(I’m on a little bit of a software kick this week; I’ve realized I work with software every goddamn day but hardly ever talk about it with anyone.)
Developers update too quickly
Here’s a thought: I hear a lot of software developers say they assume “power users” update their OS and other software quickly. I just don’t think that’s a safe assumption! I, and several other working developers I know, HATE to update their tools, because it’s probably going to break! I was advised that if you want to work with Unity, you should really be using the version from 2 years ago, before they started breaking a bunch of stuff and adding incomplete features. I run macOS 10.14, but wish I was still running 10.11 (or even 10.9 in terms of performance). But I just literally can’t and the ONLY reason is because the software tools I use don’t maintain backward compatibility for more than a year or two. And I think that’s a mistake!
Developers are trapped by this cycle of assumption:
- All Mac devs know that macOS is getting buggier every year.
- They still want to use “the new features,” even though they aren’t that significant year over year.
- Those same devs then inadvertently pressure the people who use their software to update to the newer and worse OS version by dropping backward compatibility.
- Apple has no outside pressure to improve compatibility because the numbers allegedly show “most” people are upgrading.
This sucks! I think there’s another negative cycle here: developers of software for a platform follow that platform closely, talk to other people who develop for it as well, and get a general sense that “most people” update whether they like it or not. But talk to any working professional — artist, accountant, and anyone in between — and unless they are sorely missing some feature, they are not eager to update. They just want their workflow to continue to work! They don’t want a UI overhaul (unless they work in Unity or Unreal, lol). And they don’t want to have to update their operating system. Because when it inevitably breaks in a dozen other ways due to platform mismanagement by Apple, Microsoft, Google or whoever, they resent it.
Or, they just don’t use your software. This post was born because I installed NetNewsWire for iOS, really liked it, and wanted to install the Mac version, too. Oops! No dice. Requires at least macOS 10.15. But why? It’s an RSS reader. It fetches feeds and displays them, something that’s been technically feasible and fast for decades, including in the previous incarnation of NetNewsWire that I used smoothly on my 2005 PowerBook!!! What possible reason is there to build software that literally doesn’t run on anything but the newest hardware/OS combo?
(Related: I think it's bad that developers use new hardware! It gives you the wrong idea about the platform, and hides performance problems that most of your users — who can't afford a new computer every year or two — are forced to deal with.)
In the case of NetNewsWire, I’m pretty sure it’s because they wanted to use SwiftUI. Okay! Why doesn’t SwiftUI work on older versions of macOS? Because fuck you, it would be too much work for the most valuable company in the world.
The numbers back this up
But what’s the harm? How many people are you excluding? Well, according to statcounter.com:
(By the way, my 2-year-old iPhone updated to iOS 14 last week, and now it often fails to load CSS and images on sites in Safari!!!! Fucking WHAT???????????)
According to Apple a year ago (via Apple Insider):
There may be as many as 42 MILLION Macs running versions of macOS more than a year old. One of them is me. And I don’t plan to update until I have to buy a new Mac, which I do not look forward to, because the stories about accumulating bugs (on top of the myriad I encounter all day every day already) are a major deterrent.
So I guess I won’t use NetNewsWire on my Mac! Oh well, no big loss for them, I guess, since it’s free anyway, and software isn’t meant to be used, especially not by almost half of the Mac user base.
I guess the question for developers is: how many possible customers do you want to have? 58 million, or 100 million?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯