[qyv]

Why are people so eager to leap from computer OS's (MacOS or even Windows) to these walled gardens like iOS? I can't imagine developing software on iOS, because you know the deployment procedure will be straight to the app store. This ends the ability to create, distribute and install software yourself. Is this really what we want???

[marvinalone]

Because the Bazaar is grating.

Out here in the free world, every time you want to use a library, you have to choose between 12 different options, all suck in one way or another, and you really have no way of making an informed choice. So you pick something by gut feel. Half the time you are wrong, and all of the time you worry that you have made the wrong choice.

But if you buy into Apple's cathedral, they tell you what to use, and you use it. End of story. It's always behind the times, and it won't run outside of Apple's stuff, but it works (for now, at least), it's well documented, and you don't have to spend days finding and comparing solutions. You can get back to writing code, which is the fun part.

Is it good business? Good for the world? Maybe not. But it's certainly attractive.

[Xcodeista]

Yes, it's what most people want. As a developer, I do not miss the days of trying to drive people to my website to find my app. If you were lucky you could get a mention on a well-known website or one of the many download aggregators, but it was hit and miss. The Mac had some very good ones, but with Windows, not one was big enough to be worth your time. It was a nightmare. Getting noticed on the app store is non-trivial, but at least your product is already in the place where users are going to find stuff. It's one less thing to have to worry about.

As a user, I don't miss having to search the general web to find something for my computer, only to be misled by poor results in the search engine, malware download sites, software that would be the perfect solution but doesn't run on my OS, ads everywhere, etc. Now I have one place to go and everything on it works with my system. Sure it's not perfect, and discovery could be improved, but there's no malware that I've ever run into, and everything I actually need is there.

Also, it's a false dichotomy between PC OSes and iOS. Both macOS and Windows have app stores that their users use.

[tonyedgecombe]

at least your product is already in the place where users are going to find stuff

Along with a million other apps.

[snazz]

I would love it if there were an app like Termux for iOS (if there is, and I’ve missed it, please let me know!). On Android, Termux lets you use the local command line in some sort of chroot where you can install packages with apt. If this were made available to iPad users and it integrated well with Xcode (one of the issues with sandboxing), it wouldn’t be very far off from the macOS experience.

[pjmlp]

Yes, because this walled gardens offer us very nice tooling similar to the Xerox PARC days of yore, instead of lego pieces that we need to sort out new every year, while offering sandboxes that actually protect $HOME from random apps.

[moftz]

Because their experience (and probably livelihood) rests with iOS apps. No one is buying an iPad hoping that some day they can write kernel patches on it. If you make your money off an ecosystem, you are going to buy hardware for that ecosystem.