Linked List: June 17, 2020

Wednesday, 17 June 2020

Apple’s Developer App for Mac 

Martin Pilkington on the new Developer app for Mac, ported from iPad using Catalyst:

There are other minor things I could have filed bugs about, but unfortunately I ran out of time. However, this shows just how much Apple has missed. And it is all entirely avoidable if Apple as an organisation took the time to put the care and love into their apps. They’re still capable of doing so. Just look at their iWork apps or their Pro apps. They are still amongst the best apps on any platform.

Catalyst is almost a poster child for this problem. I’m under no illusion of the technical challenges involved, but it has effectively been released in an unfinished state, leaving apps feeling like they don’t fully fit on the platform. Developers can put a lot of time and care into working around a lot of these, but some things can’t be fixed, and every minute they spend fixing flaws in Catalyst is a minute not spent making their apps even better. However, Apple doesn’t even do that with their Catalyst apps.

As things stand right now, Catalyst seems like a framework written by people at Apple who don’t know what makes for a good Mac app, for iOS developers who don’t know what makes for a good Mac app.

No one would be happier than me to see big news on this front next week at WWDC. But man, what a sad statement about Catalyst the Mac Developer app is. It’s not like Catalyst heralds a new style of Mac app — it’s not about an old style vs. new style. It’s just about paying attention to details or not.

Compare and contrast with the new version of the Mac App Store app, the one introduced in 10.14 Mojave and carried through to 10.15 Catalina. There are a lot of things in the current Mac App Store app I don’t particularly like — UI designs that I would broadly describe as iOS-isms. (Because the Mac App Store app exhibits so many iOS-isms, I’ve seen many people assume that it’s a Catalyst app — it is not.) One conspicuous example: in the Updates section, when you click the “More” button to see an app’s complete release notes, they show up in a white pseudo dialog box with no controls at all — no close button, no “Done” button. Just a white box that you dismiss by clicking anywhere in the content area of the main App Store window. That’s not a traditional thing in the Mac UI language. I personally don’t think it’s a good design, in the abstract, for a mouse-driven UI. But: it is clearly and obviously by design. In fact, because this sort of pseudo dialog box/panel is not a standard window, it took extra work on the part of the engineers who made the Mac App Store app to implement it.

Whereas all or nearly all of the issues Pilkington cites in the Mac Developer app aren’t things he dislikes, per se, or things that are designed “the new way” or “the iOS way” — they’re just things that weren’t designed at all. Just accidental behaviors inherited by default from Catalyst. Everything is too small, the layout looks like a complete afterthought if you resize the window to larger than a laptop display, and the accessibility hierarchy is — indisputably — an embarrassment.

ElevationHub 

New $50 add-on for MacBook USB-C power adapters — gives you an SD card reader, USB-A port, and integrated cable management. Clever.

On Avoiding or Embracing Apple’s In-App Purchase Cut 

Jacob Kastrenakes, writing about the Hey/Apple App Store dispute for The Verge:

Apple takes up to a 30-percent cut of revenue on in-app purchases and subscriptions, so developers try to avoid signing up users within their app whenever possible to avoid the steep tax.

I think it’s essential to point out that this is not true — many developers embrace Apple’s in-app purchasing. No dispute about it, a 30 percent cut is high. Even a 15 percent cut (what Apple takes from subscriptions after the first year) is high compared to simple credit card payment processors. But the App Store is more than just a payment processor, and for some developers, Apple’s cut is either happily worth it or at least begrudgingly worth it. One reason some developers embrace it is that they know users like and trust Apple’s in-app purchases — the user experience is excellent.

The issue exemplified by Hey is that there are cross-platform apps/services that don’t want to use Apple’s system, period, full stop. They don’t need to, or don’t want to, or think Apple’s cut is too high, or perhaps their business model literally can’t support giving up 30 percent of revenue — whatever. They’re not trying to collect money from users within their apps by circumventing Apple’s IAP APIs with their own payment processing — they’re simply willing to forgo in-app commerce completely and sign up all their users on their own, outside their app.

Netflix stopped offering in-app subscriptions on iOS in 2018, and Spotify charges extra to make up for the lost revenue.

Netflix and Spotify shouldn’t be lumped together. Yes, both object to the size of Apple’s cut, but Netflix simply decided to forgo signing up users in their iOS app. That’s exactly what Hey wants to do too. Spotify, on the other hand, wants to have it both ways — they want to sign up paying users within their iOS app but they don’t want to pay Apple’s cut. Maybe you think Spotify is right (me, I think they’re hypocrites), but theirs is a very different stance from Netflix and Hey’s.

Dithering: ‘Hey Apple, Cut It Out’ 

Today’s episode of Dithering is — shocker! — about the Hey/Apple App Store dispute. In the minute-long excerpt tweeted here, I mention this quote from Walt Disney, which I think sums the whole problem up: “We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.”

(Dithering is just $5 per month — cheap! — and it’s really easy to sign up for and subscribe to in your favorite podcast player. And if you don’t like it, it’s really easy to cancel. But I bet you won’t cancel — people are really digging the 3×/week 15 minutes/episode format.)