Apple’s New Attitude Towards Developers: Complacency

Will they succeed in alienating developers?

I’m a software developer and I’ve been using a Mac for 15 years, when I got my first Mac running OSX Tiger 10.4. Throughout this time, professionally or not, I’ve been building full-stack apps with a variety of technologies, including JavaScript, Go, and PHP; for a while, I also worked on iOS and macOS apps, written in Objective-C (that was before Swift came to be). Throughout multiple MacBook, I’ve been happy with the tools and supports Apple has offered me, directly (macOS and its UNIX foundations, XCode) or by creating a platform others built on: interpreters and compilers for all languages, Visual Studio Code, etc.

Then came 2020, and for the first time I’m starting to feel like Apple has begun to fail developers like me.

Their latest actions scream of hubris and complacency towards the large number of professional developers that depend on their products and ecosystems. Not to mention, some of them might actually prove illegal.

The transition to Apple Silicon

There are three ways I think Apple is failing us developers, and I want to start with the most technical one. Earlier this year, Apple announced that their Mac line is transitioning away from Intel…