I saw an interesting video on YouTube. Mark Spoonauer, the editor from Tom’s Guide, was talking about things to be wary of if ordering the iPhone Duo. He ended the video by saying that he’s definitely going to buy one himself with his own money, but that he really wants to see applications that are customized for this new device on launch.
I had also recently listened to a podcast with Marco Arment, the developer of the popular podcast player Overcast, where he was ranting at some length about how the developer tools for this device weren’t available at launch, and there is no way he was going to be able to get his application updated by the time the device is actually in people’s hands. He knew he was going to get one-star reviews from people complaining that Overcast wasn’t updated for the iPhone Duo.
I was thinking he’s not alone, and Spoonauer is setting himself up for failure because most applications aren’t going to support the iPhone Duo out of the gate. That’s really because of a bunch of decisions that Apple made.
First off, they decided to make the iPhone Duo a completely unique software experience rather than having it just be iOS when it’s closed and iPadOS when it’s open. Because it’s really neither, developers have a ton of work to do to get their devices ready for this new mullet hardware that has different touch targets and different margins than any other Apple platform.
Compounding the problem, Apple didn’t have their developer tools ready when the device launched, so now developers have to do all this extra work in even more compressed time. Marco is right. Apps aren’t going to be ready on time, developers are going to get one-star reviews, and it’s entirely Apple’s fault.
I bet Apple does have software engineers that they are loaning out to big developers, so Meta, Microsoft, Google, Spotify, they will probably have their applications updated day one. But if you listen to your podcasts in Overcast instead of Spotify, then you’re not going to have a customized user experience when this comes out. But this kind of favoritism goes way deeper than this, and it’s emblematic of how Apple has always treated developers.
The original iPhone was not actually a smartphone; it was a very sophisticated feature phone because only Apple was allowed to write applications for it. Everyone else had to use what Steve Jobs called the “sweet solution” of web apps—what we would today call PWAs—where you have a website running in its own window, essentially pretending to be an application and having limited local resources, largely sandboxed from the rest of the system. And that’s the way Steve wanted it. He wanted Apple to be the only company that could actually write native software for the iPhone. Now, he had to relent on that, and they unveiled the App Store with the very next iteration of the iPhone, the iPhone 3G. But if this sounds like third-party developers are an inconvenience that Apple reluctantly tolerates—no matter what they tell people at WWDC—that’s because third-party development literally began as an inconvenience that Steve Jobs reluctantly tolerated.
But tolerated or not, third-party developers have never been on equal footing with Apple. Apple allows their own apps to use private APIs that third-party developers don’t have access to, and Apple applications will always have better system integration and access to high-end features that third-party devs will never be able to match.
That’s by design.
Apple needs third-party developers because they make the platform more valuable, but they have never treated developers as partners. It treats them as expendable suppliers, to be commoditized, undermined and eventually replaced by Apple itself. They do this because once people are using Apple apps, it’s much harder for them to switch platforms. If your notes are in Obsidian, you can switch from an iPhone to an Android without much trouble. If your notes are in Apple Notes, that’s a much bigger lift. The indie developer Apple spotlights in their WWDC keynote this year will be Sherlocked three years from now.
We see that Apple has systematically moved into one software category after another over the last 20 years, taking over as many niches as they possibly can. Why run Day One? You’ve already got Apple Journal. Why run Spotify? You’ve already got Apple Music. Why run Google Docs? You’ve already got Pages. Yeah, I know that’s a laugher, but Apple doesn’t think so. It’s not that they think Pages is competitive, but rather that they have a player in that space, making it just that much harder to opt for something else when all the Apple stuff “works better together.”
Which brings me to my central question: why do developers stick with iOS? Why are they letting Apple oppress them? Why do so many developers develop for Apple first?
Historically the answer has been because that’s where the money is, that at least here in the United States. Apple has much larger market share here so you’ve got more users, and the conventional wisdom was that Apple users actually pay for software and Android users don’t. And 10 years ago when Android phones were much less sophisticated and tended to be considerably cheaper there was some logic to that. If you only spent 50 bucks on your phone you’re probably not spending 20 on software, but Android users spending $2,000 on a foldable phone are a different story. The argument doesn’t hold up anymore. Like the fish man said, “It’s a trap.”
Now, I’m not saying that Google or the Play Store don’t have their own problems. But I think it’s high time, after nearly two decades of, let’s face it, a fairly abusive relationship, for developers to rethink what platform they want to focus on first. Because, I hate to tell you guys, but Apple just isn’t that into you.
