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🌱 Apple Is Not the Reason I’m Buying Apple Products - These People Are

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In the court cases against Epic, this round of regulatory scrutiny from the EU, and other more, Apple has made their sense of entitlement abundantly clear. Every piece of business that happens on their platforms, is to their credit. And developers are lucky to be able to pay them almost a third of their revenue for the privilege of being on their platforms. If Apple understands that their relationship with developers is reciprocal, they’re hiding it well.

I like all my Apple hardware. Heck, I even love some of it! I also like the operating systems, the general focus on privacy, and the way the different parts of the ecosystem work together. But I think I could enjoy a Framework laptop, Asus phone and some Sony earbuds as well! The things Apple makes and does isn’t the main reason I keep buying Apple products. It’s all the fantastic third-party developers, mostly indie, who make great software for the Apple platforms.

I know that Apple makes some great tools, APIs and frameworks to make this happen — so I’m not saying they shouldn’t get anything for their trouble. But this idea that it’s a one-way street, where only Apple gives other companies business, just feels so wrong to me.

So even though I know neither Tim Apple nor any other Apples, will read this post, I feel the need to shout: Apple, you need to wholeheartedly thank (among others) the following great developers - because they give you a lot of business:

Great third-party software

Most of these apps are what I would call indie apps — but not all of them. 1 And I think most of them are only available on Apple platforms currently — but they might be available on, or on the way to, other platforms as well. I’ve tried all of them, but don’t necessarily use them regularly — but I do use many of them! 2 I’ll also try to give social links to the devs I know — but you are welcome to contact me if some are wrong and you know who I should tag! I’d also love to get more tips to people and apps who should be on this list!

Apple Studio Display, Røde USB mic, mechanical numpad and keyboard, Apple trackpad and Macbook Pro 14-inch.

I would never have bought all this stuff without the indie scene on Apple’s platforms

A stock Mac, without utilities like these, feels broken to me:

Answering the question «Is macOS good?» is kind of hard. Because I really don’t like it out-of-the-box — but it’s terrific with third party software…

Audio Hijack

Some do wood working as a hobby — I do development

  • And even though I’m very far from being at a professional level, I really like the Zed code editor by the team behind Atom.

  • Panic also has some great software, in

  • iTerm , by George Nachman is also good,

  • but my favourite terminal app is Warp.

  • And if I had coded more on my iPad, I probably would’ve used Runestone, by Simon Støvring,

  • and Working Copy more!

  • Oh, and my favourite browser, is Arc by The Browser Company —

Zed

But there’s even more great ways to write notes and other texts

Bear screenshot.

Bear

There are also lots of great calendar apps and task managers

Calendar 366 screenshots, for iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch.

Calendar 366

Most of these have good mobile clients — but here are some other mobile favourites

Mela screenshot, showing a recipie for Chili sin carne.

Mela

When Apple got a fine for unfairly competing with 20 music apps (Spotify being one of them), they wrote a very bitter reply. Here they pointed out that «Spotify pays Apple nothing», 3 even though they have apps on Apple’s platforms. But you can also think of it the other way around: That Spotify is maintaining clients for Apple’s platforms, without Apple having to pay Spotify anything. Because services I use a lot, like Tidal (trying to switch from Spotify), Telegram (the chat app with the best UX by far) and YouTube (Premium is well worth the cost) are obviously available for other platforms as well — so they don’t keep me on Apple’s platforms. But these platforms would be way less attractive for me if these companies didn’t make clients for them! And Apple doesn’t pay them anything for it.

Again, Apple does deserve tons of cash and credit — but not all of it. People like the mentioned developers are the main reason I buy Apple products — and not Apple themselves.


  1. And people’s definition of «indie» varies! ↩︎

  2. Yes, I have a problem. ↩︎

  3. Because they don’t use in-app-purchases. ↩︎