Under the Radar

00:00:00 ◼   ► Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development.

00:00:04 ◼   ► I'm Marco Arment.

00:00:05 ◼   ► And I'm David Smith.

00:00:06 ◼   ► Under the Radar is never longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.

00:00:09 ◼   ► As we record now, the coronavirus known as COVID-19 is sweeping the media,

00:00:16 ◼   ► and it's spreading around the world, and it's not in massive numbers in most parts of the world yet,

00:00:22 ◼   ► but certainly there's reason for much of the world to be very cautious at this point.

00:00:27 ◼   ► And so in the wake of that, right now many large conferences are being canceled.

00:00:34 ◼   ► Facebook just canceled their F8 conference for--is it F8 or F8? Whatever it is.

00:00:38 ◼   ► Who cares? For this year.

00:00:41 ◼   ► Google just announced yesterday that Google I/O is canceled for this year, which occurs in May.

00:00:47 ◼   ► There's been a bunch of other large cancellations of large conferences.

00:00:50 ◼   ► And so right now there's pretty significant and I think very plausible speculation

00:00:56 ◼   ► that Apple might cancel WWDC this year, which is scheduled to occur probably only a few weeks after Google I/O.

00:01:03 ◼   ► It is seeming like--there's a bunch of particulars about this particular virus that's spreading

00:01:10 ◼   ► that I think make it so that it's probably not going to be well-contained or resolved quickly.

00:01:17 ◼   ► There's a long gestation period and everything, so it's probably going to be a while before this is under control,

00:01:22 ◼   ► because making a bunch of companies and people rethink things like unnecessary travel or large group events.

00:01:30 ◼   ► And so I think--in my opinion, I suspect WWDC is already canceled and they're just kind of making other arrangements

00:01:39 ◼   ► and they'll probably not announce the cancellation until the other arrangements are ready to be announced and finalized.

00:01:45 ◼   ► And so I thought it would be useful this week to talk about what this might mean for the community, for Apple, for developers,

00:01:53 ◼   ► and what the alternatives are and how that might help anybody moving forward,

00:01:59 ◼   ► and what this means moving forward if, at least for this year, there's probably no big tech conferences.

00:02:05 ◼   ► And that maybe in future years this might--it might cause changes that might affect future years as well.

00:02:12 ◼   ► So what do you think?

00:02:15 ◼   ► Yeah, so I think at this point it seems very unlikely that an event like WWDC is going to happen anytime soon.

00:02:26 ◼   ► Even just the--and I think the reason for that is probably even an interesting thing to just briefly touch on,

00:02:32 ◼   ► because there's obviously the risk is that if you take people from all over the world

00:02:39 ◼   ► and intentionally bring them all into one giant room, that you are creating an environment that is--

00:02:47 ◼   ► if anyone comes into that environment who is carrying this virus, that would then spread within that community.

00:02:55 ◼   ► And obviously that's not good. It's just fundamentally.

00:03:00 ◼   ► And I think it's not good for--there's the general reasons why it's not good.

00:03:05 ◼   ► And then there's even just the fundamental strategic reasons for a company like Apple.

00:03:09 ◼   ► Obviously it's not good for the disease to spread. It's not good for the developer--

00:03:13 ◼   ► an engaged subset of the developer community for your various platforms to be sick.

00:03:21 ◼   ► And broadly speaking, for the typical demographic of the people who I see at WWDC,

00:03:28 ◼   ► it is unlikely that COVID-19 is going to be particularly dangerous, necessarily.

00:03:33 ◼   ► It would certainly be unpleasant if you contract it, but it is more likely something that your experience would be similar to the getting the flu,

00:03:40 ◼   ► from the general demographic there. But I think more fundamentally, I think if I was Apple and I was trying to plan a conference,

00:03:46 ◼   ► it's like the biggest difference between the online version of WWDC,

00:03:54 ◼   ► which Apple has been doing a great job over the last few years of building out,

00:03:57 ◼   ► and there's a rich, robust experience if you are not physically in San Jose currently.

00:04:03 ◼   ► All the events are streamed, the videos are available relatively quickly thereafter,

00:04:08 ◼   ► and there's not on-site access to hardware or things that are unique and special and only available there.

00:04:16 ◼   ► The same version of Xcode is available if you're remote or if you're on-site.

00:04:21 ◼   ► And in many ways, the biggest thing that is available and unique about the on-site experience of WWDC

00:04:28 ◼   ► is access to the engineering staff of Apple,

00:04:32 ◼   ► access to the people who are building the things that get announced every year.

00:04:39 ◼   ► And in many ways, that physical access, to me anyway,

00:04:42 ◼   ► that is the fundamental reason why I would imagine large organizations wouldn't want to have events like this,

00:04:47 ◼   ► because the last thing Apple would want is the core engineering team of their flagship products

00:04:56 ◼   ► to all get sick in a way that is potentially, if not profoundly dangerous for them,

00:05:06 ◼   ► at least knocking them out of commission for a while and causing all kinds of questions around quarantine

00:05:11 ◼   ► and working from home, and if you're allowed to work from home,

00:05:15 ◼   ► because you're working on new and secret features at Apple, I have no idea how that even works,

00:05:19 ◼   ► there's lots of situations there that's really problematic and could potentially derail the launch of the next version of

00:05:27 ◼   ► watchOS, iOS, MacOS. That would be a really problematic thing, and that's the one aspect of it that you can't reproduce

00:05:36 ◼   ► necessarily remotely, but that's the main thing where I think of this event.

00:05:40 ◼   ► It would seem like a really poor strategic move for Apple to encourage people from all over the world to come

00:05:47 ◼   ► and then interact directly with their engineers right now.

00:05:50 ◼   ► Oh yeah, and also I think an abundance of caution is warranted.

00:05:54 ◼   ► Apple is a very high-profile public company. They are very much in the public eye.

00:06:00 ◼   ► Any slip-ups they make are magnified like crazy by the media and by the public,

00:06:05 ◼   ► and so they need to be very careful if they take risks that could result in bad press.

00:06:11 ◼   ► And while COVID-19 is flu-like and most people who get it have just flu symptoms and flu problems,

00:06:19 ◼   ► and it can usually be treated, some people die from it because some people die from the flu.

00:06:24 ◼   ► If you are very old or very young or have a compromised immune system or various other possible conditions,

00:06:31 ◼   ► you could die from it. And can you imagine how horrible it would be if somebody came to WWDC,

00:06:39 ◼   ► caught this virus, and died from it? Nobody wants that. For lots of reasons, that would be horrible.

00:06:45 ◼   ► And I think that's why these companies are being especially cautious about this.

00:06:51 ◼   ► And that's one of the reasons why I think Apple has already canceled it.

00:06:55 ◼   ► I can't imagine they would be willing to take a risk like that with such a high-profile thing.

00:07:02 ◼   ► So I think it's interesting. You mentioned that they've been building out streaming and the offline experience,

00:07:10 ◼   ► because if you look at conferences like this, WWDC is about a 5,000-person conference,

00:07:17 ◼   ► and it has to serve three audiences, really, if you think about it.

00:07:21 ◼   ► It has to serve the media, the fans, and the developers.

00:07:26 ◼   ► And the media can be served in lots of different ways.

00:07:30 ◼   ► Not all of the media is even there in the room during the big keynote.

00:07:35 ◼   ► They already have been live streaming the keynotes for years.

00:07:39 ◼   ► And so most of the world's media, most of the world's fans, and big point here,

00:07:45 ◼   ► most of the developers are not at the conference anyway.

00:07:49 ◼   ► Most of them are watching the live streams because they can't all be there,

00:07:52 ◼   ► because the room only holds 5,000 people,

00:07:55 ◼   ► and there's a lot more than 5,000 people who are interested in this content and want to see it,

00:08:00 ◼   ► or who need to see it for their jobs.

00:08:02 ◼   ► There are way more than 5,000 Apple developers out there.

00:08:05 ◼   ► So we've already had this problem for years,

00:08:08 ◼   ► where most people who want or need to get this content can't be there in person.

00:08:14 ◼   ► So they have to find ways, they've had to find ways to both make the selection process

00:08:20 ◼   ► a little bit more accessible of getting there in the first place,

00:08:23 ◼   ► and then for all the people who don't get there,

00:08:25 ◼   ► of making the content available to them somehow.

00:08:27 ◼   ► So really, Apple is already very well set up to have an online-only WWDC,

00:08:34 ◼   ► because they've been moving in that direction for years.

00:08:36 ◼   ► They already are almost there.

00:08:39 ◼   ► I do think the keynote, they could have media events,

00:08:45 ◼   ► bringing a few hundred journalists into the Steve Jobs Theater to have a media event

00:08:50 ◼   ► is much less risky than bringing 5,000 people into a giant room.

00:08:53 ◼   ► They might still do that, have the media thing in their own theater.

00:08:58 ◼   ► They might even just skip that and just have a small selection of just employees there

00:09:03 ◼   ► to basically clap and live stream it to everybody else around the world,

00:09:08 ◼   ► maybe they could have private briefings like they've been doing

00:09:11 ◼   ► for many recent product releases and announcements.

00:09:14 ◼   ► So the media side, I think they have covered pretty well.

00:09:18 ◼   ► I think they have lots of options there that they've already been doing

00:09:21 ◼   ► that might not even involve any in-person gatherings of large groups of people,

00:09:26 ◼   ► or at least would involve only one kind of small one, like at the theater.

00:09:29 ◼   ► And so the media side is covered.

00:09:32 ◼   ► The fan side is also covered if the media side is covered,

00:09:36 ◼   ► because the fans watch the streams, and most of the fans aren't there.

00:09:41 ◼   ► So they have that covered too.

00:09:44 ◼   ► And so that leaves us with the developers.

00:09:46 ◼   ► How do developers get their needs taken care of?

00:09:49 ◼   ► And again, because the vast majority of developers are way more than that 5,000 number

00:09:55 ◼   ► that can actually be there, they already have their needs covered pretty well

00:10:00 ◼   ► with access to the videos and the slide PDFs and having searchable transcripts

00:10:06 ◼   ► and sample code downloads and everything.

00:10:09 ◼   ► That's already been covered pretty well in the past.

00:10:12 ◼   ► So they just have to keep doing that, and then that leaves this one remaining piece,

00:10:16 ◼   ► which is labs, as you said, where you get to actually talk to Apple engineers

00:10:21 ◼   ► who write the stuff you're having problems with.

00:10:23 ◼   ► You can show them your code.

00:10:25 ◼   ► They can tell you certain things you're doing wrong or certain things you should be doing.

00:10:29 ◼   ► Labs are invaluable, but labs have always had this problem of very limited access.

00:10:36 ◼   ► If you think about this kind of democratically,

00:10:39 ◼   ► let's conservatively estimate there might be 100,000 people who would want to be there if they could.

00:10:47 ◼   ► They have 5,000 seats.

00:10:49 ◼   ► Let's say there's 100,000 Apple developers who would love to be there.

00:10:51 ◼   ► There's probably actually more than that.

00:10:53 ◼   ► Software development is a massive business.

00:10:55 ◼   ► Mobile is a massive part of software development, and the iPhone is a massive part of that.

00:10:58 ◼   ► Apple always talks about how there's millions of developers.

00:11:01 ◼   ► Right. That is probably not wrong.

00:11:05 ◼   ► Let's say there's 100,000, and so we've only been having a 5% availability rate

00:11:11 ◼   ► for who even has access to the labs that were there in the first place.

00:11:17 ◼   ► And then let's say also that's not an evenly distributed 5%

00:11:23 ◼   ► because that's very relevant to things like cost and ability to travel,

00:11:28 ◼   ► ability to get time off work or to have your job pay for this very expensive travel

00:11:33 ◼   ► and lodging and this conference ticket.

00:11:35 ◼   ► It's been kind of this exclusive, expensive, very limited access.

00:11:42 ◼   ► And it feels kind of wrong that most developers don't have access to this amazing resource

00:11:49 ◼   ► of being able to talk to people in labs and only this tiny percentage that is fortunate enough

00:11:56 ◼   ► to get a conference ticket at all and to be able to pay for all of it

00:11:59 ◼   ► and to be able to get there and everything, which is a very small percentage of developers around the world.

00:12:03 ◼   ► It seems like this is a good opportunity to actually change the way that works.

00:12:09 ◼   ► And we have things like the DTS incident system.

00:12:13 ◼   ► Every paid Apple developer account comes with these developer technical support or DTS incidents.

00:12:20 ◼   ► I believe it's two per year, right?

00:12:22 ◼   ► - Something like that.

00:12:23 ◼   ► I hardly ever use them, but I think you get two per year.

00:12:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, I've actually never used one.

00:12:27 ◼   ► I feel very wasteful.

00:12:28 ◼   ► Every problem I ever have, I'm like,

00:12:30 ◼   ► "Oh, I don't want to waste one on this."

00:12:32 ◼   ► And so as a result, I've been an Apple developer for 12 years.

00:12:35 ◼   ► I've never used one.

00:12:38 ◼   ► But anyway, they have certain resources,

00:12:41 ◼   ► but Apple does not have a ton of engineers.

00:12:45 ◼   ► The resources they have are not as big as most people would assume.

00:12:50 ◼   ► They don't have as much free time or as much availability to help people, as you would assume.

00:12:55 ◼   ► And so they've always had these weird systems of sometimes you would have an app store representative

00:13:01 ◼   ► reach out to you to say, "Hello, I'm going to be your representative here.

00:13:07 ◼   ► "If you have any questions or you want to talk to us about editorial stuff, email me."

00:13:10 ◼   ► Sometimes you have somebody like that on the inside who's kind of on your team.

00:13:14 ◼   ► Most people don't.

00:13:16 ◼   ► Sometimes you can go to W3C and have access to people in the labs.

00:13:20 ◼   ► Most people don't.

00:13:21 ◼   ► Sometimes you might know someone who works there and be able to message them

00:13:25 ◼   ► and ask them questions that way.

00:13:27 ◼   ► Most people don't.

00:13:28 ◼   ► And so there's all these processes where there are special levels of access

00:13:34 ◼   ► and special ways that you can get help outside of the regular DTS system

00:13:38 ◼   ► and outside of what's available to everybody.

00:13:42 ◼   ► And only a very small percentage of developers have access to that.

00:13:45 ◼   ► So I would like there to be more effort put into making those resources available to everyone.

00:13:51 ◼   ► I'm lucky that in recent years I've gotten some of those resources.

00:13:55 ◼   ► But it's actually only been very recent.

00:13:57 ◼   ► And I spent most of my career, including all of Instapaper and most of Overcast so far,

00:14:01 ◼   ► not having those resources.

00:14:03 ◼   ► And so I know what it's like to feel like Apple is just this big brick wall that you have no way into.

00:14:09 ◼   ► And when you have a problem or when you have a big question or a big bug,

00:14:12 ◼   ► that's really hard to deal with.

00:14:14 ◼   ► So I'm really interested to see what changes Apple makes this year

00:14:21 ◼   ► that might help break down that barrier just a little bit.

00:14:24 ◼   ► I know they can't break it down all the way because they have limited resources.

00:14:27 ◼   ► But to break it down just a little bit,

00:14:29 ◼   ► to try to solve basically the labs at WBC problem without having WBC,

00:14:34 ◼   ► I think that might be more broadly applicable

00:14:37 ◼   ► and it could really help out developers if they could find a way to further democratize that.

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00:16:12 ◼   ► So I've been thinking a lot about the labs question and how to address that.

00:16:19 ◼   ► For A, I totally agree that I think the labs are not a great solution

00:16:24 ◼   ► to the problem of access and support from the developer technical community.

00:16:30 ◼   ► They serve a tiny fraction of the community at large just by the nature of what they are.

00:16:38 ◼   ► And then even there, there's some problems and some issues that can be solved with 10 minutes with an Apple engineer.

00:16:47 ◼   ► When that happens, that feels like magic and it's amazing.

00:16:50 ◼   ► That's happened to me before. You go, you show someone, they're like, "Oh, you're doing this wrong."

00:16:54 ◼   ► You flip this around. When it happens, it's amazing.

00:16:57 ◼   ► But in general, even the lab itself, it can be frustrating or it's a kind of problem

00:17:02 ◼   ► that they can't help you with or can't necessarily give you direction for.

00:17:06 ◼   ► The engineers are not educators in the sense that if you're trying to learn to program,

00:17:14 ◼   ► or if you're trying to learn how to use the Event Kit API,

00:17:21 ◼   ► the way to learn that is not in the labs with the Event Kit team.

00:17:25 ◼   ► The way is probably through online tutorials and videos and books and Stack Overflow.

00:17:30 ◼   ► The community resources for most things are very robust and good.

00:17:35 ◼   ► And the only place where it gets at all tricky is with new things for which the community

00:17:41 ◼   ► has not developed the education and support infrastructure around it.

00:17:46 ◼   ► What I'm reminded of is the launch of WatchOS One.

00:17:51 ◼   ► I was trying to think if this happened before, but it was one of the few times

00:17:56 ◼   ► when Apple introduced a substantial new platform and framework outside of WWDC.

00:18:04 ◼   ► It happened with tvOS also.

00:18:06 ◼   ► Oh, sure. And then with tvOS, they did the tech talks, right?

00:18:09 ◼   ► Yep, they traveled around the country doing little mini WWDCs in various cities.

00:18:13 ◼   ► Yep, it was fun.

00:18:14 ◼   ► What I remember with watchOS is what was interesting is the Apple developer forums,

00:18:20 ◼   ► which have been around for a very long time.

00:18:23 ◼   ► For that particular launch, I would imagine because they had launched this platform

00:18:28 ◼   ► without the typical WWDC infrastructure around a new platform launch,

00:18:35 ◼   ► I remember the developer forums were the place to go to talk, and they were very actively moderated

00:18:42 ◼   ► and staffed by Apple engineers, I can only imagine.

00:18:46 ◼   ► They're just nameless avatars from my perspective.

00:18:48 ◼   ► I have no idea if they're people who work in the DTS system, if they're on the evangelism team,

00:18:52 ◼   ► if they were engineers.

00:18:54 ◼   ► But I distinctly remember there being lots and lots of people with the little Apple badge

00:18:58 ◼   ► next to their name in the developer forums being really helpful and answering the same kind of questions

00:19:04 ◼   ► that would be answered in the labs.

00:19:07 ◼   ► If there's things that come up, and primarily, honestly, the biggest advantage I like to hear

00:19:13 ◼   ► when I go to the labs, it's like most of what I'm going there for is the "Is this a bug or am I doing it wrong?"

00:19:20 ◼   ► Because so often, especially with new things, you kind of end up in these places where you're using a new API

00:19:27 ◼   ► and it's giving you a response that you don't expect.

00:19:30 ◼   ► And because it's new and because this is beta 1 of iOS 14, you don't know if this is a bug,

00:19:37 ◼   ► and you should report it as a feedback, or you're doing something wrong and it's actually working as designed.

00:19:43 ◼   ► And showing it to an engineer, they're able to be like, "That's a bug," or "This is working as designed."

00:19:48 ◼   ► And the same thing happened in the developer forums with the original watchOS launch.

00:19:52 ◼   ► Time and time again, people would report problems and you'd kind of get the,

00:19:56 ◼   ► "Huh, that looks like a bug. Please file a radar at the time."

00:20:01 ◼   ► And that was the very useful thing, and that scaled reasonably well.

00:20:06 ◼   ► And the nice thing about that experience is if I have a problem and I go to the developer forums

00:20:11 ◼   ► and I talk about my problem, and someone at Apple or someone else in the developer forum

00:20:18 ◼   ► is able to give me help and point me in the right direction, the next time someone else has that problem,

00:20:23 ◼   ► it's now searchable. It'll show up in their search results, or they go to the developer forums and search it.

00:20:27 ◼   ► And now it actually starts to scale, that you can have that one interaction rather than just benefiting one person

00:20:32 ◼   ► in that 10 minutes with that engineer. That 10 minutes of that engineer time suddenly benefits

00:20:37 ◼   ► tens or hundreds or thousands of people going forward.

00:20:41 ◼   ► And so in that sense, the more--I love going to the labs. It's one of my highlights of the year.

00:20:47 ◼   ► It's just I really enjoy it personally. But when I really take a step back and think about,

00:20:52 ◼   ► could that experience be replicated online with things like the developer forums

00:20:57 ◼   ► or an increase in just general documentation and guides or potentially even--

00:21:02 ◼   ► There's all kinds of things you could imagine. You could imagine Apple specifically reaching out

00:21:07 ◼   ► to some of the well-established educators within the community and working with them,

00:21:12 ◼   ► giving them--having them have phone calls with the engineering staff so that they can get

00:21:17 ◼   ► a huge amount of content and be a resource to other people.

00:21:22 ◼   ► All of those things scale so much better. And while I would miss not going to the labs,

00:21:27 ◼   ► the reality is it's been a tremendous privilege for me to be able to go to the labs as often as I have.

00:21:32 ◼   ► And that's an experience that is not available to most people.

00:21:37 ◼   ► And any solutions and things that they do to sort of

00:21:42 ◼   ► mitigate the removal of them is ultimately better for the community overall.

00:21:47 ◼   ► And I think that's ultimately probably the right way to go.

00:21:52 ◼   ► Do things that address the issue of wanting to explain the reason behind

00:21:57 ◼   ► and understand bug or feature of new APIs to the community.

00:22:02 ◼   ► I think the developer forums is the thing that comes to mind the most for me as a great way to serve

00:22:07 ◼   ► a place that Apple already has infrastructure around to do that and to be active and engaged in that.

00:22:12 ◼   ► And people know that if they have a problem with the new API, that's where they go.

00:22:17 ◼   ► And if they do that, I think we'd be all right. I don't think overall the engagement

00:22:22 ◼   ► or adoption of the new APIs or new technologies that Apple would have announced in person

00:22:27 ◼   ► would really be in any way harmed. And the access side of it,

00:22:32 ◼   ► both just in terms of, you know, it's so like the,

00:22:37 ◼   ► I love the things when it feels just sort of equal and egalitarian that like if someone,

00:22:42 ◼   ► it doesn't matter if you can afford five or six thousand dollars to go to San Jose,

00:22:47 ◼   ► you have exactly the same footing as someone who can. And like, I love that.

00:22:52 ◼   ► And ultimately, like, that's I think the direction they should go.

00:22:57 ◼   ► And like, what that means next year when this is calmed down, like, who knows?

00:23:02 ◼   ► But if this year goes well, then like maybe W3C itself becomes something that is,

00:23:07 ◼   ► you know, sort of less of a thing or not a five day conference becomes a shorter conference.

00:23:12 ◼   ► And like the funny thing that even too that comes to mind, like when I think about W3C

00:23:17 ◼   ► without a physical event, like you wouldn't have the weird thing you have now where

00:23:22 ◼   ► talks are done on a schedule where if the new technology that you're interested in

00:23:27 ◼   ► is not like being talked about until Friday, you have like a week where

00:23:32 ◼   ► you can't really start working on it because you don't really know how it works. Like you would

00:23:37 ◼   ► imagine Apple would prerecord all of the videos about all of the topics ahead of time

00:23:42 ◼   ► and then release them on Monday afternoon when they release the new version of Xcode.

00:23:47 ◼   ► And just like they were all there. Everything's available all at once, which is in many ways, I mean,

00:23:52 ◼   ► it's kind of a ridiculous mind bending fire hose to start to drink from. But at least you don't have this weird

00:23:57 ◼   ► thing where you're like, sometimes this happened to me W3C where the new technology I'm interested in

00:24:02 ◼   ► is like talked about on Friday. And then there's a lab for it, you know, afterwards. So but it's like

00:24:07 ◼   ► most of the week at W3C this new thing that I'm trying to work out and wrap my head around, like I have no support or infrastructure

00:24:12 ◼   ► to dive into that. So ultimately like it might be better.

00:24:17 ◼   ► And like it's bad and like sad from a nostalgic perspective, but

00:24:22 ◼   ► ultimately I think I would be okay with it and it would be ultimately probably better for the community at large

00:24:27 ◼   ► to really shift in that direction.

00:24:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean like the tradition angle is certainly strong. I mean, you know, Apple's been holding this for a very long time.

00:24:37 ◼   ► 2009, that's the same year you started going, right?

00:24:42 ◼   ► Yep, 2009 was my first one.

00:24:44 ◼   ► Yeah. And so, you know, we've gone to like, you know, 11 of these or whatever, if I'm off by one, sorry, I'm a programmer.

00:24:45 ◼   ► And then, you know, I think though it's time to scale this. You know,

00:24:49 ◼   ► when this started, the developer community was way smaller and they actually had trouble

00:24:54 ◼   ► selling out the tickets to the conference.

00:24:59 ◼   ► But that time has long since passed. And so anything that can benefit more people, like you said, like, you know, scaling

00:25:02 ◼   ► these resources is beneficial. So I thought, you know, one way to end this would be

00:25:07 ◼   ► a repeat segment on this show, how we would spend Tim Cook's money.

00:25:12 ◼   ► You know, if Apple doesn't host this conference, they're going to save a lot of time and resources.

00:25:16 ◼   ► Not all of it. It still takes time to do things like prepare the presentations, give them, do the videos, you know,

00:25:21 ◼   ► put them up, everything, you know, do stuff like that. That still is going to take time and engineering time in particular

00:25:26 ◼   ► because the engineers usually write those presentations and often give them.

00:25:30 ◼   ► But there is still way less work for them to do if they don't have this conference.

00:25:35 ◼   ► And so how would we allocate those resources? And I think the best way to allocate them

00:25:40 ◼   ► is to fix some, or at least improve, some long-standing shortcomings

00:25:45 ◼   ► that affect this kind of thing directly. Number one is documentation.

00:25:50 ◼   ► You know, there's been a lot of bad or missing or incomplete documentation

00:25:55 ◼   ► from many modern APIs that Apple has released over the last few years. Clearly the documentation team is

00:26:00 ◼   ► either understaffed, overworked, both, who knows, but they need to put more resources

00:26:05 ◼   ► into documentation and this would be a good excuse to do that, like, now.

00:26:10 ◼   ► Another area that could use a lot of improvement that is relevant to this is staffing up DTS.

00:26:14 ◼   ► I've always heard DTS has a small staff, you know, smaller than you would probably think,

00:26:19 ◼   ► and that's one of the reasons why Access has to be so limited to it.

00:26:23 ◼   ► How about staffing that up and making those resources more available to anybody who has

00:26:28 ◼   ► a developer account instead of just the people at the conference? And finally, I know this is a big ask,

00:26:33 ◼   ► but maybe improving radar/feedback system, whatever we're calling it these days,

00:26:38 ◼   ► improving the public interface to that, not putting a new coat of paint on it,

00:26:44 ◼   ► but improving the amount and quality of communication that external developers get

00:26:50 ◼   ► when they file feedbacks, radars, whatever we're calling them, because right now

00:26:55 ◼   ► it's still pretty miserable. Most reports still go totally unanswered. The few answers

00:27:00 ◼   ► you do get tend to be like, "We need a sysdiagnose," which you usually don't need,

00:27:05 ◼   ► or things like, you know, "Please reproduce with the sample project," like when you often already

00:27:10 ◼   ► included one. Responses that make it look like they're just kind of trying to batch close a bunch and not looking

00:27:15 ◼   ► that closely at yours. And then usually there's stuff that happens behind the scenes

00:27:20 ◼   ► with your bug if it gets viewed by anybody that you aren't privy to,

00:27:25 ◼   ► that never gets back to you, that's never updated. Usually it isn't even marked as a duplicate, even when it is one.

00:27:30 ◼   ► The public-facing interface to bug reporter is minimal.

00:27:35 ◼   ► You get almost no feedback, so it seems like it's a waste of your time to even file bugs in the first place.

00:27:40 ◼   ► This would be a good opportunity to improve that as well. Put processes in place

00:27:44 ◼   ► -- by the way, this will also improve software quality -- put processes in place to better

00:27:49 ◼   ► deal with the bug reports that get filed, and to have more,

00:27:54 ◼   ► generally more and better feedback, and allow the people who are filtering these more time

00:27:59 ◼   ► to do their jobs, because again, it really feels like they're rushing when they go through and batch close a whole bunch of bugs.

00:28:04 ◼   ► Give them more time, give them more resources, make this a priority to make the bug reporting

00:28:09 ◼   ► interface better for developers who don't work at Apple, because right now it's still pretty miserable.

00:28:14 ◼   ► Combine that with better documentation and increased DTS resources, and I think

00:28:19 ◼   ► that would go a long way towards every Apple developer's experience.

00:28:24 ◼   ► I think the biggest thing that comes to mind for me, the fact that I spend Tim Cook's money or reorganize things at Apple,

00:28:28 ◼   ► is I honestly think there's a benefit in not having a single

00:28:33 ◼   ► event that all of development is focused around, that happens once a year,

00:28:38 ◼   ► there's this big drop of information, and then it kind of goes radio silent again.

00:28:43 ◼   ► That I think it would be great to increase the ongoing

00:28:48 ◼   ► communication, support, documentation, going forward. That this is just something

00:28:53 ◼   ► that they do, it isn't necessarily all at once. I'm thinking how

00:28:58 ◼   ► there's a lot of developer guides or videos or things that you could imagine, that if it just became a regular

00:29:03 ◼   ► thing that Apple was putting out, or working with

00:29:08 ◼   ► other external content creators to encourage or to work with, and

00:29:13 ◼   ► you can imagine a world where if you didn't focus everything around just WWDC,

00:29:18 ◼   ► that you instead have this focus of this constant creation of content.

00:29:23 ◼   ► You would have just increased the overall quality of communication and education out there.

00:29:28 ◼   ► And ultimately, that's what Apple wants. Apple wants us to understand their

00:29:33 ◼   ► APIs, to take full advantage of them, and to then ultimately make their platforms look good

00:29:38 ◼   ► by taking full advantage of all the things they're putting the effort in, in creating in the first place.

00:29:43 ◼   ► The more resources you can put into that, and then expanding that over the course of the year,

00:29:48 ◼   ► I think would just further Apple's vision in that way.

00:29:53 ◼   ► to you in two weeks. Bye.

00:29:54 ◼   ► [BLANK_AUDIO]