretty much all of them use Apple gear inasmuch as they work digitally, even iPhones and iPads.

Android's JVM bullshit makes it a "passive media consumption" platform, but iOS and iPadOS have real-time features that let them respond to input events with very low latency, perfect for creative work like music and visual art. Accordingly, the best creativity apps for mobile platforms work ONLY on iOS and iPadOS.

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> Do you know any musicians?

Yes

> Pretty much all of them use Apple gear inasmuch as they work digitally, even iPhones and iPads.

There's a big difference between one musician I know who uses their iPhone to watch YouTube videos to improve their guitar-playing technique - to another that uses their iPhone only to capture samples because their DAW setup couldn't possible fit on a screen that small.

None of the musicians I know (games-industry folk, mostly) uses an iPad as a DAW because it's a massive usability downgrade from a desktop (e.g. plug-ins support in Logic-Pro-for-iPad is lacking; or simply quickly dragging-and-dropping files around directly from the filesystem; and the inability to use shared projects from a company LAN). (I'll admit I have zero exposure to this area, so please correct me if I'm overstating these issues).

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> We need to can this "passive media consumption" nonsense with respect to Apple

I remember when Apple added Stickers to iMessages - and was appalled that they had decided that normal users should not have the ability to make their own stickers (unlike every other chat program out there). I think Apple's attitude towards their users is very much a valid criticism.

> We need to can this "passive media consumption" nonsense with respect to Apple I remember when Apple added Stickers to iMessages - and was appalled that they had decided that normal users should not have the ability to make their own stickers (unlike every other chat program out there). I think Apple's attitude towards their users is very much a valid criticism

Your point about stickers might have been true in the past, but it's wrong now. Since I don't use a lot of stickers, I looked it up, and it was added in iOS 17 last year.

> I looked it up, and it was added in iOS 17 last year.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph9b4106303/io...

Sort-of - but what Apple actually did just reinforces my position: iOS does not let you provide your own pre-made ARGB images, it only lets you use their own photo-subject segmentation tool - whatever sticker image Apple Photos generates is at the behest of whatever their image-segmentation algorithm thinks is best: i.e. you lack full creative-control.

(To be clear: I'm not decrying the sticker-from-photo feature, I think it's nifty - I'm just miffed that there's no way for me to simply provide my own raw images).

> perfect for creative work like music and visual art

This exactly. For a keyboard/synth musician, the iPad is amazing. I could list dozens of apps, but Sunrizer, Animoog, and Korg Gadget are fantastic and I've used them for years. Synth apps work well on the multitouch screen and are very responsive. Some apps like Animoog and Geoshred also provide an expressive multitouch playing surface.

For visual/digital artists, Procreate + Apple pencil is a fantastic combination and basically reason enough to buy an iPad.

Why should it be canned? Apple users are very much passively brand loyal and of the mindless apple-made-it-so-it-must-be-great mentality. It's very on brand for them.

I doubt it's because of realtime constraints, you could probably use the NDK if you need to mostly escape the JVM. ObjectiveC/Swift are also garbage collected, so it's not like iOS is strictly realtime by default.

I think the main reason those products are available on iOS and iPadOS is because most creatives have _always_ been on Apple's products and iOS users are on average wealthier and more willing to pay for software. Also, I bet the original version of the software has been available on MacOS for a long time, so on top of having paying customer it would also make it easier to port to iOS than Android.

There's TermUX on Android, doesn't mean most phones are made for and mostly used for software development/sysadmin tasks. Sure, there are a few people that'll use their Android phone to SSH into something in a pinch, but 99% use their Android phone for social media, emails, web and youtube just like Apple iPhone users.

> you could probably use the NDK if you need to mostly escape the JVM

Yes. The audio/synth app situation has improved significantly for Android (iirc Caustic started on Android and was later ported to iOS, and Korg Kaossilator has been ported to Android), but it's still behind iOS/iPadOS, particularly the breadth and quality of iPad music apps. But if Korg ever ports the rest of their (excellent) music apps, Android musicians will be in for a treat.

> ObjectiveC/Swift are also garbage collected

Both use Automatic Reference Counting:

https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...

Software and hardware support does matter. Apple made sure that Logic Pro, GarageBand, and MainStage worked well on Apple's OS and hardware platforms, and third party apps benefited. Apple also did a great job with Apple pencil, which works very well for Procreate.

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