July 2020

You run into those fellas in life and online who will always explain, for any situation, why the big company is right.

If asked, they will discuss their political and economic ideology. That ideology, they’ll explain, is about reality and logic — it isn’t some blanket defense of big companies. No way. It could just as easily defend small businesses and working people.

Except… every single time, without fail, they side with the big company. And then you realize that they’re the overdog lovers. They cling to the big wealthy power and hate the underdogs. It would be nice if they’d just say so.

Ed Hardy, writes, in Congress, keep your mitts off the App Store. It’s fine. [Opinion]:

When Apple CEO Tim Cook takes questions from Congress on Wednesday, he’ll surely get an earful of software developers’ complaints about how the App Store operates. Chief among the criticisms will likely be the fact that Apple charges a percentage of revenue earned from in-app sales.

It’s not just a percentage of revenue from in-app purchases. It’s percentage of every paid upfront app, too. And the percentage is 30% for most cases.

Hardy continues:

There’s not a bit of justification for any of these highly publicized complaints. They come from companies that want to have their cake and eat it, too.

There’s plenty of justification. If you offer a Mac app outside of the Mac App Store, you can expect to pay about 5% to your payment processor. This option is not permitted for people writing iPhone and iPad apps.

It’s incredibly dismissive to accuse companies of wanting to “have their cake and eat it, too.” What companies want is to be able to pay their people and keep making the things they think are cool or good.

The next section of Hardy’s piece is called “The App Store does business like a grocery store.” But…

The App Store does not do business like a grocery store

Hardy writes:

…take a trip to your local grocery store. Suppose it’s a Kroger. You’ll find store brands — products made by Kroger — on the shelves next to products made by outside companies, like Procter & Gamble. I hope you’re not surprised that if you buy a Procter & Gamble product, Kroger takes a share of the revenue.

That’s exactly what Apple does with the App Store.

If I make and distribute toothpaste, I can offer the exact same product via Kroger, Safeway, and Albertson’s — and I could sell it from my own website and via Amazon.

That’s a lot of choices I have for selling my product.

But if I write an iOS app, I can sell it via the App Store and through no other method.

This is not at all how grocery stores work.

Hardy continues:

To be fair, it’s not just Spotify who’s complaining. The CEO of Epic Games (maker of Fortnite) whined about the App Store just last week. And the developers of premium email app Hey engaged in a very public spat with Apple in June, accusing Cupertino of acting like “gangsters.” But none of these companies’ criticisms hold up.

For whatever reason, developers are often accused of being whiny. Oh, those whiny developers who like to have their cake and eat it too. How dare they complain about Apple policies. Betcha I’m being a whiny developer right now.

No. Again: developers want to make great apps and be able to continue making great apps.

Hardy:

To demonstrate why, let’s continue with the grocery store analogy. Kroger built its store into a successful business. But suppose the companies who make the products sold in that store wanted to keep using it, without sharing any of the revenue with Kroger. That would be completely unfair. Kroger is paying upkeep on the store, but these other companies don’t want to contribute.

We’ve demonstrated that it’s not like a grocery store.

But let’s talk about fair share.

Apple — certainly among the wealthiest of companies in human history — is taking 30% of developers’ paychecks in order to show services growth. This is not about upkeep on the store: this is about profit for Apple. And not just profit but a specific category of profit.

And the rules aren’t remotely fair. Facebook — another fabulously wealthy company — certainly profits from its iPhone app. Does it share any of this with Apple? No. Instead, apps from smaller developers (because they are almost all smaller than Facebook) are subsidizing Facebook.

If there’s a fair share to be paid, the largest apps get away without paying it. Instead, companies like Omni subsidize Facebook. Fair?

* * *

The next section is called “Selfish developers want to use the iPhone ecosystem without paying their share.”

This is total bullshit and insulting. (Developers are always whiny and selfish, of course.)

This isn’t about paying a share into some commons run for all of our benefit. Apple isn’t just asking for us to help cover costs.

No.

This is the only game in town for iPhone and iPad developers, and we have no choice but to subsidize apps like Facebook. We have no choice but to contribute to Apple’s services growth.

Hardy:

Of course, the analogy isn’t perfect, because it underplays Apple’s role. It didn’t just build a grocery store — it built the entire town. There would be nowhere for Spotify and the rest to sell their products if the iPhone never existed.

This is kind of the thing with platforms. There would be nowhere for Spotify to sell their iPhone app if there were no such things as iPhones. True.

The major reason these software developers have a business is because Apple makes iPhones that people carry with them everywhere. Without them, there’d be no Spotify. Fortnite would be a PC-only game.

I think the argument here is that, without Apple, the smart phone revolution wouldn’t have happened so quickly. That may be true! But it’s not argument in favor of Apple’s 30% cut.

Hardy:

These companies love to play on the idea that a 30% share of revenue is an egregious price to pay to be on the App Store. However, a recent study found that Apple’s percentage falls in line with other software stores (.pdf). And Procter & Gamble wouldn’t blink to hear that Kroger charges 30% extra for one of its products.

All of the various app stores are charging too much. They all point to Apple as precedent.

* * *

The next section is called “Consumers benefit hugely from the App Store.”

In some ways, sure. It’s also worth remembering that the more money Apple takes from developers, the fewer resources developers have. When developers have to cut costs, they stop updating apps, skimp on customer support, put off hiring a graphic designer, etc. They decide not to make apps at all that they might have made were it easier to be profitable.

Suppose the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee — where Apple CEO Cook will answer questions Wednesday (as will the leaders of Facebook, Amazon and Google) — mistakenly thinks there is some justification for these developers’ complaints. Regulations that forced Apple to change the way the App Store worked would benefit a few big-name software companies, but they would hurt hundreds of millions of Apple users.

We have no way to know that — we don’t know what that regulation would look like or who it would benefit.

I do not want to see Congress regulate app stores. I want Apple to make better choices here — better for Apple, Apple customers, and developers.

But if Congress lowers the cut to 10%, or says that App Stores must allow for side-loading, it’s hard to see how customers would be hurt.

(That said — again, I’d really prefer not to see federal legislation. It shouldn’t be needed.)

Hardy:

True, Apple rules the App Store with an iron fist. While it sometimes acts in opaque and arbitrary ways, firmness is absolutely necessary in a world full of unethical developers who’d happily flood the App Store with crapware designed to steal user information. No one wants that.

Developers: whiny, selfish, and unethical.

Any time I hear about iron fists and the necessity of firmness, in any context, I get pretty nervous. But let’s set that aside.

App Store review is not filtering out apps that steal user information. No. This is done by sandboxing and other technical restrictions. Apps can’t steal user information. Apple — to its immense credit (it’s one of the things I love about Apple) — continues to lock this down.

The App Store has nothing at all to do with it, though.

Hardy:

Letting companies avoid this process would release a wave of malware on iPhone users everywhere. In a world where everyone’s phones are networked together, introducing another way for criminals to spread nefarious software is a horrible idea.

This is horribly, terribly untrue. Again: the App Store doesn’t prevent malware. Other technical limitations, built in to the platform, prevent malware. Apple does a great job with this and deserves all kinds of credit.

The second sentence in Hardy’s paragraph is just pure scare-mongering with no grain of truth.

* * *

The next section is called “Cupertino deserves its fair share.”

Hardy:

Cupertino deserves a cut of the action for the hard work it does policing the App Store. (And don’t forget about the enormous cost of operating and maintaining the servers that power this $519-billion-a-year economic engine, to say nothing of building the software tools developers use to create apps for iOS and macOS.)

Again: Apple isn’t asking us to cover costs plus a little something extra — no. Apple considers revenue growth in services to be of paramount importance, and this is one if its favorite ways of making that services money.

This isn’t about fairness at all. If it were, you’d think Facebook might pay some share.

Apple doesn’t “police” the App Store for the benefit of customers. Submissions are checked to be sure they adhere to Apple guidelines — in other words, reviewers make sure that apps are making money in approved ways and giving Apple its cut.

It’s also understandable that software developers want customers to pay them directly, rather than sending payments through Apple. And admittedly the company does make exceptions for certain services, like Amazon Prime Video, that bring customers to Apple’s ecosystem.

However, Cupertino’s general policy on payments means customers can feel safe shelling out for software and services within the Apple ecosystem. We know some shady firm won’t steal our credit card info. Even the best-intentioned companies get hacked, and I trust Apple’s network security far more than I do some random developer’s.

Again: this article mentions fairness a few times, and I hope it’s clear by now that the App Store isn’t exactly fair.

That thing about security and credit cards is more scare-mongering. If side-loading were allowed, most developers would use reputable systems like Square and Stripe and so on, where the developers never actually see credit card info at all.

(Developers are, by the way, whiny, selfish, unethical, and random.)

Maybe Apple’s 30% cut seems steep for digital products. But, as Ben Bajarin, head of consumer technologies at Creative Strategies, points out, the App Store seemed like a bargain to developers when it launched in 2008. At that time, developers typically surrendered 50% of the retail prices on software sold through physical stores. And small devs couldn’t even gain a toehold.

This is enormously untrue. I know because I was one of many small developers who were there.

We used Kagi as our payment processor at the time, and I think we paid around 5% for our storefront and payment processing and everything. Completely reasonable, and we were perfectly happy with it.

We were also a two-person shop — my wife and I — and you can’t get much smaller than that. Did we gain a toehold? Hell yes! We did great!

There were a lot of small companies operating that way. Hardly any of us were selling boxes through retail stores in the 2000s — we were already selling over the web by the mid ’90s.

Nobody saw this as a bargain. The developers I knew — small developers with nice toeholds! — were shocked and astonished, because we were used to paying 5-10%.

Perhaps Apple should shave a few percentage points off its take from App Store revenues to keep everyone (including Congress) happy. But third-party developers absolutely should pay a share of their revenue to support the iPhone ecosystem. Everyone benefits from it, including the companies that are whining. They just don’t want to admit it.

The traditional way of supporting a platform is to write good apps for that platform. That’s it. A platform with more and better apps will attract more people to that platform. (It’s not the only thing, but it’s a real thing.)

But Hardy — and Apple, apparently — has forgotten that simple truth.

And they haven’t realized that current App Store policies actually hurt the situation: we don’t have the quantity and quality of apps we should have. Which hurts that very ecosystem.

Developers will often tell you that Apple’s 30% cut isn’t the worst thing about the App Store, and that it’s actually far down the list.

True. They’re right.

But it’s worth remembering that money really does matter. Say you’re making $70K per year as a salary, and someone asks if you’d like a raise to $90K. You say yes! Because that extra $20K makes a real difference to you and your family.

To an app on the App Store it might mean being able to lower prices — or hire a designer or a couple junior developers. It might be the difference between abandoning an app and getting into a virtuous circle where the app thrives.

Quality costs money, and profitability is just simple arithmetic: anything that affects income — such as Apple’s cut — goes into that equation.

To put it in concrete terms: the difference between 30% and something reasonable like 10% would probably have meant some of my friends would still have their jobs at Omni, and Omni would have more resources to devote to making, testing, and supporting their apps.

But Apple, this immensely rich company, needs 30% of Omni’s and every single other developer’s paycheck?

When I was a kid, I put all of my hopes on finding a 1955 double die penny.

I keep noticing that people say they “felt okay” about whatever they did. It was “just their grandkids” or “pretty much everyone was wearing masks” or “it seemed like they were being careful” or whatever.

The hospitals are full of people who felt fine about things.

Reminder: it’s a zillion times easier to hack Twitter and take over accounts of Apple, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, and others than it would be to hack their separate websites.

Distributed systems are safer.

Local Seattle developer and good friend Olof Hellman finds the phrase “the blind leading the blind” problematic, and he writes:

Let your guide take you to Pike Place Market and taste the coffee and the piroshky and the crumpets and the nectarines and the chowder. Let your guide take you to the Olympic Sculpture Park, to hear the city and the train tracks and the ferry and the the wind curling around Alexander Calder’s Eagle, and taste the air from the Sound and feel the full force of the sunset. Let your guide take you to Sake Nomi where Johnnie will pour you a flight of Junmai Daiginjoshu and treat you like the Nomidachi regulars.

That right there is why we wish Olof would write every day.

If SwiftUI and Combine are the new, Swifty V and C in MVC, where’s the M?

I keep thinking that Core Data, amazing as it’s been, is part of NeXT-world Apple, and we’re due for a Swift data model framework.

Instead of defining your model in a schema editor (a la Core Data), you’d use a Swift DSL — which would be nice because you wouldn’t have to keep the schema and your model code in sync. It would be just one thing.

It would use (or at least allow for) value types over reference types. It would use protocols instead of inheritance. It would play perfectly well with Combine.

It might not even use SQLite — I can imagine Apple creating a storage system more purpose-built. It might be built with syncing in mind first rather than as afterthought.

I have no inside knowledge. And maybe this is just wishful thinking. But it surely seems to me that something like the above should be coming — it would be weird if not, I think. Maybe next year?

Swift is open source and is used in more places than just Mac and iOS apps — it’s now appearing in places like AWS Lambda, for instance.

But SwiftUI is not open source. At least not yet.

As a developer who uses SwiftUI, I’d sure like to see it made open source. I think there might be a good reason beyond just that, though — an open source SwiftUI could be made to work on other platforms.

Somebody would have to actually do that work, of course. But imagine that work has been done, and you can write SwiftUI code that runs on the web, Android, Windows, and Linux as well as on Apple devices.

Right now people are using web technologies and things like Electron to do cross-platform apps. And… it’s not great, and it’s hard to imagine Apple likes this situation. At all.

If SwiftUI makes it easier to make apps that work across Apple platforms only, that’s nice but not enough: the future will still belong to web wrappers like Electron.

The reason for that is simple. Apps cost a lot of money to make, and every additional platform costs yet more money.

The people who make the decisions on what to use aren’t generally the people who care about things like platform differences and performance. Those folks want to get the most bang for their buck, and so they’ll do what’s cheapest. Especially if you can’t prove, with data, the benefits of a native app over something like Electron (or other web wrapper).

(Bless those people. They are not Philistines as a rule — it’s just that they take their responsibilities seriously, as they should. They’re doing their job.)

But what if you could come to those people with an alternative — SwiftUI (and Combine) — and tell them that it will run everywhere, and that it’s at least as cheap as a web wrapper, and that it creates high-quality native apps?

That would be cool. I have no idea if that’s how people at Apple are thinking. But I hope they are.

I was actually surprised at the changes Apple is making to stop tracking. It’s not enough to stop tracking on the web, and it’s not enough to stop tracking in iOS apps — which is happening probably way more than you think it is — so Apple did both.

While I know that Apple takes privacy seriously in a way other large tech companies don’t, I still didn’t expect them to go this far. I’m glad they did.

My pet theory is that this set of changes is the most important thing to come from WWDC this year. These privacy changes will, I think, have far more impact on the tech industry, on society, and on our lives, than SwiftUI or a new processor for Macs or anything like that. (As fun as those things are.)

It’s always going to be an arms race, I suppose — see this press release from Kochava:

Options exist to perform identity resolution using hashed-email-to-device linkages, device connections by household, and other first-party identifiers key in solving for identity resolution and attribution.

[…]

Further scarcity of the IDFA forces greater reliance on attribution by fingerprinting. Fingerprinting is a probabilistic method of attribution based on device IP & user agent that’s less precise than deterministic attribution based on the globally unique IDFA. Nonetheless, a high degree of accuracy is still maintainable with fingerprinting…

IDFA stands for “identifier for advertisers.” One of the changes Apple is making is that when an iOS app asks for the IDFA, the system will ask the user to consent to being tracked. When consent is not given, the IDFA will just be a string of zeros.

It’s self-evident that pretty much everyone will say no, which makes the IDFA useless. App makers will want to avoid even the shame of asking for consent.

Kochava is saying — and I’m betting they’re not the only company saying this — that they’ll find a way around the IDFApocalypse to identify users. They will probably succeed, too, at least to a certain degree.

However, Apple has shown that it has a mandate to fight, and the will, and it doesn’t mind dropping down some very large technical hammers to protect our privacy.

* * *

It’s important to note — before people get stigmatized unfairly — that most of the tracking and metrics collected by various websites and apps is done so with innocent motives. Marketers want to know which campaigns are more effective; they want to get the most bang for their buck. Product designers want to know which features are more popular; they want to know what’s working for people and what isn’t. Publishers want to know which pages people visit and how they got there. Engineers — like me — want to be warned of potential problems.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting those things! The people who want those things aren’t trying to snoop on people or anything — they’re using data to do their jobs better.

The problem is that the tech industry, in order to serve these needs, did what it always does: code up the thing, take the biggest bite it can, and hope to make enough money, and amass enough power, to be able to repel any future ethical distractions. So now we have mass surveillance.

But Apple recognizes that there’s still a need to know, for instance, which of your ad campaigns is doing best — and so there’s SKAdNetwork, which is a thing I don’t totally understand yet, but I get that it answers marketing questions in the aggregate (which is all marketers should want) and doesn’t violate privacy.

I like that Apple knows that it’s not enough to just shut down the bad actors — people who have questions to answer, but who have no interest in violating privacy, need solutions.

PS See the WWDC 2020 video Build trust through better privacy for way more about all this.

I spent the month or so before WWDC like you — suffering through a pandemic, outraged by violent racism, worried about democracy. Heartsick and appalled, mad and sad.

Nothing has changed since WWDC, either. Except for one thing. A small thing in comparison, but important to me — I had been very worried that Apple would, as part of the ARM transition, lock down macOS so that only Mac App Store apps would be permitted.

That didn’t happen. And Apple employees explained that it’s not going to happen — and, given that it didn’t happen this time, given that they had this chance, I believe them.

I understand adding security features to the Mac. But to take away our freedom to create whatever Mac apps we want, and distribute them without Apple’s, or anyone’s, seal of approval, would be to take the heart out of my career.

But that’s not what happened! I feel great about this. I’m going to stop worrying about the Mac.

The New Way of Making Apps

I’m excited about the new features in SwiftUI this year. This reminds me of the early 2000s when I switched from writing Mac Toolbox apps to Cocoa apps. It was a whole new way of writing apps, and it was so much better.

I jumped right on it, back then — and I feel no less enthusiastic for this new new thing than I did for Cocoa almost 20 years ago.

Apple has essentially said, I believe, that the way we’ve been making apps is all legacy. AppKit and UIKit both. SwiftUI is the future.

NetNewsWire and SwiftUI

We re-jiggered the NetNewsWire roadmap somewhat.

• Mac/iOS 5.0.x: bug fix releases
• Mac 5.1: Feedly, feature parity with iOS
• Mac/iOS 5.5: iCloud sync, other integrations and features
• Mac/iOS 6.0: SwiftUI, features tbd

The thing to call out here is NetNewsWire 6.0. We’re already at work building a SwiftUI app where Mac and iOS share as much UI code as possible.

The work is going very quickly: I’m amazed. If you want to follow along, or even help, take a look at the swiftui branch.

I’m super-psyched for this. If it means Mac and iOS can share most of their code, and we can add features more quickly (because SwiftUI makes for so much faster development), then we can ship more and better versions of NetNewsWire more often. I want that!

I’ve been reluctant to write about how my new job is going — I don’t want to look like the guy who drank the kool-aid, and I certainly don’t want to be the guy who couldn’t read the room during our new multi-crisis normal.

But, maybe, some good news, even if for just one fortunate person, is okay to write about? I’m not even sure. But some of my friends have suggested I write it up, so I am.

* * *

Anyway. It’s going well! I love the job and the people and what we do.

Telling stories by way of human voice is among the most elemental and powerful of arts, and I believe that stories transform lives. My work at Audible is motivated by the same thing in me that makes me make NetNewsWire (an RSS reader), that made me create MarsEdit (a blog editor), that makes me write this blog.

Audible acts like a company with a mission. It seems like every company claims solidarity and support these days, and most of these claims are shallow and opportunistic. But Audible is committed to revitalizing Newark, NJ — from hiring locally, to Newark Working Kitchens, to Newark Venture Partners, and plenty more — and it’s helping, for real. This is not some new face for the current moment: it’s part of the company’s DNA and history.

And if you read the Audible blog, you’ll find that the company is dedicated to bringing us the stories that need telling and that urgently need to be heard.

It’s a good place that’s doing good, and I am proud to work there.

* * *

I’m on iOS. I’m senior enough not to be embedded in a scrum team, but I’m an individual contributor, not a manager. My job, broadly speaking, is to help the team increase velocity and quality. (My job isn’t strictly limited to iOS, but that’s where my focus is.)

My first month was spent meeting people (over video; via Amazon Chime) and learning things. The largest company I’ve ever worked at had about 100 people: Audible is much larger — 20 times larger? I’m totally just guessing — and that means I’ve had to learn about the ways of large companies. (Also remember that Amazon is part of this, usually in the background.)

I’m starting to be able to contribute a little — just recently I committed my first code. In any given month I might be writing a ton of code, or hardly any, or somewhere in between. While writing code is important, my job is more about things like architecture and best practices — it’s about finding ways to make the team better.

My background leading the NetNewsWire open source project is very relevant here. I learned, while running the NetNewsWire project, that people will rally to a higher standard if you can show them that it’s possible to reach it and then lead them there.

During my first month I felt like a detective from an Agatha Christie book, interviewing people and taking notes — What happened? How did we get here? What the heck is an ASIN? Those were the easy things to learn, and the hard lessons, where I learn how to take my experience and help lead us to that higher standard, are to come.

But that’s also the challenge! And the fun. It’s why I signed up.

* * *

I love this job every day except when I have to get up early due to time zone issues. Sheesh! (This happens just once or twice a month, seems like, so it’s not at all bad. It’s fine. But I Am Not a Morning Person.)

* * *

I haven’t noticed that the people I work with have a lot of public social media presence. (Maybe I just haven’t gotten clued-in yet?) But here’s Jeff Merola, the engineer I work most closely with. He’s smarter than I am, which is wonderful.

Doug Russell, who used to work on accessibility at Apple, writes:

some of the code that powers accessibility on apple platforms is just disgusting to look at and to work on.

most of the code that makes apple software accessible lives in what’s called an accessibility bundle. without diving into the minutia of the thing, bundles are a way to load something akin to a plugin into a cocoa app at runtime if an assistive technology is activated. it involves manipulating the app or framework class hierarchy and using objective-c dynamism to read app state and build up a usable accessibility hierarchy. insert a super class here, read an instance variable there, swizzle in a method and store the state for it in associated objects.

In other words — Objective-C and its runtime play a big role in making Apple’s great accessibility possible.

What happens when that’s not really a thing anymore?