Comment by zackmorris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zackmorris | Hacker News Reader

Apple's websites are among the worst corporate sites I've ever used. I don't say that just to be critical or cynical (ahem), I'm merely pointing out that they have tremendous room for improvement. As opposed to say php.net or stackoverflow.com which still give me that fresh air "why can't all sites be like this?" feeling every time I visit them.

Most of the time when I visit Apple's sites now, I just assume that what I need to find will either be buried in a convoluted maze, or simply won't exist, and I'll find myself on a "this has been deprecated" 404-style page which takes me someplace only loosely related to what I was looking for. So I end up back at google to try to find a copy of the information either cached somewhere or offsite.

Simply being an Apple developer is a chore. Keeping up with yearly certificate expirations is taxing when you are contracting for several clients. And they never really worked out an easy way to allow several developers to share certs. I just assume now that the other developers will invalidate whatever shared cert I made.

The situation is bad enough, and exacerbated by Apple stubbornly refusing to see the flaws, that I wish a startup would encapsulate the friction and just take care of all the minutia for me. I should never have to personally deal with provisioning. Anything short of a one click submission to iTunes Connect is reminiscent of all the TCP/IP details that we used to have to put in our modems in the dialup days, when all that should have been required was a phone number and passcode. I can't gently forgive them for it. So I think this downtime could be a wakeup call for them that the inefficiencies in their system are even costing them now.

Have you spent any time on the Verizon or Sirius XM sites? How about the average multinational insurance company? "Among the worst corporate sites" is a huge leap, considering the profound amount of crap. Spending 5 minutes using the average electronic medical records (EMR) web application would be enough to make your hair fall out. Forget about interoperability of EMR formats. It's a mess. I'm not defending Apple at all, I've spent many nights throwing iPhones over the provisioning and certificate process, but to me, the outcome of surviving that process is that I'm making money from the apps, so it's not ideal, but at least my iOS users are actually paying me money, as opposed to Android users that, as a group tend to expect something for nothing.

We ought to also look at the inefficiencies of the Android system while we're here. 35% of users are still on Gingerbread! You can't really expect to earn money as a developer if you ignore 35% of your target market, with iOS we have over 90% running iOS 6 and only about 6% running Android 4.2, which means that developers can't take advantage of a new Android feature without leaving behind the majority of their market, or creating multiple versions and then on top of that, having to test on a myriad of different hardware configurations. The fact also remains that Android users are generally cheap -- they don't like to pay for apps. So you have a highly fragmented OS environment, coupled with a user base that, in generally spends much less that iOS users and, on top of that, you have a royal mess in the copy-protection scheme used in Android -- which had to be disabled in Jelly Bean due to it breaking apps.

Of course, the security in Android is top notch! Great job on that Google.

If we want to talk inefficiencies with Apple, we certainly can, but to ignore the Google mess is disingenuous.

As far as the effect of Apple's "inefficiencies," is it really affecting them? Are people still buying apps and computers?

My last point is that the assertion of Apple "stubbornly refusing to see the flaws.." That's interesting, because unless one works for Apple at a level high enough to be involved in the conversation, that suggestion is merely conjecture. That's right up there with the pundits being disappointed that iWatch has been delayed, despite having no proof or any acknowledgment from Apple that even such a product exists.

There's an easy solution to not having to deal with Apple's "inefficiencies" -- don't deal with Apple and go make your money with all of the people paying money for Android apps. Or, respond to one of the hundreds of job listings at Apple and do something about it.

Given that iOS users worldwide are less than 1/3 of Android users, ignoring Gingerbread would still leave you with roughly double the userbase...

I completely agree with all your other points though. :)

Why did you make an android rant on a thread about Apple's (obviously) hacked together website?

if you don't like android, that's fine, but it's a total digression from the thread.

Oh sorry I just meant, from a developer's perspective, Apple's site is very "hands on". An 80s and 90s way of looking at software development that requires more setup and boilerplate than today. To me, they are passing the buck to developers to just "work it out".

I realize that Android is even worse (I wouldn't be able to test on the hundreds of devices it runs on). I'm hard on Apple because they have billions of dollars. Two policies that would fix their site for me:

* Throw provisioning in the wastebasket. They forgot the first rule of security: if you leave it up to the user to learn it, it's insecure. Imagine how easy it would be to steal the private keys from a developer's machine, or from the email they used to send the key to someone on their team. It's fine to let devs sign their binaries. But don't impose that as a requirement. Xcode should automagically jump through whatever hoops are necessary to sign a binary to run on the device you are building for, and also sign it when you upload it to the app store (with credentials it receives from iTunes Connect using your username and password). To me, there is no excuse for the way it runs now. I understand that they rushed it through to get the iPhone released to the public, and that they perceive their current policy as more secure. But they are wrong. It's just more work.

* If they are going to deprecate something, don't get rid of the original page. This is web design 101 and I just don't understand how it keeps happening.

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