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October 28, 2015

4 Reasons Why Microsoft is Better for Developers than Apple

Microsoft is better for developers than Apple. I know this sounds like heresy in this new Apple-centric world, but it's true. Furthermore, it isn't even close. Here are 4 reasons why:

1) There are more Microsoft devices and they are worth more

It may be that if you add up all the iPhones, iPads, and Macs in the world, you get a larger number than the number of Windows PCs (or Windows devices not including mobile devices that don't run regular Windows). But the sheer numbers don't matter, it is how many devices there are factored by how much money a developer could reasonably make by selling a copy of their software to the user of that device. When that is considered, Windows wins. By a lot. A developer can make a lot more money by selling software to a Windows device compared to a iPhone, or an iPad, and even a Mac, although the Mac price might be close. But there are still a lot more Windows PCs than Macs. And a developer makes far less selling to iPhones and iPads. Even if there are more of them, it doesn't matter. Prices are so much lower on those devices that it doesn't matter how many of them there are. Windows is where the money is as far as software is concerned and this was true 20 years ago, true 10 years ago, and still quite true today.

(As an aside, Android is even worse than iOS on this comparison. Per device, you can't hardly make anything selling software on Android devices, far less than even the small amount iOS makes).

2) You don't pay a 30% Apple tax to sell to Windows PCs

To sell on the Apple AppStore, Apple takes 30% of the price of every app that sells. While Microsoft has a AppStore on Windows, it is not the primary way software is sold on Windows. You can sell on Windows without paying the 30% you have to pay to Apple.

You can sell on a Mac without paying the Apple tax as well, but again there are far fewer Macs than PCs. The Mac at least avoids this tax, so a developer can make a business selling Mac software without the Apple tax. But not paying that 30% makes a huge difference in revenue between the platforms.

3) You don't have to get your Windows apps approved

When you sell on the Apple AppStores on iOS and Mac, you have to submit your apps to Apple and get them approved. Apple can, and will, reject an app for any reason. They will even reject apps for no reason at all. Even if you do get an app approved, it takes about a week in the best times, and can take a month or more if you have to deal with rejections along the way.

On Windows, you just upload a new version to your web site and you are done. No reviewers, no rejections, no delays. Much easier.

4) Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility

Microsoft cares a lot about backwards compatibility. When they release a new version of Windows, they make sure that applications that ran on previous versions of Windows still work. Of course, there may be an application here or there that gets broken by a new version of Windows, but by and large everything works, and for a long time. You can still run Windows 3.1 applications from 20 years ago on 32 bit Windows 10. You can even still run many old DOS applications from the 1980s. In Windows, old stuff just works.

On the Mac, you are lucky if an application from 5 years ago still works on the latest OS X. On iOS, you are lucky if an application from last year still works on the latest iOS. Apple not only doesn't care about backwards compatibility, they seem to go out of their way to deliberately break older applications. It's like it is company policy to do it.

This is why Apple has never really caught on with business users and why it never will (unless they change their ways). Businesses require that the applications work for a long period of time. For example, I recently was in a computer store and the store's point of sale application was running in a DOS box on Windows XP. In 2015. And the biggest irony? It was a store primarily for Apple products.

Because of these reasons, developing for Windows is simply a better choice for developers than developing for Apple OS X or iOS. And with the rise of Windows 10, it looks like this is going to continue for awhile.

Posted by Thomas Warfield on October 28, 2015 at 09:07 AM in Goodsol News | Permalink | Comments (2)

October 27, 2015

Our Descent into App Store Hell - Best Regards from Apple

On September 15th Apple released iOS 9, the new version of the iPad/iPhone operating system. Later that day, we started to get reports that our iPad games were crashing on iOS 9.

This was odd and it was working fine on my iPads. It is common for apps to break when Apple releases a new iOS version. This should not happen, but Apple simply doesn't care about backwards compatibility - it is simply not a priority for them. If anything gets broken, they just expect the developer to fix it. This adds a huge burden to app developers on the iOS platform, but that's a topic for another blog post.

In the past we've been pretty lucky, we've never had a major issue with our apps and new OS versions before. Anyway, it quickly became clear that this time was different.

After collecting some crash reports from users who had the problem (Apple's own crash reporting system turned out to be useless), a pattern emerged: all the of the crashes were happening on 4th generation iPad models. We managed to get access to an iPad of this model and was able to duplicate the crash.

All of this took a few days and then within a couple of days we'd figured out the problem - a line of code that should be fine was crashing the 4th generation iPads and the 4th generation iPads only. What made these iPads different, we didn't know. But it didn't matter, because it was a simple thing to just change the line of code and stop the crashes.

So all we had to do was change the one line of code, rebuild the apps, resubmit, and wait a week for Apple to approve them (because it takes Apple a week on average to review submitted apps). A pain in the butt to be sure, but pretty routine.

So all 5 of our apps got the fix, got submitted, and we wait.

Then the first app got reviewed and rejected. The rejection was bizarre - it said the app wouldn't load on either an iPad running iOS 9 or an iPhone. The app is iPad only, so why would they even be testing it on an iPhone? And the app loaded and ran fine on every iPad we tested it on (which by this point had grown to quite a few as we had added more iPads to our testing). As the week went on, the other 4 apps got rejected for the same reason.

We asked Apple why they were testing an iPad only app on iPhones, but we got no reply to that question. Our first thought is that something had gone wrong in XCode (the development platform for iOS apps). So first we tried rebuilding in a different version of XCode. No luck. In all, we built on 3 different versions of XCode and made 10 submission attempts, all getting the same result (with just enough difference in the results to make everything confusing - sometimes the app reviewer would say it froze on startup, sometimes the splash screen would show), but always with the bizarre statement that it was tested on iPhones as well as iPads. After the first rejections I found out there is a way to get apps reviewed faster, I applied for that and it got approved, so after the first week wait, the next submissions got reviewed within a day or so.

We tried everything we could think of, nothing worked. We tried making a Tech Support Incident with Apple to try to get someone not the app reviewer to look at the problem, but we had no luck there. At this point, we were getting into all kinds of details about the testing process, about looking at build UUIDs to make sure they matched what Apple was testing, possibilities of XCode issues with plist files, all sorts of stuff that got us exactly nowhere.

Throughout it all, it just seemed like this iPhone thing was the key to it all, unless it was just boilerplate text that a lazy reviewer put in (most of the app rejection text was simply boilerplate text, so it was hard to tell if they were really trying to test on iPhones or if it was just part of their form letter).

Finally, after more than a month (by now it was October 24th), after the latest rejection, we asked again, why are you saying you are testing an iPad only app on iPhones? Why is a one line of code fix causing so much trouble? Perhaps I worded it differently this time, or maybe it went to a different person at Apple who actually knew something.

Anyway, this time, suddenly, the reply was that they looked at it again and there is no problem, it is being put into review again, best regards from Apple. And it went into review and was immediately approved.

So after more than a month of late nights, endless testing and submissions, we have no idea why the approval was delayed for more than a month. We were just caught in some sort of Apple review trap, and somehow got free. The build that got approved was essentially the same as the first one submitted over a month earlier.

Best regards from Apple.

The full as-it-happened saga is detailed here.

Posted by Thomas Warfield on October 27, 2015 at 09:07 AM in Goodsol News, Indie Games | Permalink | Comments (3)