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WWDC was not about developers this year. It was a conference call with shareholders and investors. No bold moves, just several consecutive "this product will no longer suck" and "look at what you can do now, big companies" announcements.

watchOS will work now (it's too slow ATM). tvOS will just be less cumbersome. macOS still lagging behind (I mean, I already have great third party apps that clean my hard drive, but thank you for solving a problem I didn't need fixing). iOS 10 is simply about messages (it's not going to make me ditch Telegram, because it doesn't have an Android client, regardless of how large you make emoticons appear on screen). Apple Music will still suck, especially if you have more than one Apple ID. And Apple Maps will continue to be useless outside of the US.

Where did the bold moves go? Where's the "we're breaking up iTunes into several distinct apps that serve their purposes really well"? (Guess iTunes is too valuable a trademark...) Where is the "we will end the WKView vs UIView vs NSView nonsense"? (You know, OOP is about creating classes, which are abstractions and whose instances deal with the particularities of their environment; a View is a View, regardless of where they live; an instance of a View should care about being on a watch or on a phone, not the developer.) Where is the "we love indie developers and will help you"? They showed off a lot of integration with well established apps, that don't really need to stand out any more. They showed that video of "normal people" who have developed apps, but no one knows about them! And then they changed the AppStore so you can pay to advertise your app, but who has the means to do that? Indie devs are surely on a tight budget, so who's that helping again?

For me, this WWDC was sugar coated with a "we love you developers" BS, but was a business statement to large companies ("see what you can do now Uber, Lyft, WeChat, WhatsApp, Doordash, all the P2P payment apps, ESPN, WSJ and so on?"). It's already a known fact that the bulk of the AppStore revenue goes to the top 1% apps. And what's the point of having tvOS be open to developers if it is very unlikely I'll ever develop anything for it unless I work at CBS?

It's great that they want to make it easier for kids to learn Swift. But there's very little point in that, if those kids' apps aren't going to be used and are simply going to make the "we have 2 million apps on the AppStore" announcement look shinier for shareholders. Without a strong indie community, the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad is just manufacturing workers for large corporations.

And without a strong indie community, things get tougher for indie clients as well. Who will have the money (and therefore the time) to implement all those integrations in order to even dream about competing with heavily funded apps?

Yeah... So thanks, Apple, but no thanks.

Comments
  • 7
    These were literally all my thoughts today while being there. Apple is not what it used to be.
  • 3
    I think Apple is doing what they do: be a multi billion dollar company. It's just that they're doing too much of it now.

    The reason why Windows Phones didn't catch up was because there weren't enough apps! Developers were already burnt out by iOS and Android and there was no capacity left. Android is still in the game because of sheer volume. iOS' only advantage is being iOS. And iOS is made up of us! Not shareholders.

    I think there is a greater then ever opportunity to start advocating for Android-first apps now. They get better ranked on Google searches (if I'm paying for exposure, Google is definitely where you want to put your money on) and Apple is for the big guys now.

    That's definitely going to be my pitch from now on.
  • 2
    You can use iMessage on Android..

    Otherwise; I agree. It was sad
  • 1
    @SithLord You have to use your Mac as a relay, isn't it?
  • 1
    I made similar, albeit much shorter comments and got - 1's :(
  • 1
    @BellAppLab ah okay, Lol! Didn't know
  • 2
    All the noise they are adding to iMessage, with really shit effects and primary school graphics. FFS who seriously wants this shit?
  • 1
    @0xH4lcyon Guess the gif junkies are not into longer rants and are all Apple fanboys/girls.
  • 0
    Dooooh... Everynoone :/
  • 2
    @helloworld I can think of two people who don't: the guys demoing it.
  • 1
    Terrific detailed post. Thanks for sharing. 😀
  • 1
    Nailed it. This was the first time I really felt like Steve Jobs had left the building, and that the company really needed him to create something amazing.
  • 0
    That's a bold opinion, considering it was posted 9 hours before the developer sessions started.
  • 0
    @mudandgears I'm pretty sure it was nine hours after ;)
  • 0
    @BellAppLab What sessions were on Monday? I thought yesterday was just the Keynote, the Platform State of the Union, and the Design Awards.

    All the cool dev stuff came out in the sessions today.
  • 0
    @mudandgears Oh, sorry. You're right. I misread your comment.

    However, in looking at the sessions' descriptions, I still stand by my remarks. With the exception of any content provider being able to publish stuff to the News app, I don't see anything else that addresses the concerns I shared.

    I mean, yeah, a new file system is cool and all, but it is innocuous to what I was talking about.

    And then, there's a large number of sessions that are about things they have presented last year, like Search, Spotlight, NSUserActivity and handoff. And then there is the new SiriKit, MapKit and Messages. And these are all things that can help an app stand out from the crowd, but are secondary to an app's core functionality.

    So I go back to my main argument. Do clients of smaller apps want those features? Of course. Will they have the money to pay for them on top of their apps' core functionality? No.
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