[BoorishBears]

As a user of macOS, why don't you put the onus on Apple to not artificially limit what developers can offer you without it breaking on upgrades and migrations?

Some of the private APIs being used have been stable for generations and are clear improvements in one way or another over the publicly available APIs (like CAContext stuff). I mean a modern OS is not like a library you stick up on NPM and hope no one tries to use internal methods that you'll end up having to support. There are so many desperate teams working on OSX and the applications from Apple that use these APIs, it's not like backwards compatibility, documentation, and most of the issues public APIs face aren't already an issue that has to be tackled.

Apple uses these APIs to make features no one can fairly compete with, which is detrimental to you, as a user, and to external developers. Imagine if any app could use APIs like the ones that Apple Music uses to have tight integration with Siri, or that Apple Maps uses to show on your lockscreen.

[saagarjha]

> There are so many desperate teams working on OSX and the applications from Apple that use these APIs, it's not like backwards compatibility, documentation, and most of the issues public APIs face aren't already an issue that has to be tackled.

When push comes to shove, Apple can tell those teams to rewrite their code. It can't do that to the authors of, say, Firefox.

[BoorishBears]

What are you talking about?

They literally do it regularly, public APIs get deprecated then removed and consumers have to rewrite their code.

This article is literally about Apple making 3rd parties rewrite their code just to access the app store.

And before you or someone else points out "Firefox is directly distributed", I say: Exactly. So they can use the internal APIs as they please, then Apple can remove then as they please and break Firrfox and... make Firefox rewrite their code.

Apple is not Microsoft. Apple does not work towards not breaking existing software, they actively break it with each macOS and iOS release, sometimes not even releasing the tools needed to fix them before general releases

Making an internal API people are already using public literally does nothing but optionally allow Apple to give a heads up about deprecation. Apple could literally slap "public" on every internal API, break them every release, and the result would be no different than the current status quo because of the overarching rule of App Store admissions... your app has to work, regardless of if an "internal" or "public" API is changed.

Honestly for most developers that wouldn't seem to different from the current situation: see iOS 13 where basic UILabel stuff was breaking.

And again, apps that don't use the App Store already use internal APIs and can already break all the time.

[scarface74]

Apple rarely removes public APIs without any deprecation warning that appears when you compile your app at least one version ahead of time.

[BoorishBears]

Apple often straight up breaks the implementations of public APIs leaving developers scrambling to fix them. See modals in iOS 13, or title bar styling.

I work at a development agency and on both macOS and iOS every release is a race to figure out which breaking changes have been sprung by Apple (including crashes caused by silent changes in behavior of existing APIs, people have had apps rejected for breaking on pre-general release OS versions when we didn't even have the tools to test them yet)

[scarface74]

There is a difference between breaking a public API which is a defect and that’s done unintentionally - that happens with every operating system and framework - and depending on private methods to behave appropriately.

Decades ago, when Apple introduced 68040 Macs, a lot of programs broke because they were writing self modifying code and that didn’t work with the 68040 cache. Whose fault was that Apple’s or the developers?

[BoorishBears]

It is not a defect. It is literally intentionally broken! Do you actually know this space?

The modal example, it's to support new design language Apple is pushing, straight up breaks modals designed a certain (valid) way.

Catalina removed XML exports used by music apps. There was no deprecation warning.

Apple's recommended fix? Don't update if you need one of those apps.

These are not defects, they are literally breaking changes intentionally made with no warning.

I don't understand why all of you seem to be operating underthe assumption apps using "public APIs" just work with each OS update. It just doesn't work like that. They break and crash not due to defects but due to intentional changes

[piva00]

Just like `sun.misc.Unsafe` was around for ages until it wasn't. [0]

[0] https://blog.dripstat.com/removal-of-sun-misc-unsafe-a-disas...

[BoorishBears]

I fail to see how this is anything but the perfect case for allowing internal API usage.

There was no other way to do what Unsafe did, so people used it for years.

A lot of people used it to do useful things in Java. So much stuff that this article is saying it literally became indispensable for much of what Java is used for. The ecosystem was better for it.

Sun says we want to remove it.

So Sun can provide alternatives that do the same job, or find that it generates so much value that it shouldn't be removed, or remove it and leave people literally exactly where they'd be if it never existed if there's no other way to do what it does. People would gnash their teeth, but the message sent is "Java was never the right tool for the job so we don't want you as a user."

And the article rightly points out, Sun was removing it for the sake of removing it. Having a bad engineering structure where that handwavy rant about Unsafe can justify removing a useful feature has nothing to do with internal vs public APIs.

[piva00]

The usage of Unsafe was never encouraged, it is a problem that Sun never provided a public API with similar features but relying on a private API is what caused the issue of breaking changes in the future, something that every Java developer was well aware that could happen.

Yes, I agree that the problem was that Sun didn't provide a public API for it, at the same time developers breaking the contract (instead of pushing for it to be moved to a `java.` namespace) shouldn't be excused and embraced, it causes bigger issues to the overall design of the platform when then you have to be maintaining an API for the sake of usage, the same cruft that Win32 suffers for its whole existence, and which made developing on Win32 a pain in the ass for a lot of people, for the sake of not breaking some twisted way that a major application used it.