The Downside to Apple’s Silicon

It’s not the hardware… it’s the developers

I know I’m probably going to get lynched for this post but I think it needs saying and hopefully it will change things, but considering how small my blogs reach is I very much doubt it.

There are two main reasons for this. Firstly ARM and x86_64 require different feature sets to get them working and the second is that different systems require apps to be written in different programming languages and developers don’t seem to want to learn different languages.

Apple is pushing for developers to move from Objective-C to Swift for apps to be supported on their platforms (and if I’m reading the signs right then at some point in the not so distant future they will be making it swift only) whilst apps for other platforms are written in C++ or C#. Then there’s web apps that are written in HTML or PHP.

As a non-developer and a newbie to writing apps, I find Swifts is relatively easy to learn and hope that one day it becomes the main programming language as more manufactures switch to ARM-based architectures in the future. For the time being though I think we are going to have the same problems, we have now for at least a few years to come.

For Example, as I’ve mentioned before I used a piece of software called WYSIWYG to help me design lighting rigs for shows. The problem is that the developers (Cast Software) have developed the software for windows only and have no intentions of bringing it over to macOS, which is really annoying as all the other tools I use for events product are run on macOS.

I really do hope that Apple’s move towards ARM-based Mac does help shift developers to create multi-platform applications but I can’t see it happening any time soon. The only apps that I really see that are cross-platform these days are games, a few productivity apps and the development platforms such as unity and unreal engine. Both of those last two platforms make it really easy to publish apps to all platforms with the tick of a box in the settings if only this could be the same for other development environments.

My though on this could well be wrong, and if they are tell me why in the comments, and developers only develop for one platform because they don’t feel there is a big enough audience on certain platforms. But that is where I think they are wrong, If you don’t write the software to be cross platform to begin with you’ll never know where you biggest audience is and with the rise of the iPad and other tablet devices they should be branching out to these platforms too.

I know Swift works well on macOS and Linux operating systems and with windows moving to a UNIX kernel it only seems logical that Swift could also run well on it too. I’m not saying that the language should be the default but it’s open-source so it wouldn’t cost Microsoft anything to allow it’s implementation in Windows and would help developers create high-quality cross-platform apps without having to learn half a dozen different programming languages.

One way that we could encourage developers to use Swift is to have courses at college teaching students how to use it (it’s already done for C++, C#, Java, HTML & PHP). I really think that could help encourage more developers to deploy their apps on many platforms, not just one. I should point out that it’s not just windows developers that are guilt of this but so are the ones that develop only for Linux or macOS.

I hope that one day, in the not so distant future, I won’t matter what operating system you are running or what hardware you are using (so long as it’s powerful enough) you can run whatever app you want (without having to run virtual machines) on what ever platform you want. It really would make working with others so much simpler, I’d love to not have to export items I’ve created in Blender on macOs to another format so they can be opened in another application in windows so I can convert them again to insert them into wysiwyg.

Sorry for my rambling rant, I could probably do with a map to navigate this post so god knows how you’ve managed to get to the end of it. Let me know in the comments below what you think is holding back developers deploying their apps across platforms.