Dear Apple

It's absurd to have to beg the wealthiest software company in the world for what should be considered really basic stuff. Xcode is consistently unstable, slow, missing simple essential functionality (like refactoring), and Apple's interface builder is something that most experienced Apple devs know to run for the hills from.

Wow, it&#x27;s that bad for developers of their own platform? I do rails development and left OSX for linux a few years ago after finding all the custom song &amp; dance to do things on apple was painful. Not a day goes by I am not grateful for doing that, i am much happier doing web dev on a linux box.<p>But I was under the impression Apple at least took care of the devs who work on their platforms.<p>As someone else has noted: vote with your keyboard. I do ROR web development in part because I am free of many of the constraints other devs must face on custom platforms.<p>If you don&#x27;t like doing dev with Apple, don&#x27;t do dev with Apple. Either pick better tooling (if available) or ditch the platform (if possible).

Apple works with their bug reporting system; instead of encouraging people to &quot;sign&quot; &quot;letters&quot; (on Google forms no less) - open a bug report at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugreport.apple.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugreport.apple.com</a>, post the bug number and encourage people to duplicate it. This is the only way to move something at Apple.

I made a conscious decision a while back to simply use a Linux distro (Ubuntu) with easily&#x2F;cheaply-available commodity hardware for programming. Correct me if I&#x27;m wrong but other than iOS development, there isn&#x27;t anything I can&#x27;t do on Ubuntu with a 2010-ish laptop that I can do with a 2016-ish Macbook.

As a developer who moved from Java and JavaScript (IntelliJ IDEA) to Swift and Xcode about a year ago, the experience has been horrendous. How is it okay for a company as big and serious as Apple to have an IDE and tooling as bad as Xcode? The IDE frequently crashes, there is no refactoring support at all, practically non-existant code completion, syntax highlightning frequently stops working, etc etc.

@dang Can you add the repo name to Github URLs that point to repos? For example, display the title as &quot;Dear Apple (github.com&#x2F;dear-apple&#x2F;dear-apple)&quot;.<p>I thought this was a letter from Github to Apple, but was disappointed to discover that it was a letter from some subset of the Apple developer community.<p>I recognize that this is sort of pulling at a thread, but since Github is so widely used, perhaps some sort of exception can be made?

These letters always come off as sounding immature. The open letter, the why I quit, the why I switch letters all do. It is as if you need validation for something.

While I have slightly despised Xcode ever since 4.x when they integrated Interface Builder and everything else unnecessarily into one buggy app, it has only been <i>completely broken</i> for me with the latest version. “Something” makes typing s...l...o...w......a...s......h...e...l...l... and I have never figured out what. The editor became utterly unusable no matter the project and I was forced to do every change outside of Xcode.<p>I am very thankful that they at least had the wisdom to expose &quot;xcodebuild&quot;, etc. as command-line tools, because I have always set up my primary build to rely only on the commands. (Even when “building” from Xcode, the build that I click runs &quot;make&quot; underneath with xcodebuild.) That way, I never <i>need</i> to be in the GUI and can work around its quirks or bugs that make it unusable, which has paid many dividends.

I&#x27;ve given up on App store development. I wrote a handful of moderately successful apps in the 2009-2012 range, but the market is too crowded and the expectation of free, or near free software isn&#x27;t profitable for the small team of &quot;just me.&quot;<p>They do fascinating work though. Making a living with Microsoft technology at my day job(s) for two decades, Apple stuff was a refreshing change.

The best way to build native iOS applications is in Visual Studio with Xamarin IMHO.<p>It pulls in the UI designer from XCode, and you get all of the advantages of Visual Studio which is hands-down just a better IDE than XCode.

Just stop pushing apps for iProducts. When all the major apps stop adding features for a while Apple will focus on getting developers back or customers switch to Android.

The one thing I&#x27;d really like to see is a more stable autocomplete. Having a decently working editor should be prioritised above everything else in my opinion.

It would also be an absolute joy if we could actually refactor with Xcode.

It&#x27;s kind of sad seeing developers beg for things they could build themselves if the tool was open source.

This is what you get for relying on proprietary software, begging on your knees for crumbles while your supplier is busy pivoting themselves out of relevancy. It&#x27;s always the same game, and we never learn; as soon as the next new shiny arrives, people get in the same old lines and beg for another round of abuse.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;bug-reporting&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;bug-reporting&#x2F;</a><p>For anyone who signs this, make sure you throw a report at em as well!

They should recruit the services of Miss Swift, who received a swift response from Apple when she tried this, albeit not on a Git repository. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;taylorswift.tumblr.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;122071902085&#x2F;to-apple-love-taylor" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;taylorswift.tumblr.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;122071902085&#x2F;to-apple-lov...</a>

Oof. This isn&#x27;t good for Apple, and I say this as a fairly big Apple fan.<p>From my perspective as a programmer, Apple&#x27;s success has hinged entirely on the quality and innovation of their OS and dev tools. For a long time, both of these have been ahead of the game (since NeXT came to Apple).<p>They lose this advantage, they crumble. Mark my words! Go on, mark them.

As someone that has dabbled in Android development, I have to say that Xcode is light years ahead of its competitors re: developer friendliness. It&#x27;s realistic from a complete novice to setup their environment and create a full app in a few hours. Just getting your environment setup for Android can take a whole day or more.<p>I&#x27;m surprised by how few of these comments actually touch on the suggestions in this letter. Overall, they seem like small improvements that won&#x27;t really move the needle on Xcode&#x27;s effectiveness... Breaking up targets to make 15sec compilation times to &lt;1sec would be nice though<p>Things I do with every project: -Don&#x27;t use the interface builder, easier to do all UI work programmatically - Use Pods

I use XCode for the absolute minimum, and when done with it, go back to AppCode.

I really don&#x27;t know what Apple gets out of keeping XCode as closed source. Why not open it up?

Since their tools and software is not improving and each version brings new bugs to enjoy, I am happy to see Microsoft support compilation of other platforms with Visual Studio. The best would be Apple stops their whole desktop lineup and focus on mobile Devices, making everything easily accessible from other platforms. Maybe the way the Macs are updated is a sign in this direction.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s considered a problem by the team at Apple, or even by some developers, but I would love a more stable Swift language. The number of changes per version * the number of projects in the world is causing a large amount of work and instability. This is contributing to the low tool quality as well.

Normalization of Deviance - this is a not uncommon problem with organization that grow as big and are successful. I&#x27;m curious on ideas on how a company as big as Apple and it&#x27;s somewhat unfocused relation with the developer community can fix this? Maybe their CEO needs to call out to Developers.

74 signatures is hardly a blip. I would&#x27;ve waited for at least 5000 signatures before publishing this.

While we&#x27;re at it, maybe we can put pbxproj out of its misery and get a modern project file format and module system

Signed. But is there some way you can hide the email addresses on the Google Sheet?

Can we give this HN post a better title? This is atrociously clickbaiting. Granted it just goes to GitHub, but I would like to have at least an _inkling_ of what I&#x27;m about to read.

Xcode is 14 years old and Swift is a new language with no baggage that really only needs to target iOS and has new APIs for graphics and more. Seems more likely their goal would be a much-more simplified IDE for iPads that anyone can learn that can only publish to iOS.<p>They also stopped making computer monitors and routers last year and haven&#x27;t updated most of their computers in years.<p>Best reason to host WWDC outside of SF this year is so it won&#x27;t be a building full of Xcode developers lol!