Michael Tsai

> This is more than just a revenue calculation

Everything is a revenue calculation

> that has massive engineering implications for an ecosystem as vast as Apple’s.

That is Apple's problems. All Eu says is "do not deliberatly hamper competition and don't install artificial barriers to differentiate your products".

Apple has had no issues complying with every single request from any government.

> Simple features like Live Translation or iPhone Mirroring become 10x more complex to build when you need to test and support other vendor devices.

You don't have to test and support them on vendor devices. You either provide an API, or let "vendor devices" implement the same features. This has never been such big of an issue.

> In fact some features become downright impossible if you require interoperability.

Then those features are either not needed, or it's Apple's own fault (e.g. for preventing others from building the same feature set).

It's insane to me that Hacker News, of all places, would argue that walled gardens are good, actually. Ponder this article, for example: "Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones" https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-awesome-with-iphones

> This is about slowing down the pace of development and adding engineering complexity to everything worldwide

The only ones insisting and making it so are Apple. A great example is this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/14/dma-compliance-default-maps-app-in-eu/ Apple…

Not the OP, but these days I find new things (mostly blogs) through four different mechanisms:

1 - Hacker News - If there's an interesting article linked, then I'll consider adding the site to my feed (using feedbin since the great Google Reader apocalypse).

2 - Blog referrals - Sometimes existing feed items will link to other articles sites (sourced from, similar problem, etc) and I'll sometimes add those sites.

3 - Search Results / Organic - If I'm investigating a particular problem/issue/topic and find a good blog, then I'll add it to my feed.

4 - Topic Specific Aggregators - in some cases there are people that produce topic specific post summaries (such as the .Net Morning Brew https://blog.cwa.me.uk/ or Michael Tsai https://mjtsai.com/blog/ ) that link articles - again, if the articles are good, or I notice I've visited the site before, I'll sometimes add it to my feed list.

Just checking my OPML, I have around 600 sites (more than a few are likely no longer posting) in my current reader - accumulated over the last 20 years or so - that I've found specifically interesting (mostly professionally, and a few hobby based ones as well). I still get around 60 or so new items per day, and probably skim 20, read 10 in detail, and mark the rest as read.

Like the linked article discusses here, it's no longer possible to easily get a feed from major social media sources - which limits the usefulness of RSS from a purely social perspective (but I've never tried to use it that…

> Often I’ll just open the files in IDEA to have sane hotkeys, my plugins, multiple cursors, and the list goes on and on and on.

"Sane hotkeys" and "my plugins" are subjective (and suggest that you probably don't use Xcode as your primary editor). And Xcode has had multiple cursors since Xcode 10 in 2018 https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/04/29/multiple-cursors-in-xcode/

The reason AppCode died is that Apple platform engineers on the whole are very happy with Xcode. Source: I worked as an Apple platforms engineer for a decade across many teams and the person who complained about Xcode the most was always me, and overall I also think it was usually pretty good, arguably great. That is until they added Swift, which always had performance and stability issues (many of the complaints in this thread are fair for Swift support in Xcode). It still worked quite well for me for the C family of languages though (I haven't used Xcode seriously in a couple of years now).

If your going to give your opinion on Xcode, it's a good idea to give a count for years that you've worked in the program. For an IDE I personally wouldn't bother with anyone's opinion that hasn't put at least 1000 hours in the program, and a lot of the comments in this thread sound like people who just opened the program for a one-off task and formed their opinion based on that.

My colleagues for years have been people who live in Xcode, eight hours a day, five days a week, and I've never heard opinions like this thread…

(First off, as a disclaimer, I no longer work for Dropbox, I don't speak on their behalf. I've only used the feature as a user.)

I don't know a common search/find system that open()s or read()s files during the search by default. AFAIK Spotlight and Windows search are indexed searches. As for the indexing operations, I don't know how that is handled, they could disable indexing for remote files, or they could somehow integrate with indexing.

Based on my testing of a pre-released version of the feature (it isn't released yet), if you were to do something like `find ~/Dropbox -type f -exec md5 {} +`, it would download files.

As a user it did exactly what I expected. I was truly amazed. It was totally seamless and amazing.

Compared to the complexity of what has already been implemented, solving the problem of "I want to recursively open/read every file in my Dropbox, but I don't want it to download terabytes of data and fill by hard drive" seems fairly simple. For example there could be a setting for the maximum about of space Dropbox will use up, e.g., 40 GB, plus Dropbox could be smart enough to detect disk usage. If you `grep -R` it may download/open/read the files, once you reach 40 GB or near your disk capacity, Dropbox could start removing local copies of files that are not pinned to be local, i.e., remove the files that were downloaded because of the open()/read(), not the files you explicitly told it to keep local. I don't know how the team will choose to implement…

Apple has completely lost the goodwill of Mac developers. The one and only reason the ones that haven't gone bankrupt are still staying is because they have no other choice due to platform lock-in. Every single conversation that I've had with indies recently have gone along the same lines: Apple is killing the indie scene.

I wrote about the MAS exodus [1] more than a year ago and people were skeptical back then. Think again - here's a list of great apps [3] that are only available outside the MAS. Those are not just small time hobbyist apps - those are professional tools.

Pieter (founder of Bohemian, company behind Sketch) listed many problems with the MAS at a recent conference [5]. Wil Shipley (well-known within the community) has also written about it [6].

And now you have another flagship OS X app ditching the MAS due to the multitude problems it creates. The message is loud and clear - if you're a real software business, not a hobbyist at home, don't waste your time with the MAS - it simply does not allow you to run your busienss properly.

When the companies building the flagship apps for the platform publicly state they cannot do business due to the restrictions of the Mac App Store and then abandon the dysfunctional virtual marketplace, then you know Apple have pushed them beyond the edge. No company would just decide to leave the MAS unless the situation is hurting them significantly and holding them back. And unfortunately, there are almost no words to describe…

No, it is readable when it is on company servers.

http://images.apple.com/privacy/docs/legal-process-guidelines-us.pdf

"iCloud is Apple’s cloud service that allows users to access their music, photos, documents, and more from all their devices. iCloud also enables subscribers to back up their iOS devices to iCloud. With the iCloud service, subscribers can set up an iCloud.com email account. iCloud email domains can be @icloud.com, @me.com and @mac.com. iCloud data is encrypted 3wherever an iCloud server is located. When third-party vendors are used to store data, Apple never gives them the keys. Apple retains the encryption keys in its U.S. data centers. The following information may be available from iCloud..."

"...i. Subscriber Information ... name, physical address, email address, and telephone number ... iCloud subscriber information and connection logs with IP addresses ... Mail Logs ... Email Content ... Other iCloud Content. Photo Stream, Docs, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, iOS Device Backups ... photos, documents, contacts, calendars, bookmarks ... photos and videos in the users’ camera roll, device settings, app data, iMessage, SMS, and MMS messages and voicemail.

iCloud content may be provided in response to a search warrant issued upon a showing of probable cause."

It is only data stored directly on devices that Apple claims it can no longer give access for. Note that a lot of data gets synced without user knowledge including working drafts of documents:…