One of the big Qs from pundits before the DMA was ‘what are all these 'great' apps we're missing out on because of Apple's App Store restrictions, and do they even exist?’.
Mere days after a major App Store rules change, @delta (which has been denied for years), is the top app on the App Store.
For every Delta, there are a thousand great apps that were simply never started because they would never fly. Dreams that never left the whiteboard, market segments that were never given chance to exist
Some simple categories of apps that can't realistically exist on the iOS/iPadOS/visionOS App Store off the top of my head (there will be rare, hoop-jumping exceptions, of course):
• Virtualization tools & VMs
• Emulators or language runtimes that require JIT
• Compilers & IDEs that can deploy locally
• Disk management tools
• Backup and recovery software
• Screen sharing & remote control
• Any software with a plugin model for extensibility (like most pro apps)
• System shell replacements
@stroughtonsmith Not that I disagree but minus the remote control part, isn't screen sharing pretty good? I like how it needs a proper per use permission rather than the very slow adoption of new apis on macos
Many of Apple's apps, like Playgrounds, simply could not be built by any third party developer.
Playgrounds uses all kinds of special entitlements, JIT, and system access so that it can compile apps using Swift, run them locally, and deploy them to the homescreen. An insurmountable competitive advantage vs any other third-party developer tool on the platform.
(And Playgrounds is provided for free, which makes it pretty hard to compete with even if you did have all the same features)
@stroughtonsmith As someone who has built tools like that (processing.org), it drives me insane that it's not possible for a third party to really build something like Playgrounds. Such an incredible waste.
And having used the Mac since the original 128K, I've watched how Apple's dev tools have always been outdone by third parties (Lightspeed C vs MPW, later Metrowerks, etc…) and it's frustrating that they lock down their platform this way.
(Interface Builder, as inherited from NeXT was briefly an exception, but it's long since outlived its usefulness.)
If you want to talk about walled garden lock-in, Playgrounds goes full circle:
It is the only real developer tool you can use on iOS and it only supports Swift. So it (intentionally or unintentionally) leverages Apple's market power to juice Swift and SwiftUI (at the expense of any other language or development environment), which leads you as a learner straight into Apple development, the App Store, Apple's ruleset, yearly account fees and giving 15/30% of your future revenue to Apple
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