[ScottFree]

This is something I've always wondered and still can't find a good answer to: why are MacOS apps so damned beautiful and plentiful compared to linux and windows apps? Are the official Apple frameworks just that easy and pleasant to work with? I hear devs complain about ObjectiveC all the time, so it can't be their language choice. Or is it another example of Steve Job's reality distortion field, but applied to the entire MacOS application developer community?

[dagw]

why are MacOS apps so damned beautiful and plentiful compared to linux and windows apps?

One is developer culture. Going all the way back to the earliest Macintosh days, Apple has always had detailed guidelines about how the one true way a GUI app should look and feel. And the importance of following those guidelines gets drilled into you from your very first Hello World program. This leads to all apps on macs to look both good and consistent, giving developers a lot of inspiration to draw from when they write their own apps. Windows and Linux simply doesn't have this culture ingrained into its developers. It also helps that Apple really only has one GUI framework at a time that it pours all their effort and focus into while Windows and Linux always have at least 2 or 3 competing frameworks that never get quite the attention they need.

Another might simply be financial incentives. Anecdotally Mac user care more about what their apps look like than Windows and Linux users, thus the financial incentives to put in the effort to add the final polish to your apps is higher, since it probably affects sales much more than it does on Linux and Windows. Also (and equally anecdotally) Apple users seem far more willing to pay for small useful applications from indie developers so more indie developers put more effort into producing small useful and beautiful apps for Mac.

[gervase]

> Apple users seem far more willing to pay for small useful applications from indie developers so more indie developers put more effort into producing small useful and beautiful apps for Mac.

This rings true to me as well, but why is this the case? If we roughly assume that Mac users are 1 order of magnitude fewer than Windows users, they must be >1 OOM more likely to pay for these kinds of apps to generate this impression.

I struggled with this puzzle for quite a while when I switched from Mac to Windows. Utilities are simply not comparable, either in design, functionality, or simple quantity, for a market which is (on paper) both much larger and much older (if you restrict your view to the OS X era).

As an aside, it totally makes sense to me why Linux utilities are numerous and awesome, but have (usually) poor graphic design, because that Bauhaus-esque function over form describes how I prefer to work, too.

[pcr910303]

> This rings true to me as well, but why is this the case?

Because the Apple macOS ecosystem already has an coherent design at the point where I (as a macOS user) would hate to bring another app that breaks the coherence.

Also Apple's official apps are generally much better than the MS ones or Gnome ones (see IE vs Safari) which makes the expectation of users higher.

IMO Apple really made a great, healthy ecosystem around the macOS.

[dagw]

I suspect a lot also has to do with the business opportunities available for developers on the different platforms. First of all, there is a near-limitless number of companies out there looking for Windows desktop developers to work on various inhouse apps.

Secondly, there is a lot more money in the business and specialist app market for Windows. I worked for 3 years at a company developing a Windows application. We charged $5k a year for a license plus a good 50-500 consulting hours to adapt the application to our customers business. That was a solid business targeting a niche market, and there are countless companies like that around in the Windows space. Those opportunities don't really exist for Mac developers. Most people specializing in Windows desktop development end up working on stuff like that if they don't end up at Microsoft/Adobe/Autodesk etc.

If I was to start a company trying to develop desktop applications for Windows there is no doubt I would target business customers willing to pay $1k-10k rather than trying to sell $10-100 to consumers. If I was targeting Mac users I would probably target the $10-100 consumer space.

[pavlov]

> "... why are MacOS apps so damned beautiful and plentiful compared to linux and windows apps?"

While that was the case ten years ago, honestly the macOS app ecosystem is mostly running on fumes at this point. There's few people coming into AppKit development, and iOS developers seem to have an irrational fear of putting any effort into learning the desktop paradigm even though the API is largely the same.

Apple is making half-hearted efforts to fix this problem by introducing two new GUI APIs on the Mac. "Catalyst" is a porting layer that lets you put iPad apps on the Mac desktop. The look'n'feel of these apps is pretty much as clunky as you'd expect. Then there's "SwiftUI" which is a new React-like runtime that spans all Apple platforms. SwiftUI is in its early stages and will take years to catch up with AppKit's functionality.

At this point Mac desktop development is effectively in a limbo: no one wants to start new AppKit projects because Apple is strongly implying that it's deprecated (although they don't seem to know exactly what it's being replaced with). So it's pretty much Electron or Qt on the Mac now, unfortunately. As an AppKit developer since 2002, it breaks my heart a bit.

[favorited]

> honestly the macOS app ecosystem is mostly running on fumes at this point

I don't have data, but there's no way that the Mac developer ecosystem is worse off than it was in the 00s. There's significantly more Mac users now, and there's orders of magnitude more developers with experience developing for Apple platforms.

Maybe most devs won't venture outside of iOS to try Mac development, but 10 years ago the few long-time Mac devs were (by necessity) putting their Mac projects on hold to work on iPhone apps.

> because Apple is strongly implying that it's deprecated

Lots of iOS developers are writing blog posts claiming things like this, but every single Apple app on the Mac is written using AppKit. You can't deprecate the technology behind your entire platform.

Maybe 15 years from now SwiftUI will have replaced AppKit as the dominant way to write UI code on the Mac, but generations of apps will be born and die between now and then.

[pavlov]

> "I don't have data, but there's no way that the Mac developer ecosystem is worse off than it was in the 00s."

I don't have hard data either. But ask any old Mac developer on Twitter whether they're doing better now than ten years ago, and I bet a majority would disagree.

For one thing, the rise of mobile app stores has destroyed the perceived value of software. A $50 app now seems very expensive to most, whereas it was mid-priced back in 2008. Yet the Mac App Store has failed to bring in the mass audience that would compensate for the lower unit prices.

[tonyedgecombe]

That isn’t specific to MacOS though, you can see it happening in the Windows world as well.

[enriquto]

> why are MacOS apps so damned beautiful and plentiful compared to linux and windows apps?

This is entirely subjective. Several of my colleagues use MacOS and I find their interfaces overcrowded and clunky compared to my minimal linux setup. What is "plenty" to some, is "clutter" to others.

[simonh]

You've not seen the Linux desktops of some of the guys in our Unix Ops department. If you're allergic to clutter, you'd have a seizure.

I can't criticize. I paid for every square inch of the screen of my 27" iMac at home, and darn it, I'm going to put something on every last one of them.

[ScottFree]

While I respect your opinion and personal taste, it is not shared by the majority of app users. If it was, linux apps would dominate and webapps wouldn't.

[enriquto]

Sure, taste is not a democratic thing.

[Aaargh20318]

I think it's mainly the macOS widgets that look good, thus making it easy to build a good looking UI out of those components. You can't make a nice looking UI if the very building blocks you have to build that UI are ugly.

[timw4mail]

Good designers like good design. The OS has better design consistency, which good designers like, and Mac users can tend to be pickier about design.

Not sure it has much to do with the developers at all.

[ScottFree]

> Not sure it has much to do with the developers at all.

Harsh but fair. I keep thinking that if we just make good app development easier, we could bring some of those well designed apps back to the native desktop instead of losing them all to the web. The reality, as you pointed out, is that the underlying technology is irrelevant. This is a marketing issue.

[ChickeNES]

> Are the official Apple frameworks just that easy and pleasant to work with? I hear devs complain about ObjectiveC all the time, so it can't be their language choice.

I've found the former to be quite true, though QT comes close. I actually quite like ObjectiveC, but Swift is clearly superior and has had great uptake in the iOS/macOS community.