Developers Frustrated at Apple for Just One Day's Notice to Submit Apps Ahead of iOS 14 Release Today

[patrickbarnes]

You developers had whole summer to update your apps! Stop finding an excuse to bash at Apple.

Focus on 14.1 that will be dropping soon.

People saying stuff like this have no idea what they’re talking about.

You can’t submit an app to the App Store without the GM Xcode.

Apple makes huge changes between the last developer release and the GM, so you have to retest your entire app with the GM SDK.

It takes more than one day to do this. Only unserious developers ship an app update without testing on the GM.

 

[Amazing Iceman]

Except it doesn't work that way. We always had a week to 10 days to test our apps with the final build.

You also can't be submitting to the store with beta builds of Xcode. We only got the final version of Xcode yesterday and when this happens review times always go way up. So if our app does not work on iOS 14 it could be days to over a week before we can submit a build with iOS 14 that corrects those issues.

And Xcode GM came out not earlier than mid-afternoon, and took at least a couple hours to download and install. Then what? Is Apple expecting Developers to stay up all night getting their apps debugged, tested and submitted to the App Store?
Are the submitted apps getting approved quickly?

 

[Altivec88]

I really don't understand the problem here. Do the iOS 13 apps stop working when we install iOS 14? If not, what's the big deal. In fact I would say its even better for developers this way. It gives users time to learn the new OS and then as new apps filter in over the week, full attention can be given to those.

I don't get what Apple delaying another week does for developers or anyone. Right Now, we have a new OS with No new apps. Wait another week and again we still have no new apps. shrugs shoulders

 

[ct2k7]

I really don't understand the problem here. Do the iOS 13 apps stop working when we install iOS 14? If not, what's the big deal. In fact I would say its even better for developers this way. It gives users time to learn the new OS and then as new apps filter in over the week, full attention can be given to those.

I don't get what Apple delaying another week does for developers or anyone. Right Now, we have a new OS with No new apps. Wait another week and again we still have no new apps. shrugs shoulders

The big deal is that as an app developer, I can’t guarantee compatibility and bugs which software which I haven’t yet tested it first on. Betas are not an appropriate medium.

Most users will just uninstall an app if they face critical usage bugs; which may have been introduced late in the game.

 

[Oohara]

ITT: a lot of people know a lot about how developers work.

 

[Ethosik]

2020 has been an absolute dumpster fire of a year for relations between Apple and developers; and Apple’s adversarial posture toward developers continues with this little stunt.

If the OS releases had to be this week due to the new hardware releasing on Friday, I’m not sure why Apple couldn’t have thrown developers a little bit of a bone and made the public release of the new OSs happen tomorrow instead of today.

2020 has been an absolute dumpster fire in general. Only good thing might be the new NVIDIA GPUs if I can get my hands on one.

 

[tzm41]

Ok, understood. We are on the same page now. It was my belief that if developers had worked on their apps following each beta, that they’d therefore minimize the time and work that would need to be put in upon release of the gold master (and thus I was having trouble empathizing/sympathizing with those developers who had waited until now to modify theirs apps). I see that is an incorrect assumption.

It's not an entirely unreasonable assumption. I would say 70% of the time if you find a bug in the earlier betas and fix it then it should be good for later betas. But there are still the 30% of the time, where the bug is actually caused by iOS, or maybe they changed the behaviors of the API back, or they fixed it and your workaround doesn't work anymore, etc. When a later beta drops devs have to fix it yet again. In my past we start working for the new iOS release starting from beta 3 or 4, just for the reason that later betas do slowly stabilize.

So the betas are still meaningful, developers just can't trust that they've fixed everything for the final release (hell, even the GM would still have a ton of known issues). Plus even if they do, they cannot submit the update to App Store without Xcode GM.

 

[Mlrollin91]

I really don't understand the problem here. Do the iOS 13 apps stop working when we install iOS 14? If not, what's the big deal. In fact I would say its even better for developers this way. It gives users time to learn the new OS and then as new apps filter in over the week, full attention can be given to those.

I don't get what Apple delaying another week does for developers or anyone. Right Now, we have a new OS with No new apps. Wait another week and again we still have no new apps. shrugs shoulders

Yes apps just stop working, if they are not compatible. New iOS versions change things that can break apps. Pokemon Go has been broken the entire summer, it was just updated last night. Additionally, I had a number of apps that did not work on iOS 13 out of the gate.

 

[Peperino]

And this is one more example, how little Apple cares about 3rd party developers.

 

[ct2k7]

Yes apps just stop working, if they are not compatible. New iOS versions change things that can break apps. Pokemon Go has been broken the entire summer, it was just updated last night. Additionally, I had a number of apps that did not work on iOS 13 out of the gate.

Hopefully apps should never get to this stage....

 

[So@So@So]

September marks the end of an quarter, I think Apple did rush out iOS 14 so fast to be able to get orders for the new iPads this month...
Not good for developers, but good for Apple's quarterly earnings.

 

[butcherbird]

Not a dev, but i kind of feel their pain. I thought it was odd that they dropped the release tomorrow thing as well. Usually there's a GM build and a week then final.. seems some miscommunication in the release process to me.

I’m not a dev, either and I wholeheartedly think Apple and Google should give up the 30% take on app-related sales. Even as a shareholder, I feel this way.

The ecosystems benefit from having apps that greatly improve the user experience and give us compelling reasons to buy the devices. That’s enough benefit to Apple and Google.

 

[Ethosik]

I really think this is the result of the new iPad and Apple Watch. I guess the better thing would have been to delay those releases until next week.

 

[rgbrock1]

You developers had whole summer to update your apps! Stop finding an excuse to bash at Apple.

Focus on 14.1 that will be dropping soon.

You obviously know absolutely nothing about how developing apps in the Apple ecosystem works. You should refrain from commenting on something you know nothing about.

 

[dynamojoe]

Does iPadOS 14 break Fortnite? (yes, I'm serious). I don't want to lose compatibility as I understand the developer has abandoned the platform

 

[MEJHarrison]

I really think some of these comments are uncalled for. Developers have explained in comments why the sudden release of the os is bad from a developers perspective. I'm guessing most of the commenters (myself included) have no real understanding of the review process and certainly didn’t understand that apps could only be submitted after the final version of Xcode was released. I'm with the devs on this one. It wouldn't have hurt anyone for the os to be released a week later.

The problem isn't people not knowing any better, then reading comments from other posters and educating themselves. The ability to learn new things is what makes a place like this so much fun. I've been a developer for 30 years (web development) and had no idea how the process works. I totally get only having 24 hours to test and fix any bugs. That feels quite familiar to me. Too familiar in fact. But while I've done lots of playing with Xcode and writing apps on iOS and Mac, I've never submitted anything to the App Store, so I didn't realize you needed the GM of Xcode to submit.

The problem is those who don't care to read the comments and take part in the conversation. They just see the headline and decide to throw their two cents into things. It doesn't matter if their comment has been made 100 times already or that their comment was essentially proven invalid pages back. Either way they wouldn't know because they don't care enough to see what others are saying. They're not here for the conversation, they only care that they say their thing, then they're done and move on to the next topic.

 

[WiseAJ]

Its because of this I have advise everyone i know to hold off upgrading to iOS 14 for a week.

 

[Larry-Bloom]

Well maybe if the developer were not the major source of leaks... A number of developers go through GM Builds and Beta release looking for clues to new hardware... This is a response to these leaks... And as a developer, I had plenty of time to get my ready for release...

The gripes here are the first app that use the new feature get the most downloads on Go Live day and they were not ready...

 

[Ethosik]

Because test, fix, test, release—plus the app review process—might take two or three or eight days. All the while, the app is crashing and the customer is pissed. And is blaming the dev, not Apple.

Yes and one thing you really don't want to rush is QA. Going from 7-10 days of QA time down to less than 24 hours might produce some buggy software.

 

[kronusdark]

I cant believe the amount of anti-developer sentiment on this thread. let's see how much you enjoy your iOS devices when all the developers jump ship.

We have timelines and priorities, we can't just drop you guys new features at the whims of Apple.

 

[JosephAW]

Maybe they did this on purpose to expose all the apps that have been secretly copying the clipboard.

 

[Ethosik]

Well maybe if the developer were not the major source of leaks... A number of developers go through GM Builds and Beta release looking for clues to new hardware... This is a response to these leaks... And as a developer, I had plenty of time to get my ready for release...

The gripes here are the first app that use the new feature get the most downloads on Go Live day and they were not ready...

They could have delayed the new watch and iPad unit next week, but still announced them this week.

 

[rgbrock1]

That's not at all what the complaint here is. Developers are not allowed to submit -- in advance -- public versions of their apps that use the iOS 14 frameworks. Usually developers are given a week to submit these apps prior to the new OS release so that finishing touches can be put on, there's no delays in approval when everyone submits at once, and everything is in the pipeline or already on people's devices when the new OS version ships.

This is a completely reasonable complaint; I don't know why you're needlessly dunking on developers here.

Because the users here "needlessly dunking on developers" are not developers and have no clue what's involved in releasing apps in the Apple ecosystem.

 

[jasonkeeven]

I'm not sure why so many devs are frustrated... the last seven versions of iOS have literally been released this week and within days of the September event... and they've had the tools since WWDC like always.

 

[ct2k7]

Well maybe if the developer were not the major source of leaks... A number of developers go through GM Builds and Beta release looking for clues to new hardware... This is a response to these leaks... And as a developer, I had plenty of time to get my ready for release...

What?
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I'm not sure why so many devs are frustrated... the last seven versions of iOS have literally been released this week and within days of the September event... and they've had the tools since WWDC like always.

Not the tools to submit an iOS 14 compatible app.