> Apple's majority of buyers aren't their users or consumers; they are Apple fans and supporters. If Apple had consumers like Android, Linux, or Windows, either they would have fixed their act or been in the ground by now.

Companies who develop these fandoms live life on easy mode. You can do anything you want, abuse customers, raise prices, make promises and never deliver on them, lock people into your ecosystem, and there will always be an army of white knights out there ready-at-the-keyboards, defending the company. I honestly don't know how people get to the point where their identity is so wrapped up in a single company that they wake up in the morning and say to themselves, I'm going to be a company apologist for free and respond rudely to people, even though the company doesn't and will never even know who I am!

Besides the rediculous hardware requirements of Android Studio, far beyond any other Java based IDE, we have a NDK experience that feels like a 20% side project from Android team, because back in Android 2.0 days they were forced to actually allow developers to write C and C++ code, otherwise there would be no games.

Even Symbian C++ across Metrowerks and Caride, felt a much developer friendly experiece than NDK has ever been.

Mobile toolchains have always been awful. Symbian's or BlackBerry's weren't any better.

Personal view on the Xcode issue is this part of your comment:

> lock people into your ecosystem

There's no real alternative to Xcode, if you're going to develop for Apple, you pretty much just have to take the dive, buy Apple hardware, and use Xcode. You don't really know what you're getting into before you get there, and by then you've got sunk cost and just have to trudge through. Somebody a while back had a comment that kind of epitomized it (paraphrased from bad memory): "I thought I was their target customer. I'm not. I'm not sure who their target customer is. Who is this even written for?"

_mlxl had a pretty funny one from 4 years ago also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932848

  > (...) I think its left a little bit of taint on my soul. It is unfathomably bad.  Apple keep bolting stuff on to it.  It's slow, broken in numerous ways, depends on file formats that aren't used anywhere outside of Apple and completely undocumented. It is such a painful tool to use.

Had a comment on another thread's Switch 2 development complaints, re. the few I have tried - Nintendo, Steam, and Google.

Nintendo - The process itself is opaque, confusing, and difficult to determine your status or progress, even large companies have difficulty.

Steam - Signing up and putting launch title info was difficult, yet Wayyyyy easier and clearer to navigate. Tools are kind of a mess, and figuring out everything you need is a challenge. (comments on the SDK are at least funny sometimes)

  // This is really, really bad.  We're sorry.  But it's been this way for
  // a long time now and it's scary to change it, as there may be others that
  // depend on it.

  // Recommended amount
  // Quite a bit
  // Practically everything
  // Wall of text, detailed packet contents breakdown, etc

  /* Prefer user version of the interface.  But if it isn't found, then use gameserver one.  Yes, this is a completely terrible hack */

  // This totally sucks, but this information can't be gleaned any
  // other way
  // (200 lines later) actually no way to do this yet.

  // um, yeah, clipping is enabled (?)
  // (500 lines later) ???? is clipping ever turned off ??

  // hush for now, less spew

  Nintendo "How do I even sign up?" Steam "Great, signed up, how do I release something?" Google "Easy sign-up, somewhat easy release of products, eventually got three out the door. Your products have been removed for (mumble mumble legalese)"

Apple probably views the product as the privilege to develop and publish apps.

so it's the wrong incentive. apple has no need to make it better because people are forced to use it anyways.