tl;dr: In spite of my usual pessimistic outlook I am inspired to work on new things.
Apple just wrapped up their annual developer conference, WWDC. Over the years it’s become a bit more consumer focused but they do still show you the new frameworks they are releasing along with improvements and fixes to things.
It’s always hard to resist the reality distortion field and just be blown away by what is shown during WWDC. I see many posts heralding the new technologies as amazing. This is often before anyone has even tried any of it.
This is the influencer/media culture we live in. The people posting this stuff don’t care if any of it works as presented by Apple they just want the clicks and the ad revenue so they will generate 87 articles repeating what is essentially Apple press releases. This will happen all across the tech sphere and you are likely to be overwhelmed with similar reports.
Much of this stuff may work just as it was presented and I have heard good reports about things like the new Siri AI. Apparently what it does is impressive and if you want to ignore the fact that to use this tech we need to destroy the planet, steal from creators, take away peoples jobs and enrich some pretty horrible people along the way it seems pretty neat!
Unfortunately if you are not being enriched by the AI slop gravy train you may be underemployed or worse and your current fleet of devices won’t even run the latest, greatest stuff.
For many of us small indie devs we make our actual living (when we do) from consulting work, developing software for other people according to their needs. When we do the real “indie” work it’s usually on some passion project that may never see more users than ourselves.
In a perfect world other people would appreciate our niche offerings and if they could find our apps in the store and not rebel against the scandalous $2.99 price tag they might purchase something. It’s the current reality. We live with it.
But if you can get past the myriad of caveats surrounding AI tech, why would you even bother to add these features to your apps? You may not be able to use the fancy new stuff until you drop a boatload of money on hardware. I know, personally, that boat has been delayed in arriving lately.
This feels a lot like another bullet point in the “haves” vs “have nots” world we live in. The group of “haves” seems to be getting smaller all the time but they seem to be enriching themselves in leaps and bounds while the rest of us try to survive.
Oh and last week Apple put out a press release saying developers were “thriving.” Statistics may say that but statistics lie. Sure the App Store may payout huge sums to some developers but the vast majority probably only earn enough to cover their yearly developer account, if that. Again “haves” and “have nots.”
The older I get and the longer I do this development work I realize time is short and we may not get to all the things we want to do in life. So when we are forced to wait yet another year for some fixes to a framework we’ve been trying to use for several yearly cycles already it can be disappointing to say the least.
You may even notice that Apple’s goals (or more correctly their shareholders) don’t necessarily align with your own.
If you’ve done anything beyond creating sample app level things you’ve probably found missing features or bugs in Apple’s frameworks. You may have even reported things only to be ignored. For years.
You may suffer from the questions of users who saw all of Apples magnificent marketing and expect all apps to offer all these wonderful new features. These users won’t want to hear that those features are not available to non-Apple apps or they just don’t work correctly or the dozens of other reasons why you can’t “just” add that new shiny stuff.
Many developers come away from WWDC inspired to work on new things or improve their current apps.
Strangely. I too am motivated and inspired. I have many long planned features I want to add to my stable of apps but prior to WWDC I was holding off on some, waiting for possible fixes or improvements to things.
Now I know those things are not coming for at least another year. So it’s time to get to work on the things I’ve been mulling over, some for a year or longer, to work around things that simply don’t work or don’t work well enough to ship to users.
Unlike past years there is no clear Apple mandated work. Thank god. I can focus on what I want to build without having to adopt my code to an ill conceived UI update that will be semi-discarded the following year. So glad with most of my apps I simply ignored Liquid Glass.
This is liberating in a way. Apple, our great lord and savior, is not coming to save us. That 15 line sample code from the video that shows amazing things happening with SwiftData isn’t going to work and you’re going to have to create a ViewModel and some supporting code to get the correct result.
It can be done, but the fancy videos implied it was magic. It’s never magic. It’s always someone else’s code. And someone else’s code can always be a problem. So write your own code and move on.
In my own work, I avoid third party dependencies and, thus far I don't use AI coding tools. I like to code and I despise relying on others to do it for me. Especially when 97% of the time it ends in disappointment if you live with it long enough.
So I’ve come to the point, post-WWDC, that I am resolved to solve my own problems and not look for solutions that are not coming. They might come in a few years if enough people care or they may never come. Doesn’t matter.
I have things I want to build. I can build them. I wish it was more magic than hard work. That’s life. Time to do the work.
