Are developers falling out of love with Apple?

Are developers falling out of love with Apple?

Wednesday 14 May 2025

After very nearly four years fighting Apple’s iOS monopoly, I’ve noticed a definite shift in the way that many developers regard Apple. When I first used to read comments on tech news reports of EU and UK attempts to regulate Apple, most were vehemently supportive of Apple’s closed ecosystem, App Store and lack of browser diversity. Now, most are disparaging. But the real sea-change has occurred in publications that have historically been very pro-Apple.

I’m not an Apple hater. I personally know at least a dozen good folks who work there (and I’m sure there are many more!). I’m writing this on an M1 Macbook Pro, which is a machine I love. I’m not interested in cars, but I can understand why my petrolhead friends think of my boring Honda in the same way as I feel about my brother’s crappy, clunky Windows laptop. I love my Macbook because it is *mine*, in a way that Apple deliberately designed iOS not to be. On my Mac, I can install and run any software on it, and remove programs I never use (mostly).

I’m not a lover of Apple, however – but that’s because I’m not a lover of brands. I love my Les Paul electric guitar, and also my Fender Telecaster; they’re for different things. I don’t care about brands of cars, clothes, running shoes, or any consumer objects. But I acknowledge that I’m in the minority, and many people feel an emotional connection with Apple.

Someone called Donna Galassi wrote in a representative article called Apple, Inc and Public Brand Perception:

Marketing experts all agree that Apple brand awareness has more to do with emotion and customer experience than their Macbook or iPhone products. The Apple brand supports creativity, imagination, innovation and design.

Apple marketing executive John Sculley is credited for helping make the company the largest computer manufacturer in the world and is also quoted as saying, “People talk about technology, but Apple was a marketing company. It was the marketing company of the decade.”

A year ago, Apple apologised after running an ad for its newest iPad that showed objects, including musical instruments and books, being crushed by a hydraulic press.

This alienated many of the creative people who had previously been core Apple lovers (as opposed to someone who loves one of their device’s utility etc). Hollywood Reporter wrote in Apple’s Soul-Crushing New Ad: Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?

“Crush,” in an incomprehensible twist of irony, is actually an advertisement for Apple, endorsed enthusiastically by CEO Tim Cook on Twitter. All of that destruction, it seems, is meant to promote the release of … a new, extra thin iPad, revealed when the clamps open back up. You can imagine the pitch: “All of human creation compressed into one impossibly sleek tablet.” But the end result feels more like: “All of human creation sacrificed for a lifeless gadget.”

Fast forward to the present. Apple was caught lying under oath in a court-case about reducing the huge commission that Apple takes from App developers. Those developers are the people who make the vibrant app ecosystem that is so important to Apple’s success, that it used the tagline “There’s an App for that”™ to market iPhones–and trademarked it.

Tech analyst Benedict Evans recently wrote

Apple thinks an awful lot about customer delight and customer satisfaction…

And separately, a whole other part of Apple treats its suppliers with quiet ruthlessness, squeezing them for every penny of margin.

And at some point Apple forgot that its developers are both customers and suppliers, and treated them like suppliers alone.

John Gruber writes a blog called Daring Fireball which, according to Wikipedia, “tends to cover Apple in a positive manner and defend Apple against criticism. Media outlets have described Gruber as an Apple “fanboy” in conjunction with his writing on the website; Gruber responded in a 2011 interview that although he does not use the term fanboy, he supports Apple because he appreciates the company”.

Of Evans’ critique that Apple forgot that its developers are both customers and suppliers, Gruber wrote in Developers as suppliers:

I’m quite certain that everyone at Apple, right up to Tim Cook, would swear up and down that Apple does value third-party developers and does not treat them like they do suppliers.

But ask iOS and Mac developers, small or large, whether they agree with Evans’s succinct summary above. I don’t know any who wouldn’t agree that Evans’s pithy take is largely, if not entirely, true. You’ll have to ask them in private, though, because, like Apple’s suppliers, they’re afraid to speak in public about the App Store.

On a site called TidBITS, that has the strapline “Thoughtful, detailed coverage of everything Apple for 35 years”, there’s a blogpost called Apple Should Align Its Corporate Behavior with Its Stated Values.

it’s difficult to see how users benefit when Apple charges high fees and restricts how developers can communicate. Those are just a few of the complaints developers have with the App Store, many of whom feel trapped in a system that prioritizes Apple’s profits over collaborative partnership.

That tension is increasingly undermining Apple’s reputation. In the eyes of many developers and a growing number of users, the same company that claims to be a champion of creativity and innovation is behaving more like a Gilded Age robber baron. Those roles aren’t always mutually exclusive—Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt combined monopolistic business practices with genuine social contributions—but with the kind of profits Apple is pulling in, the disconnect between the company’s narrative and its behavior is unnecessary and unhelpful.

There’s another website called Six Colors which provides daily coverage of Apple. It’s safe to say that it’s generally favourable to Apple; the name is explained “Back in the olden days, Apple’s logo featured a rainbow of six colors. Longtime Apple fans and employees used to say that if you cut them, they would “bleed six colors.””

Yet in a remarkable post called Can we still love Apple? Should we ever have?, Glenn Fleishman writes

I’m not sure I ever felt the sense of actual personal betrayal until Judge Rogers revealed in a scathing order that she had found not that Apple’s plan was merely egregious, but that “Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath.” …

From Tim Cook down, executives—Schiller excepted—have proven themselves unworthy of our trust. As shepherds of the company, they have revealed themselves. I may still love the concept of Apple, but certainly the company no more.

It seems to me that Apple’s reputation is at an inflection point. They may not have yet lost the support of iPhone end-users, but it’s fair to say that they gained a lot of those iPhone buyers because of the enthusiasm of the very creatives, developers and bloggers that Apple is alienating.

The question is what will Apple do? Of course, it should comply properly with regulators, it should reduce commissions, it should give developers choices of browser engines, payment mechanisms, app stores and the like.

But will it? Monopolisation and lock-ins generate vast rents for Apple, even while they burn goodwill. I think Apple has become so smug, and so complacent, so certain that it is beloved by creatives, designers and developers, that it can’t even countenance its traditional fans falling out of love with it. Apple will simply ignore this existential threat to their brand, so will lose it … having been regulated, anyway.

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