Recently, someone on Mastodon shared this video titled "Apple Changed..." by a guy named Theo who I'd never heard of, but according to his website he's a guy who "builds things". Apps, presumably. I had nothing better to do (sleepless night...) and I enjoy a good Apple bashing, so I watched the video. In it, Theo spends an hour ranting about how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store and in app purchases, how awful Xcode is as a development environment and how even as a developer you have to get Apple's approval to run your own app on your own device. And how you need a second device (MacBook) to build an app for your target device (iPad) because Apple won't allow you to build the app straight on the iPad itself. And a lot more.
I'm not an iOS developer (thank god), but I'm of course aware of Apple's restrictive policies when it comes to approving and running apps on their devices, and I have no doubt that everything he says in the video is true, and that it's really an abysmal experience developing for iOS, and that as a developer (and I'd argue as an Apple user, too) you're essentially trapped in an abusive relationship from which there seems to be no escape.
But as I watched this video I kept thinking, this guy is so rightfully angry and pissed off at Apple... and yet he's sitting in front of a brand new MacBook, a brand new iPhone and a brand new iPad.
He correctly points out towards the end of the video that the only thing that matters to Tim Cook is making more money for Apple. There's literally nothing else he cares about. Not your user experience, not the environment, and also not the mental health of children and teenagers using these devices, as much as he tries to pretend that he does. The only metric that matters to Apple is "number on spreadsheet go up". And so yes, Theo might make an hour long video about everything that he thinks sucks at Apple, and he may be right about all of it.
But he still gave them thousands of Dollars.
Apple wants his money, and he gave them exactly what they wanted. The fact that he's making angry videos is simply irrelevant to Apple, because they know that when the next iPhone or MacBook is released, he'll buy that too. So why would they change anything? Because he made an angry video? They might watch it some time when they're bored and need a good laugh, but then they'll go right back to making their devices even shittier for the end user and developer. Because they can. Because people keep buying them.
Like it or not, but if being the customer of a company starts to feel more like being in an abusive relationship rather than a mutually beneficial one, it's time to think about leaving. Yes, this is scary. It's painful. It requires sacrifice. And yes I know, the ecosystem. They lure you in with the promise of "everything just works", and once you're in, you can't leave, at least not without a great deal of pain. You know what that's called btw? A trap.
Leaving sucks. But there's no other way. As long as you keep throwing money at the corporations who treat you badly, why would they change?
This train of thought is heavily influenced by a post by Dave Rupert called "Double your business with companies you like" in which he argues that even though it might not feel like it, we as consumers do have an influence over which company thrives and which doesn't, because where we spend our money influences whose sales numbers go up and whose go down. In the world of tech this is not easy of course because there are a lot of huge and shady corporations out there, and they have an enormous amount of power. But there are still alternatives.
Apple might still try to present themselves as the underdog whose products are for the people who "think different", but they're not anymore, and they haven't been for a long time. They're the evil megacorporation now, and it's time to leave them behind and go to find the real underdogs to support.