OutdoorAppDeveloper

It's not about the developer fee. It's about Apple having absolute control over what users are allowed to do with the devices they own. As someone who started programming on micro computers decades ago, I find this concept abhorrent. It's your device. You own it. It is extremely powerful and has many amazing features and capabilities. Many of them are locked behind Apple's code walls. You are prevented from accessing them for your own good. Apple has no such restrictions and can use those features without you even knowing they exist. Right now there is a massive controversy brewing over the COVID-19 trackers that Apple built into the latest iOS update. Apple is using features of the iPhone not available to users and developers to track users contacts with each other. Apple won't even allow developers to test the features and learn how they work unless they are affiliated with a government agency. That is freaking everyone out and rightfully so. We trust Apple but not that much.

Apple could offer a "pro mode" for iOS which would allow users to take more risk and do more things on the platform. One of the things users could do is to install third party app stores. This would be good for professional users that need to get work done without Apple's restrictions. It would usher in a lot of really great ideas that cannot currently be implemented on the platform. The best of those could end up as officially supported features on the safe version of iOS.

Some popular games have modes that allow for extreme modding and hacks of the games. Users of those versions can only use specific servers so that users who choose to play by the rules are not affected. This greatly reduced cheating on the main servers while still allowing users to be as creative as they want on the hack servers. Apple could learn a valuable lesson here.

Splitting your operating system into device specific versions is easy. Making one single operating system that works everywhere is hard. Microsoft has been trying (and failing) to do that for decades. Apple had a real chance with iOS. They could have had Apple OS that worked on iPhones, iPads, Macs, the Apple Watch and future devices like their AR glasses. Each device could have tailored the UI to its own needs. But that would have been hard. Instead now we have iPhone OS, iPad OS, Watch OS, Mac OS and soon Glass OS. Such a missed opportunity.

Tile's app uses the GPS location feature in the background while also scanning Bluetooth for nearby Tile products. It gets permission from the user to do this. Apple now demands repeated permissions from users for the Tile app to continue to run in the background. Apple claims it must do this because users don't realize apps that run in the background and use GPS are burning through their battery life. This is true but Apple has magically chosen to implement a solution that puts its own AirTags product in a clear advantage. Users will probably never even be asked if they want to scan for AirTags in the background just like they are never asked if they want to scan for Apple's products using WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS in the background currently (that's how Find My and WiFi location works). I see both companies as being in the wrong here. Tile should never have built their business model with such a huge dependency on Apple's SDK restrictions. Apple should never restrict what users can choose to do with their products. Users should always have a way to tell iOS that they want to enable full access to Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS in their apps. By all means make it easy and obvious which apps are using the most power and show users why when they tap on them and give them some options for limiting the power usage of those apps (like revoking GPS background permission). If Apple built its entire SDK strategy around giving information and power to their users, they would never get into situations like this one.

Probably nothing to do with the fact that Apple "deprecated" OpenGL and Vulcan while forcibly preventing NVIDIA from releasing compatible Mac drivers. While Windows users are enjoying numerous VR games, social environments, development tools and even professional enterprise applications, Mac users are oblivious to VR. This is why this very web site stated that "no one claims Xcode will run on the iPhone". They simply do not have the vision to realize that there could be more to a computer user interface than staring at a flat screen. The same goes for Mac developers that are not even thinking about how to expand their user interface with AR or VR. When it emerges as the next big thing, Apple will be starting from square one, begging established Windows developers to port their apps and tools to iOS and macOS.