The biggest problem with IE from a developer standpoint wasn't the slow feature release cadence, it was that the features it did have worked differently from standards-based browsers. That's very much the position of Safari/WebKit today - code that works across all other engines throws errors in WebKit and often requires substantial changes to resolve.
Safari is also pretty popular on iPhones, in fact it has a full 100% market share. With browser updates tied to the OS, that means millions of devices have those "temporary" problems baked in forever.
When IE was the Emperor it was seen as IE's behaviors were the standards. The perspective at the time was that the other browsers were non-standard. That did get codified into the standards eventually. `* { box-sizing: border-box; }` that is towards the top of almost every "reset.css" is CSS standard for "use the IE box model". XHR was named XmlHttpRequest as an IE quirk and that set the standard we still mostly follow today; `fetch` is a nicer API but we still colloquially call it a part of/relative to/replacement for XHR including various browsers' Dev Tools where to focus on `fetch` requests you click the XHR tab.
Both of those things (and others) became "standards" when IE was moving quickly and breaking things. It took a while for the actual multi-browser standards to catch up. XHR took a few years to show up in non-IE browsers. CSS `box-sizing` wasn't added to the CSS standards until 2012 (11 years after IE6 was released, the "last" version of IE for a long time; five years without a new version). A lot of the web was built easier on those things or better with those things which lead to so many people using IE up to IE6 as their primary browser and so many developers building IE-only websites up to IE6.
Again, as a developer it can be easy to remember the pain of still supporting IE6 in 2005 (five years before tools like `box-sizing` made it a lot easier to support similar CSS for both IE and non-IE browsers, and a year before IE7 finally broke the "IE6 is the last IE" problem). It seems a lot harder to remember why we were still supporting a "dead"/"final" IE6 in 2005 or still supporting a "dead"/"final" IE6 in 2012 when IE10 was fresh and new and very standards compliant (including supporting both `box-sizing` modes) but not yet winning over the crowds of legacy sites: everyone was using IE6 until Microsoft killed it. A lot of things were built for its version of "standards" (many of which were better/easier to develop for versus their contemporary real standards) and couldn't be easily upgraded until the real standards also caught up to how fast IE had been innovating/changing/upgrading the standards.
The risk to the web platform that I think IE represents the most cautionary tale about is relying too much on the browser rushing ahead of the standards, because it could stop at any moment and may take a decade or more for the standards to truly catch back up. Because they did.
If Google decided today to do a "The Browser Company-style pivot" because the Age of AI means that browsers are dead, everything a browser can do should be done through agentic automation, and asked all of the Chrome team to switch to some new agentic harness or accept a soft layoff, how much work would there be to move websites out of being "Chrome-only" or built on top of Chromium? (Which to be further unfair is also sort of what feels like is already left of Microsoft's Edge team working in Chromium today.) It's real easy to imagine that hypothetical, I already named two companies working with Chromium that have just about done exactly that. The hypothetical is not that far from the inside baseball of what happened to IE6 where Microsoft thought browsers were "done" and pivoted the IE team to new roles on "higher priority" Windows work and/or soft layoffs.
We remember the pain of having to support older versions of IE pretty well, but not enough of us seem to remember the pain of how we got to that point and how easy it feels like companies could do that to the web again. Safari lagging current standards is a relatively smaller problem compared to if Chrome gets burnt we suffer another "internet dark age" of supporting ancient browsers for a decade or two due to legacy apps and in turn legacy users that don't or won't upgrade.
(Some would argue that can't happen in the same way that IE did because Chromium is open source and already has many forks. I can't help up but bring up examples like the word "diaspora" and the tale of "the Tower of Babel" that a messy soup of forks that no one can agree on as the new "standard" can be its own slow train wreck disaster.)
I guess if your business is to make urns, then your innovation ideas all center around urns. For Spotify, it's ... more questionable, but I can't imagine it was their idea.
But yeah, I agree with your sentiment, it's pretty weird.
Oh, wow, what a misguided assumption on my part then.
So, I guess it's more along the lines of "when your business is weirdly named water, you come up with weird products" which, actually, kinda makes more sense.
Just cancelled my subscription, which was due for renewal a few days after the change takes effect. I can live with vaults being read-only while I find a (self-hosted) alternative.
It's only a matter of time before the entire YouTube catalog transitions to DRM-encrypted video that you can only watch on Google-sanctioned devices. They're probably doing the math on how to make the platform at least as profitable with a drastically lower DAU count, since alienating users now seems to be their top priority.
But what about my banking app! I think it’s only fair Apple take 30% on every transaction I make. After all they put in a huge amount of work validating and making sure my banking app is safe and functional.
Edit: Maybe I am greedy now, but it would be nice if large transactions like say buying a house only would cost me a 15% transaction fee to Apple.
Developers are a tricky market for this because they could realistically move to different platforms if stuff like this started to happen. Or at least work on remote machines.
If gaming on Macs ever became popular though this would be a real risk.
I'm not sure Claude Code is making enough for Apple to take notice & drastically alter their CLI like that? CC has 100-150k users across all platforms, paying $200-1200/yr each. Even if every developer is on the top tier Max plan, and on MacOS, that's $180mn in revenue at Anthropic. So even in the most optimistic scenario, that's only ~$50mn revenue for Apple at a 30% take.
That pales in comparison to the hardware & subscription revenues Apple brings in by being a dev-friendly OS.
Claude code reached $1B in six months in early Dec and given what I am seeing on ground, I wouldn't be surprised if just in last 2 months after that their revenue grew by double.
> Wouldn’t be surprised if macOS starts locking down CLI tools towards an App Store model too.
The day that happens is the day Apple sees a mass exodus of developers to Linux, I don't think they'd be that stupid. They enjoy enough goodwill right now as the platform of choice (vs. Windows for those that don't want to run desktop Linux), I can't imagine they'd casually just throw that away.
We're talking about the company that abandoned CUDA, OpenCL and Vulkan mere moments before they were killer technologies. If Apple wanted to phase-out Homebrew, I genuinely think most of the community would nod in unison and switch to developing in UTM. Mac owners are nothing if not flexible.
Yeah no, as a Mac and Linux user, I would seize buying Mac hardware and buy exclusively Linux if they took down Homebrew from being usable. At that point a Mac is no longer a Unix system.
The Mac is barely a UNIX system to begin with. It doesn't ship with UNIX compliance out-of-the-box, and nobody complains. You're likely the minority here.
If Apple locked Homebrew behind SIP or some other inconvenience, it would just result in more virtualization. The default Mac environment hasn't followed industry standards for more than a decade, most professionals are doing their work in a VM already. Truth be told, even Apple wants you to stop compiling software locally in the long-run: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
If Claude Code was in the Mac App Store, they would have signed an agreement to do so (offer an in-app purchase option and Apple gets a 30% cut of subscriptions for the first year, 15% after that).
They would also be sandboxed such that the app wouldn't have access to the level of system integration it needs.
I would expect also that there is a broader revenue sharing agreement for both being a system-integrated search engine and "world knowledge" chatbot (Google and OpenAI being the respective defaults)
For me personally, I have used this method to spend my Apple gift cards purchased on a discount. Effectively I got a Claude subscription at 15% off. (You could argue this only works because OpenAI/Anthropic charge the same price across web/mobile, and I agree.)
So, as much as I despise Apple's business model, in some sense I have directly benefitted from it (other than stock price).
You joke, but legally they could. If game engines can charge a licence fee as a % of revenue from games developed on those engines, then legally there's not much to stop apple doing the same. Of course consumers and enterprises wouldn't tolerate it, but the barrier is commercial rather than legal.
I've long believes that the requirement to use in-app purchasing was to make such revenue sharing easier to audit - if you can only use Apple's payment system to do certain things (or else your app isn't approved), then Apple doesn't have to worry about things like audits.
Since various countries have regulated the ability to do third party payments from apps, Apple has since added API to launch said payments, to help generate statistics on use so that they can then demand third party auditing that the commissions are still being properly paid.
In the US there was a court decision that they couldn't meter or charge commission, which may very well be walked back and will lead to lots of fun future articles.
What is absurd is finding yourself paying 30% on every digital item purchased on a smartphone app. It would never even occur to us that Microsoft takes a 30% margin on Steam, yet that is what happens on webtoon apps.
Let me clarify. Microsoft did not approach Valve and say "give us 30% or else." Valve saw that Microsoft was moving in the same direction of Apple where their devices would be locked down and only run software from their store, felt threatened, and decided they couldn't remain tied to that ecosystem.
Microsoft don't really have an equivalent to iOS so let's compare oranges to oranges: macOS vs Windows.
On macOS, Apple don't take a 30% cut on Steam purchases. Steam take 30% however.
There's a big difference - when you develop an app for iOS or macOS, using Apple's APIs, platform and app store tech, it's reasonable to pay Apple something and they legally can charge.
I don't actually have an opinion on whether 30% or 15% is too much or not. It's factually wrong or illogical arguments that bother me: how can we fight anything when the arguments are just nonsensical.
Apple make plenty of user-hostile decisions, but people need to criticise them reasonably, otherwise they will be ignored by those that might have the influence to change things for the better.
> when you develop an app for iOS or macOS, using Apple's APIs, platform and app store tech, it's reasonable to pay Apple something
Is it?
We spent several decades of the PC world, MSDOS and Windows, with zero platform license fees or approvals. This was hugely beneficial for innovation, and this is why everyone hates the sudden rise of platform landlordism.
You're perfectly entitled to distribute a macOS app with your own paywall, the same as ever. Nothing has changed from that perspective.
Rent-seeking on SaaS platforms is far worse I think, e.g. $30 per month for 10GB of data in a recent offering I was looking at, and who knows where the data are. Some datacenter in a foreign land with a mad king probably.
Remember when software was sold in a box with a paper manual in a store? Before App Store and steam, retailers and publishers of games and software also took their share of the revenue from the work software developers created.
Their cut wasn’t small.
If the government stepped in to regulate the sales of software (to protect developers and consumers?) do you think:
A) apps will cost less
B) the government won’t want their cut
Yeah but there was a big difference: As a developer you could opt out of that distribution and go your own way. I knew people who sold floppies out of their garage. IBM or whoever made your hardware, and Microsoft or whoever made your OS, could not prevent your users from installing your software on their machine.
Gov't taking a cut from tha App store is already happening [1] and it's a legitimate concern unlike the concept of Apple taking cuts from people's salary (LOL).
It would likely get voided as unconscionable if they just unilaterally demanded it, but it might hold up in specific circumstances (if the user is well-aware of the salary demand when they accepted the contract, and the user gets some proportionate value out of giving Apple a percentage of salary).
If Apple can legally claim 30% of your salary then a doctor using an iPad to demonstrate results of a scan to a patient has to pay Apple 30% of their consultation fee.
> If Apple can legally claim 30% of your salary then a doctor using an iPad to demonstrate results of a scan to a patient has to pay Apple 30% of their consultation fee.
Apple could absolutely do this. They could say that professional medical use of macOS requires a commercial license, and the price of that commercial licence could be linked to revenue.
Doctors - or rather their hospital IT/procurement departments - would be held to the terms of service they agree to. Far more rigorously than ordinary consumers.
If that were legally enforcable, which is almost certainly not the case, Microsoft and Google could do the same, making your argument moot in this context.
Every software company can do this. Oracle Java is free for personal use but if you use it in prod you have to pay a licence based on the number of employees in your company. Epic games takes 5% of your revenue above a million if you use unreal for a game. Docker desktop requires a paid license if you have over 250 employees or $10 million in revenue.
Absolutely, if the taxi driver signs a contract / agrees to terms of service. What law prohibits them from charging that? This is why open source is so important.
It made sense in the early days, phone operators were charging up to 90% for the infrastucture to send an SMS, and get a download link to a J2ME/Windows CE/Pocket PC/Symbian/Palm/Blackberry download link to install the app.
So everyone raced to the iOS app store, it was only 30%, what a great deal!
The problem is that two decades later it is no longer that great deal in mobile duopoly world.
It's kind of interesting that while the structure is largely the same, the underlying behaviour/intent has morphed from a disruptor-model into being toxic rent-seeking behaviour.
Isn't it strictly worse that they're already thinking they're entitled to 30% of your salary because your clients use Apple hardware? You can change what you use, you can't change what they use.
All the regulators in the world have their sights set on them and they know it. The light is half on already and the music is slowing. This party is soon to be over. It's a last ditch attempt at milking all they can.
Stuff like this is ironic but I do think it's escape hatches like this that will make these tech companies, if they ever go down, go down kicking and screaming. Any platform holder that ever finds themselves in a bad place financially will 100% pull all the levers like this.
30% of profit from stock sales initiated on Apple hardware should automatically go to Apple. Because why not. It's a digital sale, there is no physical goods changing hands. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. /s
Safari is also pretty popular on iPhones, in fact it has a full 100% market share. With browser updates tied to the OS, that means millions of devices have those "temporary" problems baked in forever.
reply