Apple’s App Commodification and the End of Delicious Differentiation

Apple used to differentiate itself with software. We had the iLife suite with iMovie & Garageband. We had the same software Steve Jobs used for his presentations being sold as Keynote. We had professional apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic. We had Safari and Mail being shown off like favorite children.

Okay, we still have these. But all these apps are from the Steve Jobs era. From this cruicable of software devotion sparked the Delicious Generation, which was an art movement of profitable independent app developers inspired by what the teams at Apple were shipping.

What Apple did with iLife, iWork, and its pro tools would influence app makers for the Mac. You could see where the design puck was going by downloading the latest iTunes or QuickTime and studying its UI paradigms.

Apple didn’t just influence its own third-party developers, but other makers for other platforms, other operating systems, and interfaces everywhere. The iMac lead to the end of the 20th century being flooded with rainbow-colored unapologetically-plastic hardware. Web 2.0 designs were heavily inspired by Mac OS X’s Aqua and the capabilities of desktop-class apps. And Apple’s marketing was aped across all verticals, from the iPod’s billboards & TV ads, to its live stage events still used as the prototype for corporate announcements today.

Apple’s design & marketing language was borrowed, sometimes pidgin-style, by many a business.

Apple’s philosophy under Tim Cook: “We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make”. While this sounds like it has been pasted from Steve Jobs’s diary, I believe there’s a critical difference.

Steve Jobs to developers at WWDC 1997: “You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”.

Modern product management has its founding father in Steve Jobs, and so its seems like he’s all about products. But note he said the “customer experience” not “products we make”.

Apple today treats software developers like it treats hardware suppliers: replaceable widget makers that are pitted against each other to produce greater choice for less cost. Whether those vendors are sustainable businesses is of little interest to Apple as they can just find another eager vendor. They want Samsung and LG and BOE fighting in the arena all competing to product the highest-quality and most-affordable displays for the Jesus phone.

This multi-sourcing approach is because Apple is afraid of being dependent on another Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Excel. They want multiple Photoshops and Excels battling to be the best for the platform. You can see the survival of the fittest in real time by visiting the App Stores’ Top Charts. What they don’t want is another Office 365 which is the platform, unless that office pays rent.

Apple owns both software distribution and the customer relationship. This makes it difficult for an app maker to develop a deeper relationship with a customer, tailor their featureset, stand-out in the market, or provide additional value bundled in a subscription or sale. The same playbook Apple used to make iLife succeed has been pulped and recycled into the App Review Guidelines.

Apps in the iLife suite heavily used the UI & graphics frameworks that were built for the Mac. This technical foundation was what the Steve Jobs first-party insanely great apps strategy was built upon. For example, Keynote was essentially a show off of what the AppKit, Quartz, Core Animation & Core Text frameworks could do. It was the NeXT strategy but with product-market fit.

Successful businesses were built upon the very same foundation, like design app Sketch which heavily used Quartz to renders its key features: text & graphics.

This previous graphics advantage has become a commodity: instead you can use Google’s open source Skia with WebGL2 to make something just as good that works on all platforms.

Frameworks like Electron and React Native abstract away the underlying platform into an approximation. An Electron app on the Mac will largely act the same as it running on Windows or Linux. You could even run it as a tab in your browser. e.g. Notion, Slack, Discord just to mention a few.

Pixelmator Pro could be the last great Mac app, having being absorbed into its host. They had succeeded by being fluent in each platform, modeling themselves after the iWork suite’s paradigms on the Mac/iPad/iPhone. They used Apple’s frameworks to their full ability, from real time GPU rendering to machine learning, surpassing what could be done in a web app for a long time.

Is being merged into the mothership the best way for Mac-assed-apps to exit, rather than acquired by another business, or by going public? Note that Adobe tried to acquire web-app Figma, not Mac-app Sketch.

“It just works” used to be premise of new Apple apps. In my mind, that stood for user-friendliness, intuitive discoverability, and reliability. This was a differentiation from other software which often didn’t just work: confusing instead of intuitive, prone to err instead of being rock-solid, company-centered not customer-centered.

What was the last great app that Apple made? Invites from 2024? Forgettable. Freeform? No one uses it. I’d suggest the Notes reboot in iOS 9. That’s a decade ago!

So sadly, Apple third-party app developers no longer have much to be inspired by looking at the first-party apps.

And although they have their fans, Apple’s developer tools & frameworks to me feel cumbersome: sluggish, fragile, and complex. This isn’t to say the JavaScript ecosystem is nimble, but it has prioritized DX (developer experience) so newbies and experience developers can be extremely productive.

Most of Apple’s frameworks were made in a local-first, file-system world, with cloud being bolted on. In contrast, Web frameworks are made for a cloud-first world, with local-first being an add-on.

A React component from 7 years ago will still work today. My Swift code from that time no longer compiles.

SwiftUI is trying to homogenize the Apple platforms, which gives you a decent app for less effort, especially if it’s cross-Apple-platform. But making something tailored for iPad or especially Mac feels like you are trying to drive a rental hatchback off-road. It’s extremely fast for what it’s been designed to do, but falls apart on anything irregular. Irregular software is where the magic is, that’s what the misfits make.

Many of Vision Pro’s built-in apps are just iPad apps. This is like if the original iPhone ran Dashboard widgets! Sure, that’s the genius conceptual root of where Apple started but they rethought apps like Weather with a brand new design & implementation that was tailored made for a handheld touch screen.

They didn’t just do lazy ports because it would have watered down the raison d’être of the new device — Steve Jobs in introducing the iPad said it had to have reasons for why you’d pick it up instead of your iPhone or MacBook Air. The following year he showed off GarageBand on the iPad, its function rethought into its most essential form via the large multitouch screen. It certaintly wasn’t a lazy port of the Mac app.

Apple used to differentiate itself with software. It had differentiated first-party software built on differentiated frameworks that allow third-parties to build differentiated apps with best-of-class developer tools. This software story was part of its marketing story. The genius of Steve Jobs’ presentations started with the fact he had something insanely great to show.

Today, Apple is insanely profitable & insanely powerful but I fear that the customer experience is no longer its starting point.