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by ChuckNorris89 1133 days ago
Jobs made it clear in the 1997 WWDC speech[1] that Apple's priority is never the developers, but solely the customer experience and the final product, and if programing languages, frameworks or developers will be casualties along the way, then so be it. His words, not mine.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o
3 comments
amelius 1133 days ago
Without developers there would be no customer experience. But developers keep prostituting themselves and become the victims that you mention.
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ChuckNorris89 1133 days ago
I didn't mention this, Jobs is the one who called it way back when.
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okamiueru 1133 days ago
I'm not sure those two are incongruent. Surely, the customer experience and final product includes software written for the platform? And, if developers make apple development an afterthought, or more poorly tested because CI/CD is tedious and cumbersome... how does Apple benefit? Of course, this is a comment on the what seems to be lack of insight on the comment made by Jobs, and not your comment. Thanks for sharing that. It does give some insight into the state where developers seem to be treated as second class citizens, even though they rely on their work.

In any case, Apple sure has convinced the masses, and can rarely do no wrong. So, I suppose I'll just keep yelling at the clouds.

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yreg 1133 days ago
Yes, but it's unclear how having a proper documentation detracts from customer experience or the final product.
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ChuckNorris89 1133 days ago
It's not that it detracts from the customer UX, it's simply that they don't care about the developers.

They know developers will walk on glass for the privilege of accessing a large high value consumer market.

It's exactly what Jobs said and it paid off for them as you can see in Apple's current valuation. Why is that still unclear to you?

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yreg 1132 days ago
This makes sense in a company with limited. Apple can obviously both care about customer UX and have a good development documentation, have a good public bug tracker, pay out bug bounties, etc.

If they hire 20 people for this and give them a few offices in their precious mothership, it won't affect customer UX in the slightest. They may continue to give it the top-most priority, which is the right choice to make.

That's why it's unclear to me. Apple's valuation is a poor argument. It could have been even higher, since there are areas where Apple is failing precisely thanks to poor developer relations. E.g. serious gaming on Macs/Apple TV, even though the hardware is amazing.

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ChuckNorris89 1132 days ago
Why are you asking me? Why not ask Apple directly?

Their valuation and product success is poof that they're on the right track as a company. The fact that you think their track should be different just to make you happy is irrelevant to them and is exactly what Jobs answered in 1997 to that irate developer: The consumer product matters more than pleasing devs which are niche and picky group of people that are hard to please anyway and not really relevant as their consumer target.

I'm gonna have to stop the conversation here since we're going around in circles at this point.

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yreg 1132 days ago
Overall financial results are no proof that making a bad documentation was the right decision. I don't even believe it's an intentional decision, probably just carelessness.

>Why are you asking me? Why not ask Apple directly?

Not sure what's this supposed to mean, you are the one who decided to reply.

>The consumer product matters more than pleasing devs

This is obviously a false dilemma which I already pointed out. I never ever said that pleasing the devs should be prioritized over the consumers.

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