Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

Obviously I'd never be able to give up OSX for work purposes. Pretty much every piece of software I use is tied to OSX only.

For Professionals, (especially software developers), I don't think so. OS X is still very superior to Windows. And the apps on OS X makes it worthwhile.

If you want your Unix toolchains for development, you could still have them. The Surface Pro is powerful enough to run Linux in Vagrant or another virtualization engine. So you could just run a virtual dev environment. Virtual environments are sometimes better anyway, since you can replicate your operational infrastructure.

Windows 10 is looking good. If it gets really, really good they might close the gap with Apple for professional users. Their glastnost/perestroika trend of opening up and embracing the dev community isn't hurting their reputation either. I really think Satya Nadella is turning the company around.

The general public really isn't using Office 365 or Surface 3 though.

I recently started using the Windows Chocolately package manager, strange name, but works great and makes setting up a new machine and maintaining utilities much more simple.

Really? I'd think this would make the remaining things matter more. Things like:

- International text input: in OS X, out of the box, é is opt+e, e (or the now even easier: hold down e and choose é from the menu). In Windows, é is alt+0233 or something, or change your keyboard layout and relearn how to type apostrophes. Everything else related to international text input is also much nicer in OS X.

- Trackpad quality: I've yet to find a trackpad as nice as the ones that come on Mac laptops

- emacs keybindings in every text box! Anyone? ...Anyone? Maybe it's just me.

o_O

Was the whole post in a sarcastic tone, or just this part? Serious question.

Updating has previously killed my dedicated graphics card, which turned out to be a driver issue. With Intel providing 2 nearly identical drivers one of which kills it.

A while ago the fingerprint reader just stopped working after a restart. After a full hour of debugging and restarting I gave up. The next day I figured I'd try one of my debugging steps again and it started working again.

On my Mac, the worst that ever happened was a corrupted HDD. Booted into recovery, used disk utility to find and fix the problem and never had issues again.

Also, dat touchpad, nothing competes...

Apple insist on charging a premium. In addition they prefer to play the above median range of the market. Apart from first-to-market "freebies" they don't play for dominant market share. They insist on that premium, at the expense of market share and other trade-offs.

They don't play for check box ticking. They don't adjust to appeal to mobile service companies, IT purchasing departments or other buyers that make decisions about what other people will use. IE, it's not corporate sales departments dictating strategy according based on short term sales.

In order to get their premium they make stuff appealing enough to a subset of people that they are willing to spend their own money, pay that premium and get the thing that they decided they want for themselves. To make a stretched, contrived and over-complimentary analogy.. It's like a politician who wants to convince the voting public to join him in his position vs a politician that checks the polls to find out what his positions are.

Like I said, I don't have that much loyalty to Apple. I don't buy iphones because androids @ half the price are pretty good. I'd be interested if Apple puts out a laptop with a sub €500 price, but I'm not cranky if they don't have one. When they do happen to have a product that I buy for whatever reason, I'm usually on the fence mostly because of price but fairly well impressed once if I buy it.

But….I suspect the €1000+ laptop market is going to keep shrinking, and it's getting harder to justify buying a macbook. I still expect to get years out of the one I have, but I wouldn't be surprised if I opt for a €200 something when the time comes. Unless… Apple happens to be making something I'm willing to pay extra for at the time.

Recently I challenged myself to learn more about USB, HID devices and kernel development, so I partially reverse engineered and wrote a driver for the Xbox One controller. This is great and all, but it needs to be signed for people to use it without lowering a level of defense. Turns out you don't just need to be an Apple Developer, you also need to make a special request and regenerate your certificate, which needs to have a special extension, else it'll be rejected by the kernel signing system. Not the least worried I pony up 99€ (not a dev), submit a request, and an automated mail tells me I'll have a reply under 7-10 business days. So I wait 2 months, and, slightly worried since I have no reply yet, I submit again. That was 13 days ago[0].

I used to think that GateKeeper was great technology and that things will be okay. Now I have doubts: does Apple really care about its developers? How long before the kext-dev-mode boot arg disappears and kernel space becomes inaccessible to mortals?

[0]: https://github.com/lloeki/xbox_one_controller/issues/2

Same would apply to most modern programming stacks that come with batteries.

Given that I used to like Windows, before getting into the UNIX world. As it was huge improvement over plain *-DOS for someone with Amiga envy.

Going back wasn't a big deal specially given the Windows office requirements.

I enjoy playing with Macs since the LC days at the university, but always was put off by the hardware combination that was given at their price range.

For me the GPU/CPU combo is quite important.

Just have a look at the enormous amount of open research available at http://research.microsoft.com and try to find the equivalent of Apple. That tells me enough.

To keep this on the rails, I have to wonder exactly how much Apple has paid out to developers on the iOS platform vs Microsoft on their mobile platform. The very first reason the author of the linked article cited for his decision to pull out was competition, which combined with having the largest payouts by a large margin speaks to the health of the platform imho. Native vs. web apps has been debated endlessly, but the doomsday scenario for Apple's approach has which has been trumpeted for many years now has conclusively not come to pass. I suppose if you extend the time horizon out to some Nth degree that may change, but what has Apple been doing in the meantime? Making a ton of money and paying a ton of money to developers.

Sorry, I guess my English is bad. I do not understand this sentence. Could you explain?

It's not only iOS, it's exactly the same thing on Android. Some companies also tried it on Vita and PS3 with games like Rainbow Moon and Destiny of Spirits, but ultimately failed. Interestingly i've also been able to get people to completely drop free-to-pay games by getting them other hardware like PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS.

So basically the only platforms where this happens are the two primary cellphone platforms.

The infrastructure apple provides however forces demos to live in the same category as microtransaction games, and as a result, the best games either get lost in the sea of free stuff, or completely forgo a demo and just list in the paid section. Quality content doesn't stand a chance.

I don't play Clash of Clans or Game of War but I do play Boom Beach from Supercell and I can tell you with zero spent in over a year its far and away better than any other mobile game I've seen and I've bought almost every 4.5 star or better Toucharcade game for iOS.

I was hoping that iOS could become a premium platform for games, with titles like Broken sword, The orient express and others. There are a few gems here and there, but most of it is IAP-infested, pay to win. Even if I could in theory play those few good games, I've decided to give up on the iPad, as ultimately those companies won't be able to support themselves and I expect fewer and fewer quality games.

It's an old-school 2D party-based rpg, it looks dated and they recycle the engine year after year to release more games, as their loyal fanbase is more interested in the new storylines and quests than they are in gameplay updates.

I love spiderweb games, but you could spend millions marketing them and they would still be niche, I don't think the discovery issue is the only challenge here; casual management games are the Call of Duty of mobile gaming.

All of the bullshit f2p apps out there generate incredible revenue for Apple. Clash of clans alone generates 1M/day. That's 300k/day Apple gets for doing nothing.

Apple would have to give up that free cash.... Not happenimg.

I think the closest we've seen to curated lists is the "Indie Spotlight" that Apple has done for the past few months, where they feature an indie dev and list that dev's own games and the dev's favorite games to play. But this list refreshes every month, isn't archived, and seems to be sporadically featured on the main tab of the App Store.

If Apple were to open that ability to a select few approved groups (like Touch Arcade), that would be a huge step forward for Apple, and it would still be nowhere near what Valve has done with Steam's curated lists.

In Windows game development you've have a long history of many ways to distribute your wares, with different pros and cons. Not so much for Androids or iOS. Note that similar complaints have been levelled at Steam, which is the closest thing to the iOS model.

Besides, if you've ever read his blog, you know hes been self ridiculing his own marketing skills for over a decade, and has a charming way of not caring.

5000apps added every day yet no way for developers to build meaningful relationships with their customers or creating trials make it a very irrational platform to be on.

Its nothing like how Google deals with popularity and quality. It's a huge problem Apple will have to solve. On the mac app store they completely given up.

I'll make the explicit argument: iOS games are at the decline point of the hype cycle. Irrational amounts of effort have been expended on developing iOS games, both by individual developers bamboozled by a few success stories stories and hoping to strike it rich, and venture investors bamboozled by a few success stories and hoping to strike it rich. This has happened on other platforms - remember the great videogame crash? - perhaps not on windows due to some peculiarities (games there are often ports of successful console games that wouldn't cover their costs on windows alone).

> The only other way to interpret this that I can think of is "it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify a >$5 price for a game", but I haven't seen any sign of that being true. iOS has had a "race to the bottom" mentality for prices since the app store first opened.

Maybe, but the number of developers has kept going up. Imagine 5 people are willing to spend $500 developing a game that would have made $1000 a year ago. Sounds smart, right? But because there's 5 of them their games make $200 each and they each lose $300.

> There's always been a ton of free or $0.99 games, and a relatively low number of pricer-but-higher-quality games. I don't think this has changed in years, with perhaps the only real difference being that game developers are becoming increasingly sophisticated about how they apply F2P techniques.

I think maybe the changes have crept up on you. I'm playing an F2P game at the moment for the first time in a couple of years and the depth of the content and polish is staggering, unbelievably high production values.

It's about developing games for the iPad.

Not iPhone.

And making the assumption that they are the same ignore realities even Apple is aware of. One could very easily find value is developing for iPhone and not iPad. And clearly, developing for iPad alone wasn't worth it.

But isn't that the crux of it? If you are charging $5 per game and you spend $100k developing then you simplistically need 30k installs just to break even. When the app store was small and you had a good chance of being the only app in your category that was not hard to achieve. When you are just 1 of 100 other apps in your same category it is 100 times harder to achieve. If you could charge $20 or $50 which was historically how software was priced then you could tolerate 4x - 10x less installs, but the app store culture has been permanently set now such that it will not tolerate that. 99c apps got Apple off to a great start, but it has locked in a situation where only the largest (or most sophisticated) developers that can reliably get to the top of the charts can stay afloat.

I see this as, first you have the stuff that's top ranking on the app store which is mostly f2p optimization problems. But hardcore gamers should be able to spread the word about an actual good ipad game, right? Or is the notion of an ipad game itself not hardcore enougH?

There are a few reports there of games on Unreal Engine 3 having graphical glitches and performance issues under 8.3. It looks like Unreal Engine 3 is not getting updates anymore[0], so it's possible that UE3 users are stuck. (I don't know if Spiderweb use UE3).

[0] https://www.unrealengine.com/previous-versions

http://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/21507-av...

https://twitter.com/spiderwebsoft/status/588809965499850752

The tweet states "The deprecation of UIApplication and UIViewController."

I don't get it.

If you jailbreak device to be able to run unsigned code, of course this restriction goes away and you can use whatever app store you want... like Cydia, for instance.

This doesn't diminish your overall point, but a little side note - Apple Watch has no browser, and it'll never have one.

On the contrary. Part of the problem is Apple's backward compatibility, or relative lack thereof.

Apple's API stability is pure cowboy. I don't think we should pretend otherwise, just because we like their products.

Anyway, so Apple breaks your app. It's possible you don't notice this because you don't test every feature of every app you've created for every new iOS version on the day it comes out. So within a couple weeks, most of your clients are asking you why your app doesn't work and you have to scramble to replicate the problem and then someone how fix it, sometimes having to rewrite a core part of your app. This happens over and over and it's tiring, costs your company money, makes you look bad to your clients and is very demoralizing. This is no one's fault but Apple's.

And that's a software platform that has to run on a bunch of different hardware.

Also, your Xbox 360 games will all still work on your Xbox 360, as long as you have the hardware around. AFAIK all the Xbox 360 software updates never broke any Xbox 360 game.

Has this held Windows back? Yes, a bit. But I for one appreciate that I don't have to buy all new software every year for it.

"Entitled" isn't really the word I would use there. It's not like developers throughout history have forced poor platform vendors to provide backwards compatibility at gunpoint. It's that most platform developers have provided backwards compatibility because doing so helps them attract developers. This has been true literally for fifty years -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360 for the first platform vendor to figure it out. Backwards compatibility is part of the work you do to convince people to use your platform over the alternatives. Omitting it can make developing your platform easier, but that ease comes at the cost of forcing you to work harder to convince people to get on board.

Apple's within their rights to decide they don't need to work hard to attract developers anymore, of course, but developers are every bit as much within their rights to decide to take their products elsewhere.

Whether it's smart business for Apple to decide they don't need to work hard to attract developers is another matter, of course. History suggests that is an attitude that eventually comes back to bite you. (Ask anyone at Microsoft, they can tell you alllllll about it.)

> Why do developers feel entitled to hardware devices that will always work with legacy code?

First, I'm not sure where you are getting that sentiment from. They simply said they aren't going to support iOS devices, and listed why. They didn't complain Apple was doing something wrong.

Second, how is this in any way related to the hardware? An OS software revision caused the latest problem for them.

Which is fair enough. Still a shame though given how highly regarded the Spiderweb games are.

Or decide life's too short for this shit and make your money doing something more fun.

Or:

Why do hardware companies feel so entitled to force developers to change working things for free?

Because that's how the world outside Apple bubble works. You can still run older Windows software, you can still run older Linux software, you can still run older Android software.

Not forcing people to pay for new electronics (especially when it can represents their several months of earnings) just to keep their existing software running and services working is a GOOD thing.

No, you're supposed to collectively bitch, moan, and whine, and if they still don't listen, you leave, taking as many people with you as possible.

Yours is the wrong attitude. We can do so much better. Developers shouldn't gather around platforms that are constantly shifting...

Seems they've gotten pretty good reviews from critics and fans alike. (I personally enjoyed Avadon, which came with one of the Humble Android Bundles.)