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by rTX5CMRXIfFG 619 days ago
It’s highly unlikely for Apple to choke on hardware given their cash.

And as someone who’s done native for both, Android’s native SDK is a mess that even Android devs actually hate it.

Meanwhile, iOS’ SDK is incredibly exhaustive and coherent. I don’t know what your basis is for “better designed software”, but being able to fork a desktop OS from 20 years prior, make it into a mobile OS, then to a tablet OS, then to a watch and a headset OS, and then have billions of users on it all and make a trillion-dollar company out of it⸺does that not sound like good engineering to you? All while the competition can hardly build anything that actually lasts.

4 comments

> being able to fork a desktop OS from 20 years prior, make it into a mobile OS, then to a tablet OS, then to a watch and a headset OS, and then have billions of users on it all and make a trillion-dollar company out of it⸺does that not sound like good engineering to you?

Microsoft and Google basically did the same thing, and in neither case it's really a testament to how "good" their respective software is engineered. If the amount of driver cruft on MacOS is anything to go by, the engineering underneath iOS and WatchOS is probably a fucking nightmare in most respects.

People round here hate this, but it's true.

I used to be "the Android guy" at a big games publisher. In my time the billing component had to be rewritten three times solely because of Google changes. The Apple one was written once and left alone.

We can't even discuss why those Google changes happened because doing so would get you shot, or worse.

The tech direction that was going on at Apple was enormously better than other companies. It does feel like they've gone off the rails a bit, but things like Swift are underappreciated entirely because they're so successful, just with the wrong sort of developer.

> It’s highly unlikely for Apple to choke on hardware given their cash.

It just means that it will take a while, like Intel, or what is happening with search and Google.

Apple is, apparently, good at marketing