Federico Viticci Jul 23, 2025

To be completely honest with y'all, I'm feeling the same sense of dread about iOS 26 as I did with Stage Manager in iPadOS 16. And it's actually even worse, because design touches *everything* across platforms.

The more time passes, the more I feel like the entire idea of Liquid Glass needs to be scrapped. The material is bad; the few structural ideas they had are functionally worse than before.

I'm feeling very demotivated. iPadOS 26 is the only great thing I'm using so far.

Show threadFederico Viticci Jul 23, 2025

And realistically speaking, we're going to be stuck with this for...two years at least?

I hope I'm wrong! I highly doubt that big companies are going to jump on board with Liquid Glass. This design won't have the same effect that iOS 7 had back in the day.

As a result, Apple's apps will feel increasingly isolated from the rest of the industry, which is moving in a direction (AI) that Apple can't match right now.

Show threadFederico Viticci Jul 23, 2025

I'm guessing that Apple thought this design could be a nice distraction from their AI woes, and the plan is backfiring.

What's also backfiring? Not cultivating a great relationship with indie developers, who were the first champions of the iOS 7 redesign in 2013.

Good luck with that now. šŸ˜”

Show threadheretiqJul 23, 2025
@viticci I donā€™t get this. What would ā€œcultivating relationsā€ with Indie developers look like apart from easy access to huge market, excellent developer tools, fast and responsive app review process, documentation, great sample code and available one-one-one developer support (which are already in place)?
Show threadrileyslideyJul 23, 2025
@heretiq ā€œexcellent dev tools, fast and responsive app review and documentationā€ LMAOOO
Show threadheretiqJul 23, 2025
@rileyslidey Please share your last experience developing an iOS or macOS app using Xcode, submitting it for AppStore review and the response time. Waiting ..
Show threadheretiqJul 23, 2025
@rileyslidey Try developing something complex on both iOS and Android and you might get an appreciation of how good Apple developers have it in terms of world-class dev tools, frameworks, documentation and app distribution. The experience is unmatched despite the whining of a few whose whining is driven more by self-interest vs actual DevX.
Show threadrileyslideyJul 24, 2025
@heretiq just cause you and I didnā€™t face problems doesnā€™t mean šŸ˜­ others havenā€™t. Xcode is slow as balls. Documentation is few and far between. App review is opaque and confusing. Appleā€™s dev tools/frameworks certainly arenā€™t the worst, but it can be so much better
Show threadheretiqJul 24, 2025
@rileyslidey I have definitely faced problems. Thatā€™s because development is a non-trivial exercise ā€” and the more complex the apps youā€™re building, the more problems youā€™ll face. Iā€™ve spent days deciphering seemingly cryptic App review rejection explanations, reading documentation, dev forum posts, then stepping away out of frustration .. and suddenly having things click and realizing that the issue wasnā€™t the AppStore reviewer feedback, but my rigid perspective on something that I didnā€™t really understand. This has happened multiple times. The longest Iā€™ve ever had to wait for App Store response was 4.5 days and that was during a holiday period. Iā€™ve been at this long enough to know that I would be exceedingly lucky if my experience was the exception.
Show threadrileyslidey
@heretiq thatā€™s great but it doesnā€™t solve the problem of the tools and docs being given to us being exceedingly mediocre in quality for a company of appleā€™s size
Jul 24, 2025 at 12:19amIvory for iOS
Show threadheretiqJul 24, 2025
@rileyslidey I really donā€™t understand this. Xcode does everything I need it to do for multi-device development, testing and app distribution to the AppStore or TestFlight. The available frameworks are extensive and cover everything from low-level, device-oriented coding to media management, persistence, machine learning, now on-device LLMs with innovations like @Generable and @Guide that are unmatched by any other dev environment and thereā€™s sample code for all of this. The built-in Instruments and StoreKit tools have way more features for app profiling and optimization and app monetization setup and testing than Iā€™ll ever use. And Iā€™ve had no insurmountable issues with documentation for any of these ā€” even for the new stuff. So I truly am at a loss when I hear these broad generalizations. Show me another company that has comparable tools and docs.
Show threadrileyslideyJul 24, 2025
@heretiq thatā€™s amazing that you have such an excellent experience, cause Xcode is slow as hell and freezes up constant for me šŸ˜­ and it always brings up that stupid ā€œdebug symbolsā€ shit that takes forever to ever complete. as for docs, Microsoft is one company that does it infinitely better
Show threadheretiqJul 24, 2025

@rileyslidey Thatā€™s no fun and I can sympathize with the frustration. That may be a device config issue. Thereā€™s no doubt that Xcode does better when well resourced. My dev device is a 16ā€10 Core CPU/32 Core GPU M1 Max MacBook Pro with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD. Iā€™ve had moments of slowness when SSD space falls below 100GB, but otherwise itā€™s a dream dev machine and that is definitely a contributor to the great DevX Iā€™ve experienced.

I have teams that develop multi-platform apps using Python, .NET, iOS/macOS, Android, MAUI, Node, Angular, React, RoR and some esoteric stuff and honestly I hear very little griping about documentation for any of them.