The pile of open and/or hackable music hardware flooding the market makes iOS obsolete for most of my music use cases. I'm working on synths and performance tools, and had planned to sign up for an Apple Developer account to distribute them for both Mac and iOS, but even last year when I was first looking into it (pre-AI for me and most of the development world) it was already apparent that getting permission to sell apps to Apple users was a shitty process and maybe not worth the trouble. Now it seems to be even more toxic, as the queue is filled with slop. I think I'll probably focus on stuff like the FM-1 and the upcoming hackable APC or Behringer gear.

I also have been in the synth/audio realm for a while, and the situation with MVAVE FM-1[1] et al., is something that has been a long time coming.

Musicians love to tweak their instruments - the rigid paths of purchased plugins and soft synths is pretty much over. There are so many wonderful, amazing things being done - by the hour, literally - that someone who has been in this world for a while might be wondering just what to do with themselves. By the time I've worked out the design/architecture for a new synth feature or concept, there are already 20 or 30 vibe-coded variants out there in different forms..

Like all good music-tech hackers I keep a lab/ folder with F/OSS projects, and as I review disk space on the regular I notice that my lab/FM-1/ folder grows day by day by day with absolutely astonishing bits of code, some 80+ projects in all (and by no means complete), a gource rendering of the repo collection reveals an extremely vibrant and flourishing scene. And as I do these code reviews (because who isn't doing code reviews these days), I am reminded of a very cold, hard, sharp and penetrating fact: its about the hardware.

The synth world is being completely refactored, as a marketplace and as a community, by the AI revolution. The only ones getting anywhere interesting with it, though, are the ones building the hardware ...

[1] MVAVE-FM1 is an extremely important lesson. It is, 101%, a F/OSS success story. It began life as a host for a very nice synth engine - is is now a host for the hottest synth engine of the next twenty minutes!! A relative outsider has done the impossible: make something great, ultra-cheap, relatively available .. and now AI has cracked it wide, wide open - just as it is doing with cracking open the very expensive nuts of very very, very expensive competing synthesizers. The $60 FM-1 is outshining a whole fleet of $600- and higher devices, and the custom firmware circuit is not going back in the bag.

The DSP guys have their hair on fire. So the race is on to create the next platform. While Apple are gate-keeping their garden, Akai, and Korg, and .. so, so many others .. are about to have their platforms become the hottest place for developers to do things, at another end of the scale.

Its a crazy year to be a digital musician. We literally don't need Apple any more.