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This book always brings back good memories for me.

If you are interested in diving deeper into _why's work you can find a comprehensive catalogue of his public works here https://viewsourcecode.org/why/.

I have no desire to constrain user choice. I do think there is value to users in putting some constraints on app developers. If you can accomplish that without also constraining user choice then that is the ideal outcome in my mind.

Honestly not that many that I can think of. XCloud is a notable exception and I hope Apple changes their rules on game streaming services. I think many of the App Store rules have a benefit to end users but the “no game streaming services” rule seems like a loss for everyone involved.

I’m 100% for Apple being pressured to have lower fees but less stoked about Apple being pressured to allow any payment processor. The root of my concern, I think, is that what is good for developers is not always what is good for users and alternative app stores will compete by doing what is good for developers at the expense of users.

> If you don't want to install a third-party app store, then don't

I've been seeing this argument a lot and it makes the assumption that allowing alternative app stores has no impact on people who choose not to use them. I don't think this is true.

An app developer may decide to only list their app on an alternative store because they pay lower fees and they can handle payments themselves. As a user you now need to choose between not using the app or giving your credit card information to the app developer you may not trust.

If you get value out of the current App Store rules, like the person you replied to, then there is absolutely a cost to allowing alternative stores.

I didn't consider that angle. Although to me that is almost a separate issue. Even If Apple allowed separate App Stores I suspect they would still find a way to prevent access to private APIs.

Yeah that is fair. That assumes that the developer passes the cost on to the user and the alternative app stores take 0-10%.

Here is my fear. I like most, not all, of the restrictions the App Store puts on apps. If there were alternative app stores developers might only provide their apps on those stores that don't provide the same user protections I value. This is why I would prefer Apple to resolve this without allowing other app stores. I think this could be done by adjusting their rules and reducing the amount they take.

I'm curious as to why as a user you want alternative app stores? I understand as a developer why you would but it is less obvious to me how it would improve the experience for users.

The realization I’ve had after scaling a dev org from a single team to 10+ is that you don’t need microservices to achieve any of that.

> When you have 10 teams working on 1 mono-service, who is responsible for which parts of the DB schema?

You can still develop interfaces between teams without microservices. There are a number of ways to do this but the simplest is just a folder structure that reflects the boundaries and enforce them by convention. If the model/repository/[your favourite DB abstraction] lives in `context1/user` you can’t access it from `context2/account` without going through `context1/publicInterface`.

It’s surprisingly easy, depending on your language, to write tools to automatically verify boundary violations if you need to.

This still allows you to solve all of the problems you listed .

Why do you need Microservices to create boundaries in your code?

You trade the ability for teams to deploy independently for the ability to be able to make breaking changes. This is a good trade off in my experience and is better for team velocity.

The approach we have taken is to keep a single codebase and deploy. We have applied the ideas from DDD to segment the code into contexts and assign ownership of each of those contexts to a team. This allows us to get some of the benefits of Microservices without losing all the benefits of a monolith. Having these boundaries in place also gives us the flexibility to move to Microservices if and when we decide we need to.

I can’t wrap my head around this kind of hate towards the Apple/Google contact tracing. If Apple or Google wanted to track your location they would just do it using the GPS on your phone. Short of getting rid of your phone there would be nothing you could do to stop it. If they wanted to allow specific apps to track your location they would just give those apps access to your location in the background.

It seems like the governments, that you seem to trust, would much rather take that much simpler approach. Instead we have these two companies building a system that is more restrictive than location services in every way.

If you own a phone you are already trusting Apple, Google, or both. Let’s not pretend otherwise. The contact tracing system just means you don’t also need to trust the government or what ever entity is building contact tracing apps.

Some very large companies are investing heavily in making the web the go-to platform for app developers. Google being the most obvious.

Web push notifications are usually not an essential part of web app experiences and I agree they have done more harm than good so far. Some of these features enable types of apps that were just not possible on the web before. Things like 3D games where WebGL/WebGPU would be essential, text editors where they don't function without access to the file system, or a browser based video chat app that uses WebRTC.

As these features become available in most browsers their adoption will increase and any browser that doesn't support them will not be able to access web apps or pages that depend on them.

I can understand why it might seem that way but it is actually evolving very quickly. Probably faster than any other time in history. There are a few things driving this evolution but I think the most important one is a desire to make the web a competitive platform for most types of software. This means lower level APIs, deeper integration with OS, and yes a large focus on performance. 3D graphics, offline support, push notifications, file system access, animation, Bluetooth, and more are all recent areas of focus for browsers.

Web browsers really are becoming similar to operating systems in scope.

As a professional front-end engineer I thank you. The old system was a constant pain point for me. Every time I started a new Phoenix project I agonized over how to integrate the front-end workflow I liked with Phoenix. This will be a big productivity win for me.

To my knowledge they can only execute code in response to a network event. Usually this means you need to take some action to trigger an outgoing network request, like returning to the site that installed the service worker. Code execution can also be triggered by incoming network events such as push notifications but these would require you to have allowed push notifications from that site.

This isn’t about what’s best for Apple it’s about what is best for users. The way this was disclosed was bad for users.

Why not? The end goal is protecting users. If disclosing a vulnerability before a company has a chance to fix it puts more users at risk than waiting how is that not irresponsible?

Who claimed Apple invented this?

Not sure what you consider "core hardware" but iPads and iPhones have the best cpus/gpus, among the best (if not the best) displays, and among the best (if not the best) cameras.

I also would not say that "great software" does not cost that much. It costs Apple billions of dollars annually to create that software.

This has also bothered me for a long time but they've actually been doing a much better job of this over the last couple of years. I had never met a member of the Safari team either until this year where I got to chat with one, at Google's Chrome Dev Summit no less.

They also revamped the webkit.org site and started releasing developer previews of Safari every two weeks.

They still have long way to go in this area but they seem to be moving in the right direction so I'm hopeful.