> the platform that developers want to support is the one that wins.
This is very hard to believe. Developers hate apple, facebook, and countless other platforms that are doing very well. Adoption is the fundamental problem, not what developers want to support. The platform with the most users is what people will develop for.
This is pretty clearly not the case. Apple and Facebook are companies, not platforms. The platforms these companies develop are wildly successful and loved by developers.
I think you may be too focused on how developers decide a platform that is already successful. In that case, yes, which one is already adopted the most deserves strong consideration. However, when it comes to actually achieving adoption, it’s the platform that developers flock to that tend to succeed, all else being equal. We are talking about relatively fresh terrain here. There isn’t already a huge federated system like this that has a lot of mainstream adoption.
> However, when it comes to actually achieving adoption, it’s the platform that developers flock to that tend to succeed, all else being equal.
Perhaps, but I struggle to think of two comparable platforms with similar user adoption and significantly different developer interest, outside of there being different sets of developers that hate/love each (c.f. iOS and Android). I'm definitely not aware of any examples indicating a platform can be saved or damned by developers loving/hating it: e.g. most developers hated developing for the PS3 initially but it didn't fare badly in the console wars. Xbox One however did do much worse than the PS4 because fewer users wanted it.
Arguably, Linux owning the back end development space so completely is due to developer preference.
But I think you do have a point. It's not just developer preference, there are other big factors like feature offered and ease of entry that determine likelihood of success.
completely agree. i'm just saying it mostly isn't found on the desktop, neither on the iphone and you could argue neither really on android, so not in places where 'normal people' look. these people don't look at the backend so developers are free to pick whatever they want - Linux, Windows, unikernels, it doesn't matter for the end user.
Windows Phone is a platform that died cause developers did not get it. I think the issue I have with your PS3 example is that it is PS3, PlayStation was already on its third iteration. With PS2 being one of the most successful consoles of all time, companies were baked into that ecosystem. Whatever Playstation gave them, they had to work with, they fed their families that way. But I agree with the comment above. Developers support platforms (That are not yet popular) because they find it inspiring, they, in turn, give feedback to what they dislike about the platform, and if the platform has good management and responds quickly, developers work to grow that platform out. All great platforms I know today are because the company behind them inspired developers on what they could achieve using it.
I suspect this is reversing causality. Developers flock to the platform that is succeeding.
This is true of most things. Applicants flock to the industry that is hiring the most. It would be nice if the industry hiring the most was the most worthy, but that is doubtful. Consider mining communities.
I think you may be in a bubble. Many developers like apple, and facebook enough to work for them. In fact, its that which keeps both platforms viable in the face of stiff competiton and shallow moats.
Facebook has a shallow moat? People only use it at all because of the network effect.
And Apple's main draw is the large number of affluent customers. They'll have developers as long as they have those users, whether the developers like it or not. Which is why they can get away with charging 30% to developers when platforms have historically given incentives to developers to develop for their platform.
That is a bit circular to say developers like Apple because they like money, thus Apple is not truly liked for itself.
Apple was successful in building a platform because it's in house developers were capable of putting together something that was popolar with many people. They built on that to make more money by allowing other developers to use their platform.
However two things come to mind:
1. Competency is not a moat. If Apple loses developers it's next product will not be so much better than competition that it's success will maintain against erosion.
2. For all people talk about associating with necessary evils; when you associate with someone long enough, you begin to think they are not evil. Thus it seems reasonable to think developers do not hate Apple, if they work with Apple.
> That is a bit circular to say developers like Apple because they like money, thus Apple is not truly liked for itself.
It's almost as if users patronize Comcast because they like internet access and Comcast is not truly liked for itself. It's almost as if drivers patronize the DMV because they like driving without being arrested and the DMV is not truly liked for itself.
There is a big difference between needing something and liking it.
> Apple was successful in building a platform because it's in house developers were capable of putting together something that was popolar with many people. They built on that to make more money by allowing other developers to use their platform.
But who are they to be allowing anything? GE makes a fine electrical distribution panel but that doesn't mean they get to decide what kind of lamp or microwave or laptop I can use with it.
> 1. Competency is not a moat. If Apple loses developers it's next product will not be so much better than competition that it's success will maintain against erosion.
Network effects are a moat. Apple had the first mover advantage, so they had the initial users and the developers follow the users. Then the users stay because the developers are there and the developers have no choice but to stay if they want access to those users.
The users could switch to Android -- most of them already have. But the developers can't make the remaining users move outside of some sufficiently large organized boycott, which are notoriously difficult to effectuate because of the coordination problem.
> 2. For all people talk about associating with necessary evils; when you associate with someone long enough, you begin to think they are not evil. Thus it seems reasonable to think developers do not hate Apple, if they work with Apple.
By this logic the most beloved entity in the country should be the IRS. And if people had to file four times a year instead of once they would like them even more.
"Most developers are just normal people makin' stuff because their company pays them to."
And normal people do have feelings. So they like or love the things they do, or despise or even hate them.
Unless they became mindles zombies along the way.. which happens, but much more common is rather that they project all the other negative feelings into technology X or Y ... at least it often seems like this, when I read another rant about the technology Z.
It isn't about ideology it is about ease and quality.
Facebook is legendary for introducing breaking changes to their API without warning, for having terrible documentation, baroque and inconsistent APIs, flaky behaviour and broken examples.
Whatever you think of Facebook the company, Facebook the API is something everyone I know has horror stories about.
I really dislike this HN generalization that software developers are a big mass of people that think all the same way, which most of the time is actually a synomim for a thin subgroup of developers doing web applications with CLI tooling on UNIX like OSes.
There are many kinds of developers out there, some of us have experienced multiple kinds of platforms and development models towards the years, to make our business decisions how to provide our work according to points of view and related cost/benefit.
I remember when Facebook was very developer-friendly (2006-ish). Significantly different experience at the time developing applications for FB vs Myspace and the lesser social networking platforms of the age.
Apples and Oranges. Your analysis is after the fact, and those arenas aren't open development environments. Adoption follows content creation. Not every time, but the essence of the sentiment 'build it and they will come,' shouldn't be dismissed.
I’m not sure I follow developers hating Apple when 99% of the engineers I see use an apple laptop.
As to facebook, we’ll see if it survives. There’s not much to use it for aside from advertising as a platform, and I’ve heard nothing but negatives about return on ads.
Most developers I know use MacBooks, my own staff included.
Most JS developers quite like stuff like react, and most api developers like graphQL. So while developers may dislike Facebook as a company, they don’t seem to dislike Facebook tools.
I don’t think the platform that developers like will necessarily take of though.
When I was 20 years younger most developers I knew loved Linux. So maybe she plays in. I know I left gentoo for a Mac in 2006 and I’ve never looked back.
I don’t dislike Linux by the way, I just don’t want to spend time configuring things anymore.
Gentoo was certainly a terrible fit, but I've had my runs with Debian, ubuntu and fedora as well, and it somehow always ends up being configuration hell, which then breaks with some random update, prompting me to do it all over.
These days it's more than that though. I mean, I'm completely drenched in the apple eco-system, and it's kind of nice to get iMessages on my MacBook and sharing data between devices so easily. I now I could setup something similar with stuff like own cloud, but then I'd have to do that, instead of it just working out the box.
Like I said, I don't dislike linux. I've never really disliked an OS until windows 10, but I just don't bother with technology that isn't designed for user experience anymore.
Like my first smartphone was an android, I don't think I'll ever own an android phone again. :p
Why would you ask such a weird question? Is Apple an all-encompassing, lifetime sect? all or nothing? I like developing on my MacBook but I hope to God I will never have to write a line of code for the walled garden iOS, though I may not even get a choice at some point. Sometimes Apple makes very nice and useful things, sometimes some things they make are really shitty, other large parts of what they do I hate very much, like their monopolistic control freak tendencies.
One reason the world is so screwed up in 2018 is that people think they have to get everything for free.
Thus "your smartphone" is really an extension of other people's brands. It's not a tool to control your environment but a way sinister forces in the environment control you.
I like Linux for certain things but since you don't pay for it you influenced by the priorities of those who do pay: IBM, Google, the corporate customers of Red Hat.
Since you do pay for Windows and you do have a choice, Microsoft is working for you and there is an incentive to make the OS better.
Developers are moving away from Apple hardware, that is quite visible. The operating system is a much better question, that is hard to answer - given the fact that linux runs on anything, Window runs on a lot of things, and Hackintosh exists.
I can't imagine hating Facebook as a developer. Just because some people hand over their personal information to them? I'll gladly overlook that when they gave me things like React, React Native. GraphQL, Jest, Flow.
This is very hard to believe. Developers hate apple, facebook, and countless other platforms that are doing very well. Adoption is the fundamental problem, not what developers want to support. The platform with the most users is what people will develop for.