You're telling me Apple is unresponsive to support requests from their developer ecosystem? Really? Get out of town! I don't believe it.
Despite all of the rightful moaning of iOS developers, for some reason they continue to flock to the Apple platform. Apple will continue to treat their developers like second class citizens until there is a financial incentive to do otherwise. Right now, when one pissed off developer leaves or goes bankrupt because their app was yanked from the store or wasn't approved for some BS reason, 50 developers replace him.
The fact that so many of the comments replying to yours are quick to defend Apple says it all really.
Developers will put up with more crap than they should when platform religion gets in the way. Sure, there are arguments against switching platforms to Android or Windows, but most of these mean very little. Those that refuse to ditch iOS aren't doing so because they'll miss out on potential customers, it's because they like the idea of building apps for the most popular phone on the market, despite the crap they have to put up with.
It's the equivalent of dating a bitchy model. You could be a lot happier with the cute girl next door, but you'd rather put up with her shit just because you can say to your mates "I go out with a model".
That's a bit rich considering that the iOS app store is where developers can make money. I think that's a far, far more powerful motivating factor than "platform religion." The Blackberry had plenty of fervent followers and advocates: look where that got them.
Also, comparing Mac/iOS users to members of a religion is the oldest, saggiest, most lackluster thought-terminating-cliche in the book. Come off it already.
Are you from the US? If so, you can make money on the Android market quite easily. The idea that iOS is the only platform that can make money is a very dated idea, and one that never really had any merit in the first place.
There's a reason why the cliche exists, because it is true. The biggest truths in this world are the obvious ones, not the exciting ones. You pick a platform on perceived value and it's likely that your gut feeling (along with the crowd) will lead you to Apple.
If I'm wrong, then why aren't developers ditching Apple? Why is no one boycotting a platform that is happy to litigate, rather than innovate? Why are there so many weak money-related excuses to not developing for Android? It's because of personal belief, and it is your personal belief that iOS is better and will make you more money.
By that logic, we'd all set up shop in silicon valley, otherwise working would just be pointless...
We are building LiveLoop's mobile client for iOS, and not Android, for monetary reasons, and I feel that I can justify this easily.
First of all, the cost of developing for Android, for us, would be higher, because our code to render slides is somewhat resolution-dependent and iDevices come in fewer resolution variants than Android devices. One could make the claim that we should be doing everything in a completely resolution-adaptive way, but we haven't.
Second, developing for iPhone gives you the iPad for a negligible development cost, giving you access to the tablet market where Android does not have a meaningful presence yet. The great thing about the tablet market is that people spend more money on similar-functionality apps for iPad than for iPhone.
Third, the fact of the matter is that while you can make money on the Android market, the revenue economics of iOS apps are currently completely dominating Android. Both upfront and recurring revenue is higher on iOS. We don't have any qualms about leaving Android on the table today -- obviously, changes in any of these three premises, or huge growth in Android marketshare on tabloid and handheld, could change this.
...
Those that refuse to ditch iOS aren't doing so because they'll miss out on potential customers, it's because they like the idea of building apps for the most popular phone on the market, despite the crap they have to put up with.
...
Trying to assess peoples motivations is unlikely to be accurate or useful.
How else do we come to a meaningful conclusion when posed the question "why won't iOS app developers leave the platform if the conditions are so poor" if it's not from assessing the motivations of those that build them?
>>>Conditons are so poor<<<
is your interpretation. It does not take a mass delusion Stockholm syndrome sort of interpretation to figure out that a lot of developers get great satisfaction working on the platform. I'm sure to a person there are things they dislike and would change, but that doesn't mean they are being abused.
It's much easier when you accept that people have different opinions about just about everything and that those differing opinions don't always indicate a lack of reason or ulterior motive.
That's a poor argument when so many people express this opinion.
If any developers get satisfaction working on the platform it's because they like the platform; again a personal preference rather than a solid reason for believing Apple's development platforms are up to par with, say, Microsoft's .NET platform.
This could well be the most deluded comment I've seen yet on HN. And I am going to take a guess that you are either (a) not a developer or (b) have never made an app.
Because those that have understand that you do not put in the hundreds and hundreds of hours for nothing. You don't do out of some misguided dedication to Steve Jobs, Apple or because you want to be cool.
You do it because you have a family to feed, want to make some extra money (iOS is far more profitable) or just make people happy (iOS users are far less likely to pirate).
Personally I wouldn't develop for iOS because "I have a family to feed." Selling apps on the app store has to got to be one of the trickiest things developers for the platform have to put up with - as discoverability is part timing, part luck, and less marketing than most would prefer.
Also, if your app gets pulled, gets rejected, or you have trouble getting a new version out for whatever reason, the lack of straight-forward communication with Apple could be dangerous if you have other mouths depending on that income. My roommate worked for an iPhone game company and he and many other developers got laid off when one of their games got rejected.
I am a developer (web dev by day), and I have developed and published apps that are on the respective marketplaces for Android, Apple and Blackerry.
Regardless of my credentials, if you're relying on building apps to feed your family then I highly suggest that you find yourself a proper job before they starve. I've known enough people jump on the app bandwagon and drag themselves into the dirt.
>You're telling me Apple is unresponsive to support requests from their developer ecosystem? Really? GET OUT OF TOWN! I don't believe it.
This isn't something that is exclusive to Apple though this has always been an issue with them even regarding security issues with OS X.
>Despite all of the rightful moaning of iOS developers, for some reason they continue to flock to the Apple platform.
They develop for iOS because that is where the money is though this isn't the issue. It isn't as if the Android browser doesn't have its fair share of bugs.
>Apple will continue to treat their developers like second class citizens until there is a financial incentive to do otherwise.
You're right. Apple puts the interests of their customers first (not trying to be smug here). The developers come second. The only time you do hear complaints that go unanswered for devs it is usually only answered when there's a public (consumer) interest regarding it. A good example of this is Phil Schiller replying to customer's email about the Rogue Amoeba situation.
I'm certainly not defending Apple but this is a problem that has existed for as long as I've been interested in tech.
I did click on the link and did read the article though it lacked virtually any detail.
Of course Apple cares about money but they make their money by customers buying their hardware. They put their customers first because that is where they make their money.
As a counterpoint, Apple refuses to pay employees on commission because Jobs didn't want them upselling to consumers because there is a less chance of them being a returning customer.
It's the goal of every business to make money. It's how you go about it that tells the story.
what that article says is "Even if it Italy(and all UE) the law says the hardware provider must grant 2 years warranty, Apple does not care and gives only one, and asks for money if you want the second." Explain me how this is putting the customers before the money.
Apple shows a nice face to the public but then does only what it's needed to get more money. proved by both this article and how they treat developers.
If it wasn't for the developers that filled the appstore with content apple would be still years back. But apple doesn't care.
You're pointing to an article that was very short and provided no detail.
I had to go through the HN thread to see that it's more complicated than what you make it out to be but I also read a story by John Paczkowski regarding this:
I think you're trying to paint a picture from a certain perspective that doesn't contain the whole truth. I'm not saying that Apple isn't greedy as everyone else but I do believe your argument has flaws.
No but it is the universe where lots and lots of people were not aware that there was a way to get more software onto a phone or even a computer. People used to look at me like I had three heads when I told them about those other mobile application stores.
Unless you completely ignore Getjar, Handango, Pocketgear, many other repositories, and direct sales, mobile developers were not begging for crumbs from OEMs regardless of how many people knew you could put software on a computer. To be sure, the market was smaller, there were significantly less developers and less software available overall, but they all had options.
Which figures are you looking for in particular? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_store is a good place to start. Getjar and Handango/Pocketgear are some of the more recognizable names in the list.
> If it wasn't for the developers that filled the appstore with content apple would be still years back.
Plus, if it wasn't for jailbreakers and first Cydia not-native apps that Jobs hated and for a long time was against an idea of giving third-parties abilities to build so-called not-native apps, Apple would still not had their App Store and never grew to today's sizes.
Just take a look at the timeline: App Store was probably in the works when Jobs was still talking about web apps.
Thinking that Cydia forced Apple to reconsider its policy is very naive.
Cydia certainly did not influence Apple's decision: Cydia itself was a reaction to an ecosystem being left behind by Installer, a program whose maintainer had disappeared. However, I actually am fairly certain that Installer did. The timeline actually works for this rather well, when you take into consideration how much of a rush-job the whole SDK was: they pretty much started designing a "for third parties" API--from scratch, leaving Apple's apps built to an entirely different set of UI classes--for 2.x
Meanwhile, the device setup really wasn't designed to run third-party apps, and we were actually able to watch as the software was ripped apart and rewritten to work around those problems. Had you actually been there, in the field, developing for the platform at the time, you might not consider the opinion so naive. I agree, however, that people oft fail to look at how long it takes to accomplish things like this, and somehow take the release date as the point of inception: but here we could actually watch the progress.
Regardless, it might be they had it "on the horizon" (although I'd even question that, after years of talking about this story with people at conferences), but the idea that it was going to happen at that point--sufficiently early and with sufficient unknowns that they actually slipped on their release dates (not thforties slips got much press)--for that first device.. to me that is far-fetched (but I sadly realize that most of my evidence is not transferable).
Still, making good products is a tactic, not a philosophy. Apple doesn't put the effort into making good products because they want to make people happy, they do it because that's what sells.
Any notion that Apple has altruistic motives is absurd. All companies exist for one reason: to make as much money as possible. Apple is no exception.
Apple is not offering the warranty mandated by the law, so when the device breaks, the customer has to buy a new one. If that is what you get for paying a premium price for the latest Apple product then I have to say no, thanks.
Apple is providing the warranty mandated by EU law, it's just that nobody in the EU seems to understand their own laws.
EU law mandates a two year warranty for only those defects present at time of sale. Within the first 6 months of sale, the burden of proof is on Apple to prove that the defect wasn't there at sale. After those 6 months are up, the burden of proof switches to the consumer to prove that it was there at sale.
Apple complies with this law.
Apple also provides a 1 year warranty from time of purchase for defects that develop after the time of sale. This, too, is perfectly in the law, and Applecare extends this post-sale defect coverage to two years.
tl;dr EU law involves two different kinds of warranties (covering present-at-sale and post-sale defects). You've confused them.
I live in France. Every single hardware device out there has one year warranty, with possibly optional paid extension from the reseller. Five second search example [0] shows "Garantie 1 an.". None of their manufacturer get any sort of bash, except Apple.
Apple is pretty well known for helping its customers even after the warranty period is up, from everything I've seen. Certainly not always, but enough so that they get more good press for it than most companies.
So, even if they are as evil and plotting as you claim, they seem to be confused on how to be efficient and effective in implementing their evil plan.
I would hope they are not doing this on purpose. However, then it has to be incompetence or lazyness. I heard some european VP was recently let go by Cook, so perhaps he is already taking care of it.
Anyway, there are some horror stories regarding the defective Nvidia GPUs where Apple denied repairs and said it was another problem - even though Nvidia fully paid the repair because it was their fault.
I've had two iPhones, a motherboard on a MacBook Pro (which I spilt coke on, and told them I did) and a replaced keyboard on the White MacBook that cracked all replaced out of the warranty period.
I thought Apple was over priced non-sense years ago, until I bought one thanks to a spending account from my employer. Now I find it hard to justify buying anything but.
Their mandate is to do whatever their prospectus says they are going to do.
As for maximizing shareholder value, I think they've done pretty well there. I don't care for their software that much, but in terms of running a publicly-traded corporation, they've done an excellent job.
No, the goal is to make money. If a business can make money without customers, then it's still a successful business. (Though it may be a racket). Making a business with lots of customers, but no money, at best is called a startup... ;)
Apple wants money. Apple makes nice product I want to buy.
Microsoft wants money. Microsoft makes a product that its customers (until recently, third party hardware manufacturers and enterprise IT) buy to put on their crappy products in the hope of selling them to me. To support their wafer thin margins, they rent out advertising space on the hardware they well.
Google wants money. Google gives goods and services away and convinces its customers (advertisers) that they will be able to sell its users stuff that they see advertised when they use their free product or service running on some crappy product someone else sells them.
Everyone is after money. It's called capitalism. When it works well it leads people to do things that make other people happier in pursuit of getting money.
Apple is making money because they're better at capitalism than these other guys. For as long as it's existed, Apple has believed that the way to make money is to create products people -- actual end-users -- want to own and use, and for a long time this was successful but not as successful as making PC manufacturers happy, or making advertisers happy. Right now, it's working very well for Apple, and once they stopped doing stupid random half-arsed things they started making ridiculous amounts of money.
Is Apple doing something illegal w.r.t. warranties in Italy? Who knows? (a) It's the register. (b) There's no telling if the warranty Apple is obliged to provide in Italy in any way resembles AppleCare.
In general, Apple seems to handle "defects in manufacturing" very generously everywhere the world over. AppleCare covers you against all kinds of stuff that you'd be very lucky to get covered by warranty anywhere else. And if this Italian warranty policy is so all-pervasive, why do Apple's customers need to be told about it?
"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy." John Updike
Not true at all. Please read through their stance on requirement of antivirus on the machine in response to flashback Trojan [1]. Instead of arguing against or for Antivirus, they are blaming windows.
"
Do I need anti-virus software?
Ah! The loaded question. That's up to you. To date, all of the Mac anti-virus software still checks primarily for Windows viruses. The anti-virus companies have literally stopped counting how many Windows viruses there are. The Flashback trojan didn't even qualify to be called a virus. Still, all Windows users run anti-virus software. The only growth opportunities for them are Macintosh and Android. Expect a hard sell. Nothing sells better than fear. My advice? Be fearless!"
For hacker news audience ,who can take care of their own security, antivirus may just be snake oil but for clueless end user it is a big help.
As far as I can tell, that post you're quoting was written by a user totally unaffiliated with Apple. It's a pretty enormous stretch to call this "their stance on requirement of antivirus".
I put up with developing for iOS because it is the only mobile platform that can do low-latency audio on every device. There isn't always a philosophical choice involved.
It's no secret that third party developers fall pretty low on Apple's list of priorities. I get the sense that Apple's priorities are 1) balancing user interests with Apple's bottom line, 2) satisfying the interests of carrier partners, and finally 3) serving the needs of third party developers.
This doesn't mean that fixing this bug in Mobile Safari should be expected to be unimportant to Apple, since it affects one of their top priorities, the users. It would rather seem to be an indication of either a sub-optimal process for dealing with bug reports, or an issue with the author's submission, which given his liberal use of strong language, doesn't seem to be out of the realm of possibility to me.
You only have to take a look at the WWDC videos and the vast array of well documented APIs provided to know that Apple does care about developers and treats them.
So Apple doesn't have an open bug tracking system. Big deal. It's rare to see a company that does.
I don't understand how the WWDC example nullifies my claim that developers fall below users, their own bottom line and carrier partners in priority for Apple.
>Despite all of the rightful moaning of iOS developers, for some reason they continue to flock to the Apple platform.
Yes, strange, I wonder why that is, they must be irrational or something, unlike us sane guys.
It's not like there are money to be made there, or that is the most successful mobile app ecosystem in sales volume, returns and customer base. Or that it has a nice platform overall, despite having the occasional 2 year old unfixed bug...
That said I've seen 2 and 5 year old unfixed bugs in open source software too. Come to think of it, Webkit, which powers Mobile Safari, is open source itself. Why not go and submit a patch there?
Because WebKit is a rendering engine, not a UI. The Safari UI wrapper is responsible for receiving those touch events and properly notifying the rest of the browser code.
Much of this code actually is in WebKit, but Apple's form of WebKit is not open-source. Apple carefully redacts code that would provide other mobile device platforms any help against Apple's usability features, and multi-touch is one of these defended systems.
Really, as WebKit is under a BSD license, Apple can thereby leach off other developer's work without having to contribute back. They have to make a token effort at releasing their modifications to WebCore (a part of WebKit that is under LGPL), but even there they release
binary object files for anything remotely related to the mobile UI.
(Aside: this is possible, as LGPL does let you static ally link against closed-source code as long as you provide the half-compiled binaries required to re-link a complete binary with modifications to the LGPL parts made by third parties.)
2 - 3 weeks seems to be the norm. That's pretty frustrating if you consider that people's income depends on that. And that developers pay $100 + 30% share for this.
Being critical is great. Creating workarounds is even better. Being entitled is not so great.
If you want to talk about how Apple is terrible to developers, fine, talk about the App store double-standards and the developer agreement. But this is hardly an exceptional case of a company being 'anti-developer'.
I can't tell you how many bugs I've filed from OS X, chrome, to various python libraries well the response is pretty much "welp its broke" (if that). If you depend on some sort of functionality that you're not getting, it's time to move on or create your own.
The tone of this post reminds me of 'why I'm not developing for twitter' post ... where the take away for that was be weary of developing on platforms you don't control. I would assume that most of us have learned that the hard way with esoteric libraries with ghost-maintainers. Myself, I'm becoming weary of turning every inconvenience into some sort of political issue. This is _hacker_ news. Can we get back to making clever and disruptive solutions please?
I built a lot of workarounds to make my game engine ( http://impactjs.com/ ) work on iOS, Android and other browsers. But I couldn't find a viable workaround for this multitouch bug. The touchstart/move/end events are the only way to detect multiple touches in Mobile Safari - and they don't work as they should.
This bug is affecting many HTML5 games and as long as I'm not allowed to install another browser (engine) on iOS, I will keep complaining.
I think it's great that you're complaining in the way you are. It'll be interesting to see whether Apple responds. MS-Word has retained some of its obvious bugs since 1995.
>Can we get back to making clever and disruptive solutions please?
So wait, when MS was abusing its IE product then HN is justified in angry anti-MS rants, but when Apple purposely keeps html5 gimped on iOS and refuses any other browser on iOS suddenly you're all about tolerance and double-standards.
This a very legitimate issue. Apple can't applaud HTML5 in public and piss on it in private. Yes, its a threat to your app ecosystem. Accept it, fix the bugs, and allow other browsers. This is HN worthy, if not extraordinarily HN worthy.
You certainly weren't shy about generalizing about HN and telling us what is HN worthy!
Then dont generalize about HN because it has an anti-MS focus and once we start talking about what is HN worthy, then we have to admit that criticism of big players is the status quo not the exception.
Whilst I think Apple took too long to look at this bug, the instructions in the given test case are, for me at least, ambiguous:
1. Hold one finger down in the blue area above
OK, that's easy enough :)
2. Touch straight down with another finger - don't move your fingers on the surface
And here's where the confusion lies; I thought you wanted the tester to slide their finger down the screen or something like that. From the video it appears that you want to ensure that they "hold another finger on the blue area" or something like that.
Now, I confess that I don't own an iPhone, so couldn't test whether that made much of a difference, but that could be one reason why they rejected your test case. If in doubt blame incompetence, not malice :)
I'm not a native speaker, so these instructions may very well be ambiguous. Any suggestions on how to clarify it?
Back then, I built the test case and asked on twitter if anybody else could confirm the bug. I got several answers (e.g. one from mrdoob within the minute: https://twitter.com/mrdoob/statuses/6896165488427008 ) so I thought the instructions were fine.
1. Press and hold a finger in the blue area (do not move this finger)
2. Tap a second finger somewhere else in the same blue area (again, do not move your finger only tap)
3. Observe the orange bar. It should become green when both finger are touching the screen. Response time should be near instantaneous. It is not. Additionally, about 1 out of 3 touches results in an inconsistent state in which the bar remains green after both fingers are removed.
Put it another way -- he wants to run and jump at the same time! You know, the way you would in Super Mario on the original NES and every platform game since.
If I recall correctly, the ocarina app suffered from this same issue. If he offset-aligns the contact areas, he should be able to get around the issue.
Just tried his test case and at first I couldn't reproduce it at all. On my iPhone 4S, you have to do the second finger tapping quite quickly for it to go wrong -- just touching it the way he does in the video is not triggering it for me.
I was also confused by the instruction. The wording "straight down" is generally used in the context of positioning on the screen, and not used to describe the action of placing your fingers on the screen. Since it never specifies where one should put the second finger, "straight down" is naturally interpreted as a position, not an action.
Might be we are all just stupid, but the best instructions are those that even stupid people can understand.
If your natural response to ambiguous instructions are "you're just too stupid", please stay away from designing any instructions for industrial machinery.
It isn't ambiguous in the slightest as it tells you not to move your fingers on the screen, so the only reasonable conclusion from this is that the direction down is from above the screen onto the surface, not laterally across the surface. And this instruction is part of the same statement, not divorced from it, so the context is perfectly clear unless you don't bother finish reading the sentence before deciding what it means.
Also, I was not meaning that the person reading was stupid, but that they were careless in their reading of the instruction, which is the sort of thing that can lead you to counting in base nine for the rest of your life, if applied to anything big and heavy that spins.
It isn't ambiguous in the slightest as it tells you not to move your fingers on the screen
Heh, and that's exactly why it's ambiguous: the first part suggests movement; and the second commands against it.
so the only reasonable conclusion from this is...
You can make an educated guess at what's intended, but you're still guessing. What if "fingers" was a typo and "finger" was written in its place? You couldn't say for certain, and that would give an entirely different "reasonable" conclusion - all based on a typo.
And this instruction is part of the same statement
And it contradicts the first part of instruction.
Also, I was not meaning that the person reading was stupid, but that they were careless in their reading of the instruction, which is the sort of thing that can lead you to counting in base nine for the rest of your life
Your concern is for my well-being is touching, but I really do take exception to your claim of careless reading being at fault. If you don't understand an instruction, sure, go back and check that you haven't missed a bit, but the best option afterwards is to seek further clarification. That's a good life rule, and I absolutely have no shame in asking when I don't understand something.
Plus, unlike guessing at "the only reasonable conclusion," I think this approach will lead to counting in base 10 for a while longer ;-)
To me, a speaker of U.S. English, "straight down" implies movement, making the instructions confusing. A non-motive indication of position would be "straight below".
I would phrase it as "press into the screen with another finger" maybe. Common screen coordinates (to me) are left/right (x), up/down (y), and in/out (z). The instruction is trying to refer to the z coord, but using the common word for the y coord.
Of course it implies movement. You have to move your finger to touch the screen. If it said straight down and had no qualifier, then it would be confusing as then down could have two common meanings. However it does have a qualifier within the same statement that makes it extremely clear that the motion described is not a motion across the screen.
Humans don't parse language the way computers do. When they see a phrase commonly associated with movement the concept of movement will enter their minds, even if a precise analysis of the sentence does not indicate movement.
I have filed dozens of OS X and iOS bugs over the years. Almost all of them were closed with the claim that Apple already knew about that bug. However many of them were really subtle and it was unlikely that anybody else had already reported them, especially if a developer preview introducing the bug had just been released. Furthermore some of them are not fixed even now, years after the first report.
My experience is that Apple will almost never admit they don't know about a bug. The only exception are security bugs where one actually gets real feedback.
My experience is that Apple isn't that bad. I have filed several bugs with Apple over the years, and IMO their response is pretty good compared to other vendors, particularly given that I have no paid support relationship with them. The bugs ranged from AD integration issues to PDF rendering problems, to an ActiveSync issue specific to our unusual configuration.
I do have an expensive support relationship with Microsoft, and I've gotten similar results for the same types of problems. We log bug reports, and the serious ones with business impact get fixed. UI glitches or corner-case Outlook problems get fixed more slowly, or only via custom hotfix. Serious bugs get fixed more quickly, and typically get rolled into a future patch.
In the past, I've had similar or even worse results from other large companies like IBM, Oracle, Informix and Sun.
Software has bugs, and low-priority bugs persist for a long time, for reasons that may be good or bad. In any case, posting expletive-laden rants railing against a vendor is unprofessional and unlikely to garner a positive reaction.
I've only filed a couple (against Quartz), and had a similar experience. They'd maybe ask for a reduced test case, then nothing happens for 3 months; the latest patch of the OS comes out and the next day the bug is closed. I don't mind if they fix the bugs, but the stony silence is a bit frustrating.
One that never got fixed was crashers in Console. That's been going on for years now.
Thers are tons of people using this platform, and many of them are doing very obscure things with it. Meanwhile, that same bug tracking system is used by Apple's Q/A and the very engineers working on the code in the first place. You might thing the bug is something only you would find, but with this many people staring at it, someone else
probably came across it. As many ways as I feel Apple is slightly disingenuous, I really can't imagine they have a policy of making up bug numbers in Radar so they can mark things as duplicates.
My problem with the level of vitriol is that it doesn't leave much room for when things are truly bad - this has caused an inconvenience and lost time to him personally, but it's not like he's really suffered, like so many people do on a daily basis around the world. I'd love to see this passion directed at (for example) issues of social justice.
I think you're underestimating the importance of this bug. For the developer of a HTML5 game platform this is a huge roadblock - it can totally ruin gameplay, prevents the use of more complex controls and ultimately hinders adoption.
40 hours of time which isn't free, no less. Time which he (rightfully) expected to produce a fix to the problem in something less than two fucking years.
I have so much sympathy for you. (Along with anyone else that tries to produce anything that runs on any iOS device and it's walled garden.)
It's easy to see that when building a platformer game, unimpeded multitouch functionality is pretty essential. Have you been able to identify other games that have the same problem? I would of thought that this would be resolved so much sooner than 2 years. It's a core part of multitouch functionality.
At least you still have your app available on iOS!.. It is total BS how developers are treated. Apple has built up a product which sells hundreds of millions of units per year, largely in part due to the developers who have invested time in their ecosystem, but it's total shit how they return no investment back to the people who have supported this system. (Yes, developers are largely to thank. Look at how RIM and MS are failing, because they don't control nor have the content).
I agree. But, the only reason anyone writes for iOS is money. It's one of the best selling phones on the market. And iPhone uses tend to buy a lot of apps. There's a long list of developers who made fortunes on that platform.
So if you don't want to write for it, then don't. The only force that can change Apple's behavior is the consumer. Apple doesn't care about anything else. And they never will.
So stop complaining. Write your app. And hope it's a hit. Then you can sell it and buy a house on the beach.
Is there any evidence that Apple wants game developers targeting mobile Safari? It's a classic platform tactic to abuse APIs you don't want used (HTML5) to drive people to the one you do want used (ObjC). Between platform lock in and 30 cents on the dollar it's clear Apple wants developers making native apps.
I think this whats really at work here. For the same reason they won't let Mozilla, Opera, or Google make their own web browsers. Apple is affraid of people building their own HTML5 apps and subsequent app stores. This would cut into Apple's app store monopoly and cost them their 30% on every app that is sold.
Apple only cares about what makes it money, not delivering the best experience to consumers.
And you can be damn sure that they don't give a shit about developers, especially if they aren't making native iOS apps which aren't being sold in the app store.
> I think this whats really at work here. For the same reason they won't let Mozilla, Opera, or Google make their own web browsers. Apple is affraid of people building their own HTML5 apps and subsequent app stores. This would cut into Apple's app store monopoly and cost them their 30% on every app that is sold.
> Apple only cares about what makes it money, not delivering the best experience to consumers.
I disagree here, mainly because the amount of money Apple makes from the App Store is tiny, relative to their overall revenues. This year at WWDC, Tim Cook announced that Apple had paid $5 billion to developers on the App Store, which translates into a little over $7.1 billion in apps sold, or $2.1 billion in revenue for Apple since 2008. That's about $130 million per quarter, against revenue of between $7 billion and $30 billion per quarter. That's without considering hosting costs and credit card fees.
$130 million is certainly no small change. But for Apple, in the big scope, it isn't printing money for them.
You're right, it's not directly about money. But it is to reinforce their closed platform and ecosystem.
If a great application can be used instantly off the internet, with no download, no install, no hassles, no App Store, (the way software should be) then the consumer has no particular reason to buy an Apple device over one of their competitors.
By preventing developers from building quality web applications, Apple helps maintain the need for developers to build for their native platform, which means consumers need to buy Apple devices to use those applications.
Between introducing multi-touch errors, and hobbling the HTML5 Audio API, there is no way to build an engaging game for mobile Safari. Apple has sabotaged their web platform with expert precision.
Don't worry man, I have this Nexus One phone where the touchscreen registers touch on the side of the phone, and the advertised multitouch doesn't even work, never mind not receiving updates for the rest of my life (my hardware bugs cost me over $600!!). Your game has no chance to work on my phone, why don't I see a "What the Fucking Fuck, Google" post. All systems are plagued with bugs, and a lot of them get neglected forever. Instead of aggressively attacking a company (Apple hateboy?), expecting them to fix something after some f-bombs were dropped, why not write a meaningful blog post.
Plenty of Android devs owned Nexus Ones. It was the Android dev phone for a pretty important year. Yet we heard little griping at Google from devs over the fact that they cheaped out on the hardware for their flagship device.
Moreover there are countless ignored bugs in Android, many of the most starred issues have been there for two years or more. This griping about Apple is ridiculous.
They're a massive faceless software & hardware vendor, big surprise a low-priority bug (never once seen someone who isn't a dev or similar play an HTML5 game in my life) slipped through the cracks.
This isn't new, nor is it unique to Apple, so it would be nice if we could can the melodrama and focus on the issue.
Except in Android's, and especially the Nexus series of phones case, any random can do whatever fixes to the core code they wish - that's not something you can do in Apple land. I'd be shocked to learn that third party patches don't exist for at least some of the rough edges.
I've only filed a couple of radars, but actually received pretty good response. However, they weren't api-related.
One was about an issue I was having running the Britannica encyclopedia. I don't recall what it was, but Apple even called me about it.
One was about a bug in Lion, where if you pick a large desktop image, and tile it, it gets all corrupted and there are artifacts in the desktop image that respond to movement of windows above the desktop. The corruption of the image looks like what happens when CIAffineClamp is applied to an image: a row of pixels at some place in the image is repeated out to the edge of the screen.
The response was that it was fixed in a point release, but the fix was to disable the Tile option for large images. Except if you have it set to alternate images periodically, with the Tile option selected, a large image can still be tiled and displayed incorrectly.
Reviewing the test case code the basic bug seem to be that sometimes a touchend event won't fire when a secondary finger is lifted.
You can make your code much more reliable by handling all touch events and looking that the touches or targetTouches respectively instead of incremental a total touch counter on each start and decrementing on each end. This causes even the slightest movement to trigger a touchmove event which and the entire current touch state is in touches within all the events. So changing your test like so gets close and you can at least see the use more clearly:
var i = 0;
var numTouches = 0;
var out = document.getElementById('out');
var indicator = document.getElementById('indicator');
So he let this bug sit in his game for two years without thinking of a work around himself?
The situation where any platform owner has a bug that impacts your software you should try as best you can to work around it because you never know if and when it will get fixed.
Change the game design slightly? He claims he wants to walk and jump at the same time, maybe adjust the control scheme to make jumping triggered in a different way.
This bug, in particular is not a an easy thing to work around, I agree and maybe he did try all sorts of things but none of them worked, we don't know.
My point is - in the general case you should not rely on Apple fixing a bug to make your product work correctly.
In case you didn't know, the post is by the author of the ImpactJS game engine. The job of engine writers is to make sure everything works - working around it for one specific game helps only that game, but does not ensure all games using the engine will work. So the next best thing the engine author can do is pressure the OS maker (Apple) in to fixing the bug, which is what this post is about, since there is no feasible way an engine or library can work around problems like this in general.
There aren't many game concepts which work with just one button. Actually, having just one button is so absurd that people turned this particular limitation into a competition (similar to <=4kB and the like).
Reading through your comment history makes you appear to be a rather unfriendly commenter. We like to maintain civil discussions here on HN, so please try to contribute accordingly.
The entire article revolves around a bug that came about from an HTML5 game the author was working on.
> Almost two years ago I noticed a strange multitouch problem in Mobile Safari with one of my games.
TwistedWeasel has a valid point. OS X and iOS are not open source projects one can fork and submit patches to. Neither is Windows or Windows Mobile for that matter. If someone finds a bug, submitting a testcase and doing a lot of legwork is probably appreciated, but none of that will guarantee the bug will get fixed. Finding a workaround is a much better short term solution for the developer because they can continue on developing the way they need to and not have to wait for the black box of Apple's Radar to return a positive result. On some occasions, the developer might be able to search into WebKit to see if the problem is there, and submitting a bug report to that project might return more valid feedback. Significant portions of both OS X and iOS are available in source code form.
Is this ideal? No. Is it how it works? Yes. Can an everyday non-Apple engineer do anything about it? Not really.
I'm sorry but what has his comment history
to do with the comment he is writing right now? You should discuss content not occupy yourself with labeling people as 'unfriendly commenter' based on every comment written in history.
Off Topic: Twice in this thread he/she asked the same condescending question if the person he/she was replying to had actually read the article, with this one in particular showing indication he failed to read a portion of the article also. I didn't really care to start up an argument with someone on the internet if they were having a bad day (we all have bad days), so I quickly glanced over their comment history and saw a pattern.
I thought my remark was fairly civil. I was not trying to start an argument or flame war, and dedicated a significant portion of my reply to the topic of conversation and tried to be brief in reminding him/her about the reasons most of us visit HN over other news aggregating sites.
Hello? Sir? Please come down from there... hi, welcome back to reality. Have you read the article we are "discussing"? No? Ok, well, it has a LOT of "F" words, swearing and sentences like "A test case that a 3 year old could understand" in it. Please don't pretend it's literature that goes around these parts. Also, stop whoring for Karma.
No he didn't. Read the post. This was the first sentence: "Almost two years ago I noticed a strange multitouch problem in Mobile Safari with one of my games."
He should have learned to adapt instead of wait for a change that obviously wasn't going to happen.
So, tell me something: How do you adapt to not receiving an event?
The only choice is to do something completely different, but I can't think of anything that doesn't profoundly change the nature of the game (continuously jump makes a completely different game, use upward motion to jump will have a lot of false positives) and is basically an admission that a game that involves two buttons like this is simply impossible. And that's an unreasonable outcome.
(The continuously jumping game has interesting potential, but it is a different game. Plus I've think I've seen it way back in the day and it's very visually tiring.)
2) I almost fell over laughing when you mentioned a whole "40" hours. I think if I went through that whole process with Apple, I'd be happy if I got it out of the way in 40 hours.
Apple "used to" (as in, they cast a damn good image of) following Dieter Rams type of design philosophy, but that's long gone in the freak show app-orgy that exists within iOS now. It's a mess, it's terribly disorganized, it's not "less, but better" it's "more, and worse".
Personally, I'm surprised that they let iOS get this stale. But apparently as long as the penumbra of Steve's[RIP] reality distortion field exists, they will blindly march on.
What Apple needs is a new visionary. Not someone to try to emulate Steve Jobs. And they need to open the hell out of their products.
If you believe your hardware and OS are best, then open the hardware to letting people install Android on it if they don't agree, and write a version of iOS to run on other hardware.
It's not going to happen (and I hope they prove me wrong). Apple is designed as a coupled HW-SW ship, and I don't see them changing course any time soon.
My advice: Pay attention to your perspective bed partners before you commit and get into bed with them.
It's not like Android isn't without it's infuriating problems. Worse, most people are running several versions behind and the uptake on new ones is slowing, so some problems may never be fixed.
My phone has ICS and honestly I'm not getting a lot out of it. I could be back on 2.3 or 2.2 and not even notice. I think Android versions don't really have much for the end user unless he or she needs a specialized application that makes use of the newer APIs.
I'd rather go with something thats open-ish and stale than this controlled freakshow that is the iOS ecosystem.
Android in its present form is an uncontrolled freakshow. To test an Android app properly requires at least a dozen devices if not more, and even then you're only scratching the surface. You need a veritable museum at hand to be sure you've got it right.
What Apple's doing right is introducing new features and then aggressively pushing these down to the devices. iOS 5 is by far the majority of devices now, and very few are on anything under 4.
Android on the other hand seems perpetually stuck in 2.3 land. As you point out there's not much in the way of advantages if none of the apps are dependent on features introduced in 4.0. This further stalls the upgrade cycle.
To succeed Google is going to have to take a more active role and ensure that there's fewer conflicting interpretations of their standard, well-defined reference devices, and more urgency to get users to upgrade.
Going to a WWDC lab is basically the only way to guarantee an acknowledgement of a bug from Apple. Too bad it costs thousands of dollars and you have a 2 hour window in which to seize your chance.
There is no need to get emotional. It won't help anything and it just clutters the issue. Just mind you language and stick to the facts, we are all grownups here.
This was 100% deliberate. It's just some spin. The post gets more attention this way, which makes it more likely that the underlying problem will be fixed somewhat sooner.
Besides, with a headline like this it will also get automatic upvotes by everyone who dislikes Apple.
This is not a only blocking problem for HTML5 gaming. Chrome Canvas latency problem, Firefox canvas performance bug, HTML5 "poor" Audio, HTML5 "poor" video, Canvas "poor" API, SVG never works correctly, underestimated fragmentation cost, poor programming language (why the hell did they abandon ECMAScript 4?), when the hell can we use WebGL? etc...
People was complaining Flash was vendor lock-in. So kicked out Flash and now we are prisoners of fucking browsers. Kicked out poor Adobe, and Apple, Google and MS rules! Yay! Do you enjoy this?
I think plug-ins were clever, liberal and democratic software designing. We were able to choice the best technology we want to use (including Java Applet, Unity Web Player, Silverlight and even Shockwave). We were even able to develop our plug-ins freely. We had a freedom of programming language other than fucking JavaScript.
I feel people's enthusiasm for HTML5 is completely wrong. At least they should stop saying "HTML5 is a cool technology" "HTML5 is an open technology". COMPLETELY WRONG.
how could you not know that iOS is a closed garden ? Stop being complicit of this dangerous ecosystem. I understand that a lot of people have spent a decade or more in a very good relationship with Apple, swimming in wonderful hardware, nice frameworks and a helpful and friendly community, but it is finished now. This is not the Apple of today anymore.
Don't put spaces in front of question marks. If you're French, okay, you're forgiven. However, a regular space is still completely wrong and it will totally break word-wrapping.
Sorry, French here indeed. It is strange. I have made that mistake for several years when writing in English fora but recently, in the space of two months, I got several people making me noticed this. I am trying to lose this habit in English but why is it that this mistake is now fought more thoroughly? Has there been a particular event raising the awareness of this?
>Has there been a particular event raising the awareness of this?
Not that I know of. You probably just started hanging out with people who tend to complain about this kind of thing. I, for one, complain about this stuff because it's a defect I have to fix if I happen to see it in someone's copy.
It also might be a frequency illusion [1].
[1] The illusion in which a word, a name or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly appears "everywhere" with improbable frequency. Sometimes called "The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon".
It absolutely is intentional. And with that same intention Apple forbids other companies from writing web browsers that fix these and other issues with mobile Safari. Auto-playing audio and video in the browser is also forbidden, which prevents any sort of online music, or video app from being created, among other things.
So games, music, and video apps in mobile Safari are all hopelessly hobbled, and if you build a browser that fixes these issues you'll be banned.
"Auto-playing audio and video in the browser is also forbidden, which prevents any sort of online music, or video app from being created, among other things."
It also prevents MySpace. I consider that a Good Thing overall - I remember the period of the web where it was trivial to auto-play video and audio, and I remember that the consumer reaction to that was deeply hostile. HTML5 music/video apps certainly are an interesting thought, but you must consider what happens when you let random or malicious developers do those things too!
What are you talking about? How exactly is it malicious to build a game or build a music web app?
On desktops with Flash or the HTML5 Audio/Video API you can already do these things. I don't see anyone complaining that things like Youtube and Grooveshark are malicious, so why should iOS be sabotaged? Non-Apple devices like Android, and Playbook work just fine. You can build music, and video, and game web applications on those devices without these limitations, and it is not a problem. Apple simply wants a hobbled platform, to force all content through the iTunes store instead of over the internet.
It's not malicious to build a game or a music app. What I'm saying is that before you hand out tools to do that, you have to at least think about what else those tools can do. Microsoft has been repeatedly burned by this, cf Raymond Chen http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2005/06/07/42629... , and it's a very, very basic principle of platform/API design.
I argue that Apple's focus on the user experience, especially in the areas of responsiveness, battery life, and consistency with the general Apple design aesthetic, cause Apple to make choices here that you disagree with, but which aren't necessarily bad decisions.
"You can build music, and video, and game web applications on those devices without these limitations, and it is not a problem."
Actually it is a problem: Android malware exists, and I say that it proves my point: if you hand out capabilities without thinking through the consequences, it will come back and bite you.
The uses that you intend for tools are never the only possible uses of those tools.
That makes sense to me, as I read the article it sounded like he was saying that outside iOS he was locked in to Flash in the same way as he is locked in to HTML5 on iOS.
The iOS restriction is very real and enforced, there is nothing forcing people to use Flash for any popular platform.
However if you put it in terms of "if I want to use Flash, I'm forced into Adobe's implementation" then I can see that argument.
Flash was the standard. Sure, you could use something else, but that something else most likely worked for less viewers. And the plugin-gap is real -- asking users to install a plugin causes some users to skip and move on.
To ignore the previous ubiquity of Flash is absurd.
Just playing devil's debugger here: Are you SURE the bug is with Safari, and not related to something else in your code? In BioLab Disaster, for example, while it's true I can't RUN and press the JUMP button multiple times, I can definitely RUN and press the FIRE button multiple times.
Why would the FIRE button be immune to a bug in the browser? Any chance this is a timing issue in your own code, rather than a bug in the browser?
HTML5 is definitely not the only way to write a game for iOS. It seems glaringly obvious, but the OP could perhaps try writing their game as a native app.
Who else is affected by this bug. And by who else, I don't mean this one guy's customers / users. If the answer is no one else, or if no one else has reported it, then it's probably so far down the list as to be inconsequential. Which probably means the new guy on work experience gets to deal with it.
Not all bugs are fixed. There's only so many hours in the day, and some bugs are simply not worth fixing.
It's true that Apple might decide the bug isn't worth fixing, but then they should say that explicitly, so that devs don't have to file the bug a zillion times and wonder where it is on Apple's priority list. The issue here is really the lack of transparency. Bug reports shouldn't go into a black hole.
It's also not clear to me why you think no one else is affected by this bug. How many duplicates from other reporters have been closed? We have no way to know. Presumably others, though-- not every instance of an issue results in a front-page HN article.
I'm quite sure that this developer knows the difference. :)
Still, this does smell like it's a "feature", where the event is thrown away in an effort to prevent accidental touches or such. I imagine the bug is being ignored because of the difficulty of fixing it without removing the feature in question.
Alas, I suspect that Apple's secrecy harms their process as well as ours: they probably live in such a bubble that they don't see these bugs as being problems. And I really wish Android was a better HTML5 alternative, but it's been problematic as well, as evidenced by Sencha's HTML5 Scorecards (we'll see with Chrome on Jelly Bean).
To tell you the truth, I couldn't really see the bug in the video. It's probably just me. Since the bar every time eventually turned green in the video, I couldn't see the case when it does not turn green. Nor could I see the bug in the video game.
I am sure folks at Apple or regular game players will be able to tell.
I haven't reported bugs to Apple due to such problems, there's simply no incentive. Apple as a quality company has of course always been focused on hardware and third-party developers have traditionally provided high-quality apps.
Chrome uses Mobile Safari's "WebView" internally. It's the same browser engine - Apple doesn't allow other browser engines on iOS. So the bug is present in Chrome as well.
Perhaps they did use your page and perhaps it worked for them? Or perhaps your whiny tone made them disregard you as a serious witness, and so perhaps the problem is you. As other commenters point out you can't write clear instructions, what confidence should we have in your ability to write correct code?
I filed all the bug reports in a professional manner, without insults or swearing. I have a lot of respect for the engineers working at Apple, I just hate their company politics.
The blog post on the other hand was written in that manner to get public attention - which seems to have worked.
The code for the test case is about 20 lines of JavaScript. You don't have to trust me to write correct code, you can easily check it yourself.
The corporate overlords are not screening your bugs, the engineers are. Your mention that your bug got closed as a dup? And that the dup was closed as not being reproducible? It seems likely that either it wasn't really a dup or that the second bug didnt have steps that allowed it to be reproduced. In your case, I would think re submitting your as a new bug, referencing the other two, would probably bring some traction. Openradar is also an option for making your reports more public, and possibly getting more traction.
I believe you can also get public attention without resorting to such tactics. As much as I agree with your underlying position, I am sufficiently turned off by your tone and presentation that I, for example, would not go out of my way to ask anyone I might know at Apple what was up with the bug, or (of it were something I felt I could control) fix it myself. Your audience should not be people who will be riled up by vitriol: it should be other professional developers, and a larger internal-to-Apple community.
I wouldn't be surprised if other people at Apple now just feel insulted, and the people working on this problem likewise demoralized; all with the result that you are even /less/ likely to see a bug fixed in this project in a short period of time (and even if someone does "react" to this one, to be slightly more hostile and slightly less forgiving of your future bug reports, even of they are posed in a "professional manner", as they now "know better").
Despite all of the rightful moaning of iOS developers, for some reason they continue to flock to the Apple platform. Apple will continue to treat their developers like second class citizens until there is a financial incentive to do otherwise. Right now, when one pissed off developer leaves or goes bankrupt because their app was yanked from the store or wasn't approved for some BS reason, 50 developers replace him.