I use Objective-C exclusively (no Swift) in my App Store apps.

I wrote a Swift app for a hobby/free project a few years ago and regretted it. They changed the language and deprecated some of my code, which isn't easily replaceable without a significant rewrite. The project now compiles only in Swift 4 and will die when Swift 4 support is removed from Xcode.

I see no reason to use Swift. The compiler is slower and buggier. The debugger is slower and buggier. C interoperablity, while it exists in Swift, can be very painful. And I don't actually ship any bugs that Swift could have theoretically saved me from. I see no gain in switching.

People have been telling me since 2014 that every line of code I write in Objective-C is "technical debt". I continue to laugh at them and ask them to compile Swift code they wrote in 2014.

Of course if I had to get a job, it would be a different story, but I own my company, so I can do whatever I want.

The relationship some developers have with Apple should be a case-study with multiple PhD thesis in psychology.

Not even in movies I've seen so many cases of children desperately chasing their emotionally unavailable parent.

Apple is a trillion dollar company, it's the "parent" who sells you +$40 dongles for everything. "Hobbies" are only good if they make them money AND doesn't increase their risk or any liability.

I've seen this developer-Apple dynamic at least since the late 90s. "Daddy Apple" was more available back then, but it's wasn't like it cater that much to the hobbyist-developer community ( unless we see the past with rose-colored glasses ).

The App Store is a multi-billion dollar business, like a moderately high-end mall, there is no place for hobbies in that world.

I hope for a time when developers understand this and stop feeding Apple execs for free. Ironically that would be the day Apple would be "nicer" to them.

I feel this developer's pain, I remember writing a vituperative blog post about Apple's habit of buying or building their own clone of some independent app and muscling developers out of their market. With time I've mellowed. Running a business means that you have to say "no" to a bunch of things for which there is a perfectly plausible and rational reason to say "yes."

The reasons for saying "no" to good ideas are sometimes incredibly important, such as "Putting more wood behind fewer arrows, i.e. Focus." And sometimes they make no sense that anyone can discern from reading the tea leaves, but they aren't fatal to the business and so there's no incentive to figure out how to say "yes" to them.

I am in no way saying that I like living in the world where Apple treats ISVs and hobbyists as irritations. I remember having to pay outrageous amounts of money for photocopied developer documentation in the late 80s and early 90s... From Apple! I remember flying to Cupertino for OpenDoc training that cost us three grand a developer. Outrageous, were they trying to recruit a developer ecosystem? Or gatekeeping so that the only OpenDoc developers would come from companies that were already behemoths?

But sigh... OpenDoc failed, Copland failed, Pink was spun of as Taligent and failed... Easy to criticize Apple's choices, but nevertheless they survived and here we are decades later dealing with the fact that throughout its history, Apple has always had a love-hate relationship with hobbyists and ISVs.[1]

And throughout that time, we've all complained. We're not wrong, but then again, we're not right, either.

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[1]: Guy Kawasaki, Apple's first developer evangelist, wrote at length about how he was trying to drum up interest from indie developers to write software for the Mac. It was a good fit, as being an indie means you can jump into a new platform and exploit first-mover advantage, without any baggage from your existing success to hold you back.

Corporate always shit on that, they wanted big announcements from Microsoft and Lotus and Wordperfect and Ashton-Tate. And how did things play out? The "killer app" turned out to be PageMaker from Aldus, a company nobody had heard of. Later, people wrote business apps for Mac. Did they build them on top of Ashton-Tate's popular database? Nope, they built them on top of something called "Silver Surfer" from France of all places, which was eventually renamed "4th Dimension."

Apple's disdain for small developers is in their DNA.

Unfortunate that people who make more than $100/hr won't pay $60/year for an app they use every day.

The author should maybe consider that there are some possible downsides to a totally free market in food and drug products, and in particular look at the historical events which led to the creation and empowering of the FDA. e.g. "The Sulfanilamide Disaster" [0], which killed 100 people because a company used antifreeze to create a liquid form of their drug (and it would have killed more if not for FDA efforts to track down shipments and recover the drug).

The shortage is certainly a terrible thing. It also would be a terrible thing if contaminated formula killed a bunch of babies. It may be that we have not struck the right policy balance between a free market and regulatory controls, but this screed is far from a nuanced reconsideration of the role of the FDA.

[0]: https://www.fda.gov/files/about%20fda/published/The-Sulfanil...