I'm sorry? What? Don't they have contacts with devs? I know it's not Apple's bread and butter but they're one of the highest valued companies in the world (and you don't get that way by paying...
Now, however, there's a five month backlog on royalty payments - one developer had not been paid for six months and nearly went out of business, while another said they had been "stonewalled" by Apple reps for chasing payments.
I'm sorry? What? Don't they have contacts with devs? I know it's not Apple's bread and butter but they're one of the highest valued companies in the world (and you don't get that way by paying your bills) why aren't they paying out royalties?
If I had to guess, Apple has access to the numbers needed for royalties. And then apple drags their feet whenever the devs inquire. Scummy but I've seen it before. The more generous interpretation...
If I had to guess, Apple has access to the numbers needed for royalties. And then apple drags their feet whenever the devs inquire. Scummy but I've seen it before.
The more generous interpretation is that they either lost access or they themselves are missing/can't find the right dev relations people who'd know all the details (they left, are at another part of Apple, they themselves don't have access to the right documents anymore, etc). And meetings/iteration times for companies this size can easily be months; it's probably no one's highest priority.
What a fucking joke. People wonder why Apple is always going to be on my shit list, this is another point to reinforce my stance on this company. And the fact that some of the developers for Apple...
What a fucking joke. People wonder why Apple is always going to be on my shit list, this is another point to reinforce my stance on this company. And the fact that some of the developers for Apple Arcade has five months worth of back payments from Apple, I expect this type of behavior from a company that is struggling, not from a trillion dollar company.
And the fact that their VR headset is a bitch to develop for is not really surprising considering people don't play games on Macs. But, but it is a VR headset, not a Mac, people are not going to work on it for work. Chances are people want to play games, you know the reason why people get these things.
Maybe my social circle is overly gross, but the primary use cases for VR that I see after 6 months of ownership are: Beat Saber VR porn Pretty much all other usage falls by the wayside because by...
Maybe my social circle is overly gross, but the primary use cases for VR that I see after 6 months of ownership are:
Beat Saber
VR porn
Pretty much all other usage falls by the wayside because by and large it's not neccessarily better than a good screen for other things.
Yeah this tracks. There was quite a lot of disappointment at Vision Pro's launch because people couldn't watch porn on it. Personally though, the people I know who own VR headsets use them...
Yeah this tracks. There was quite a lot of disappointment at Vision Pro's launch because people couldn't watch porn on it.
Personally though, the people I know who own VR headsets use them overwhelmingly for VRChat and basically nothing else.
Well, they probably also use it for porn, but they've never admitted it.
I've come really close to buying a headset myself, but I couldn't justify the price of an Index and the Quest's Facebook account requirement was a hard no. I'm still really put off by the hardware's association with Facebook Meta. For now I'm just waiting in a weird limbo for the Deckard to maybe be a real thing or for something else to come along.
I can wait though. The only games I'm aware of and interested in playing are Half-Life: Alyx and No Man's Sky
I’ve been playing NMS in PS VR2 and it’s pretty enjoyable. Visually, it looks phenomenal but has some quirks that put a damper on things… it doesn’t do room-scale very well, or even a standing...
I’ve been playing NMS in PS VR2 and it’s pretty enjoyable. Visually, it looks phenomenal but has some quirks that put a damper on things… it doesn’t do room-scale very well, or even a standing playstyle; feels like it was designed for seated play. The HUD doesn’t track with your head, but is fixed in alignment with some canonical “front” direction, which feels like a weird choice to me. As I’m exploring I always have to remember which way is forward, and if I have my back to it I can’t see any of my vital info without reorienting. It does work better if I just remain sitting since I can’t get my body turned around that way, but frankly I don’t wanna play that way. I didn’t buy this fancy immersive thing to use it in my chair.
Also, the controls in VR are pretty arcane, and flying a ship is especially unintuitive. And (this is just a limitation of VR in general) after a lengthy play session my eyes start to hurt and I get a headache, but I want to keep playing. Non-VR mode in NMS is a completely different experience, and switching to it can be a bit jarring and frustrating.
I think 'cockpit simulators' are the current sweet spot for VR . There are lots of standing games that are fun. Room-scale can be lots of fun too but once you need to move they always feel a...
I think 'cockpit simulators' are the current sweet spot for VR . There are lots of standing games that are fun. Room-scale can be lots of fun too but once you need to move they always feel a little cludgy. No one has quite figured out the 'killer app' way to do movement. Teleporting + walking works well enough, but really varies on how natural it feels. I like the games more that lean into you being in a confined play area and you move that around or move between those areas.
I got a quest, and the account was off putting to me too but I just created a new dummy account just for the quest, and I never let anything crosstalk if I can help it, so I think my two...
I got a quest, and the account was off putting to me too but I just created a new dummy account just for the quest, and I never let anything crosstalk if I can help it, so I think my two Facebook/meta accounts don’t know about each other.
I use mine primarily for Rumble, which is probably analogous to Beat Saber in that it’s a game that accidentally becomes a hella workout. I still get a bit motion sick in the really high movement games, so I’ll only ever pick it up for small bursts to try and increase my tolerance.
Not interested in porn games, but pretty sure they won’t just be on the meta store and I’m not interested in jailbreaking my headset yet.
Honestly, I might recommend a Quest, just because it's cheap enough that when it becomes a paperweight, you won't feel too bad about the expenditure. My wife and I bought one late last year and I...
Honestly, I might recommend a Quest, just because it's cheap enough that when it becomes a paperweight, you won't feel too bad about the expenditure.
My wife and I bought one late last year and I can't even tell you definitively that I've used it at all this year, same for her.
There are some neat games on it, but as I knew going in, it's just not the way I am able to or want to play games. When I play something, I'm looking to sit down and veg out, not to mention I really only get 15 minutes, at best, at a time. Plus, by the time the kids are in bed, it's getting late and using the VR just seems like...a lot.
We did end up buying Alyx, but haven't even played it yet.
I’d like to know more about your stance on Meta. I recently turned 40, so I’ve thought about reactivating mine. I left years ago when the Snowden leaks were revealed.
I’d like to know more about your stance on Meta. I recently turned 40, so I’ve thought about reactivating mine. I left years ago when the Snowden leaks were revealed.
sounds like we need more high quality VR games in that case. But that can be its own topic of discussion. It's more of a professional niche, but having 2-3 virtual monitors that you can carry on...
sounds like we need more high quality VR games in that case. But that can be its own topic of discussion.
It's more of a professional niche, but having 2-3 virtual monitors that you can carry on the go is quite a killer feature for people on the go. You may look silly in public wearing a VR kit, but this can allow for some nice productivity in places like a hotel or a satellite office you visit. Given the pricing it feels like this is more targeting those kinds of professionals than the average gamer.
Huh. My fondest VR uses are (1) exploring the streets of Hong Kong, and other locations, using google earth, (2) sitting on a grassy knoll, watching Slime Rancher slimes frolick, and (3) VR...
Huh. My fondest VR uses are (1) exploring the streets of Hong Kong, and other locations, using google earth, (2) sitting on a grassy knoll, watching Slime Rancher slimes frolick, and (3) VR museums where I can, again, sit down and stare at stuff for a long time. Or heck even walk around the art work a bit.
Beat saber is awesome as well but not my personal top 3.
I dislike them because they barely innovate. Just more and more variously sized rounded rectangles/squares each year (even the headset is just an extremely rounded rectangle)....
I dislike them because they barely innovate. Just more and more variously sized rounded rectangles/squares each year (even the headset is just an extremely rounded rectangle).
Edit: It seems like Samsung and a few Chinese/Taiwanese phone makers are the few companies at least trying new things, e.g. Samsung's line of folding phones, and various gaming phones with extra buttons (I know, it's not much, but more than more rounded rectangles).
Given my own (admittedly somewhat dated) experience with a platform Apple clearly doesn't really care for and does not understand, this does not really surprise me. My experience is with browser...
Given my own (admittedly somewhat dated) experience with a platform Apple clearly doesn't really care for and does not understand, this does not really surprise me.
My experience is with browser extensions for Safari. Besides the very rough experience trying to communicate with Apple about store entries, the entire platform has been problematic.
About then years ago Safari did support their own browser extensions with their own API. But it was all JavaScript based and this time all browsers had their own API. This is also the only time we did manage to develop for Apple and get the extension in the store for a short time. A very short time because at some point they did not accept updates but didn't give us feedback about it either anymore.
But we could still self-publish and host it elsewhere. Which we did for a little while, but eventually they did put a stop to that as well.
Then at some point they decided that a 100 dollar development fee was a good idea. And that developing in JavaScript/html/css for browser extensions made too much sense. So they threw out their old API and introduced one that heavily leaned on Xcode. Which made having one unified code base for all browser extremely difficult, and also severely limited the ability of devs on other platforms to even help out.
Honestbleeps, the person that created the popular RES extension for reddit also wrote a medium article about it around that time.
Then at some point Apple made a big fuzz about supporting the web extensions API for Safari. Which is the standard based on Chrome's API which is also used by Firefox these days. This would be great, except that:
For the ones they did support, performance was often very bad.
It still required Xcode to wrap around it.
And as recently as two years ago people at Apple really didn't seem to understand people's problem with Safari.
Big disclaimer: I am mostly writing this from memory with a few things included I could quickly find back to verify stuff.
It is also entirely possible that these days all the relevant webextension APIs are supported, performing smoothly and that publishing an extension is actually a smooth process. But I am no longer actively involved with extension development (except for personal use) and even when I was, we basically already gave up on Apple getting it right.
For what it’s worth, the newer Safari extension architecture is built on App Extensions, which is the extension platform that everything Apple that’s not a web browser makes use of. They might’ve...
For what it’s worth, the newer Safari extension architecture is built on App Extensions, which is the extension platform that everything Apple that’s not a web browser makes use of. They might’ve thought it strange for Safari to be a unicorn of sorts that has its own totally separate (and third party) standard.
That’s not to say I’m a staunch defender of not adhering perfectly to the web extensions spec, but it’s not as if it doesn’t come with its own perks. The App Extension architecture that Safari extensions are based on gives developers access to all the same APIs that macOS/iOS developers have access to and aren’t limited to JS — if llvm/clang can compile it, you can use it in a Safari App Extension (and I think to some extent in Safari Web Extensions too). So if you wanted to drop down to Swift or C++ for some intense, number-crunchy task or take advantage of system provided hardware accelerated OCR for example, you can.
Things haven’t quite worked out that way but it feels like they don’t want Safari to be “just” another browser target in a list, but rather to be host to uniquely capable Safari-exclusive extensions and enhanced versions of cross-platform extensions.
It's not worth much, to be honest, it only further reinforces my point about Apple not (wanting to) understand a platform. The web simply is a different platform from the application landscape of...
It's not worth much, to be honest, it only further reinforces my point about Apple not (wanting to) understand a platform. The web simply is a different platform from the application landscape of macOS/iOS with a different basis in technology. People that develop extensions by large are people who have a history in web development, and that makes perfect sense. So, it is a different developer base to begin with, and I'd say user expectations are also different.
Even if their reasoning about a separate and third party standard did hold some water.
It doesn't make much sense anymore once they started their "support" for web extensions and made a big splash about it. Which, as far as I am concerned, was mostly marketing at the time. In fact it is a good example of Apple not understanding a platform and not really wanting to make an effort in doing so. Other than the minimal amount of effort, they feel they can get away with to deflect most negative feedback.
Really were really excited about the possibility of extensions they use on other browsers now possibly making it to Safari. Only to get angry at us when we had to point out the performance issues, missing apis, etc meaning that their extension in fact would not be available on Safari.
Even ignoring all the technical details. The overall experience of trying to deal with Apple support, having to pay 100 dollars to only be stonewalled when running into issues, etc are all still there. So given the relatively small potential user base and the fact that most people on macOS have a different browser installed anyway it simply was not worth it for us.
In addition to that, and more broadly speaking, it has only been in recent years that Apple started actively developing webkit again (which as far as I understand has once again slowed down) as it had started to lag behind to such a degree that people en masse flocked to Chrome (and a lesser degree firefox. At which point all that nice integration with the rest of the OS hardly matters anymore.
In fact, if anything I feel like modern day Apple is actively hostile towards the web as an ecosystem. Which I'd say is almost influenced by greed, as they want as much as possible to be exclusive to their own ecosystem which is not possible in the context of the web.
Getting back to the overall topic of this thread. I feel like a very similar thing is going on with gaming. They had to re-invent the wheel and develop metal and make it the only way to do game development on macOS. A lot of the same reasoning can be applied here, that metal allows better access to the hardware and other things. Which completely ignores the fact that the majority of games are not developed for macOS specifically but for other platforms. So where developers might be inclined to support Vulcan as that will also work on Windows they are less likely to target Metal. So, of course, they made a lot of fanfare about their porting toolkit for games towards M3 hardware. And to be fair, from what I have seen it seems to work recently well at demonstrating that games could run on macOS it is still up to developers to actually port the games.
Which is likely why we haven't seen the massive uptick in games on macOS you would have expected given the coverage it got last year. Because it puts game devs in a very similar position as extension devs with much higher risks and costs involved as well.
It’s idle speculation, but based on my experience, most Mac users switching to Chrome (or one of the many Chrome clones) are doing so not as a result of weakness on the part of WebKit, but rather...
It’s idle speculation, but based on my experience, most Mac users switching to Chrome (or one of the many Chrome clones) are doing so not as a result of weakness on the part of WebKit, but rather due to the increasing tendency for developers to not test or develop their web apps against anything but Chromium, resulting in broken or subpar experiences under anything that’s not based on Blink (including Firefox). WebKit has problems sure, but it covers most basics reasonably well, and most devs don’t need the APIs it’s lacking (for example WebUSB).
On the topic of Metal, it’s worth pointing out that it was announced before Vulkan existed and came about out of a need for something more modern than OpenGL. While I agree that some they should probably add some form of Vulkan compatibility, they’re never going to abandon Metal because that’d mean giving up interlocking graphics API and GPU development and leave them at the mercy of Khronos group for API improvements.
For modern Safari I'd say that is about right, Apple has put in the time and effort to bring Safari back up to a reasonable standard a little while ago. But just a few years ago Safari was...
For modern Safari I'd say that is about right, Apple has put in the time and effort to bring Safari back up to a reasonable standard a little while ago. But just a few years ago Safari was actually being neglected by Apple and lacking in several areas. Making even Firefox on macOS a better alternative, even though, as you said, it has its own issues due to the chrome focus.
And again, I can't stress enough how incomplete and broken (performance wise) their webextension implementation was when they first announced it and how utterly slow their development was in that area.
As far as Metal goes, I am not saying they should give it up. I am just saying that by refusing to add Vulkan support in addition to it, they are stubbornly shooting themselves in the foot as far as game development goes. Certainly once they deprecated OpenGL on macOS.
Not sure I'd agree that Firefox has been an all-around better alternative to Safari. While it's not as bad about eating your battery as Chrome is, it still trails behind Safari to a significant...
Not sure I'd agree that Firefox has been an all-around better alternative to Safari. While it's not as bad about eating your battery as Chrome is, it still trails behind Safari to a significant degree, and in my usage of it as a secondary browser I've seen odd behaviors from it, like it forgetting all of my tabs every so often (which I've actually observed under Windows and Linux too).
Honestly I find the browser landscape increasingly bleak.
Not a big fan of Apple but I'm surprised to hear the developer experience for the Vision Pro is as bad as it is. In my very limited experience, outside of making sense of XCode's hieroglyphic...
Not a big fan of Apple but I'm surprised to hear the developer experience for the Vision Pro is as bad as it is. In my very limited experience, outside of making sense of XCode's hieroglyphic interface, the iOS/iPadOS DX was decent. Surprised that the Vision Pro puts up more of a fight. Disappointing to hear that Apple is behind on royalty payments though. There is simply no excuse for any company, especially one of Apple's scale, to be behind on them.
So then...don't? Apple is a horrible company. If you're having a bad experience, then don't put your product on their shitty platform? Easy enough. If people actually did this, Apple would lose...
So then...don't? Apple is a horrible company. If you're having a bad experience, then don't put your product on their shitty platform? Easy enough. If people actually did this, Apple would lose popularity as all the good products are elsewhere and they would slowly wither and die
I'm guessing (not really basing this on anything) that these developers have signed contracts (either exclusivity deals or deals to develop games for them by porting existing ones to Arcade) with...
I'm guessing (not really basing this on anything) that these developers have signed contracts (either exclusivity deals or deals to develop games for them by porting existing ones to Arcade) with Apple, which makes sense why they are hesitant to leave that platform. Even tho they could argue that Apple had broke that contract first by not paying them the back payments, but Apple would have access to better lawyers that would sue the developers by arguing that the developers were in fact the ones that breach the contract first, and not Apple. So, it is a lose-lose situation for the developers and the average Apple user won't care about this situation.
I'm sorry? What? Don't they have contacts with devs? I know it's not Apple's bread and butter but they're one of the highest valued companies in the world (and you don't get that way by paying your bills) why aren't they paying out royalties?
If I had to guess, Apple has access to the numbers needed for royalties. And then apple drags their feet whenever the devs inquire. Scummy but I've seen it before.
The more generous interpretation is that they either lost access or they themselves are missing/can't find the right dev relations people who'd know all the details (they left, are at another part of Apple, they themselves don't have access to the right documents anymore, etc). And meetings/iteration times for companies this size can easily be months; it's probably no one's highest priority.
So, scummy at worst and irresponsible at best.
What a fucking joke. People wonder why Apple is always going to be on my shit list, this is another point to reinforce my stance on this company. And the fact that some of the developers for Apple Arcade has five months worth of back payments from Apple, I expect this type of behavior from a company that is struggling, not from a trillion dollar company.
And the fact that their VR headset is a bitch to develop for is not really surprising considering people don't play games on Macs. But, but it is a VR headset, not a Mac, people are not going to work on it for work. Chances are people want to play games, you know the reason why people get these things.
Maybe my social circle is overly gross, but the primary use cases for VR that I see after 6 months of ownership are:
Pretty much all other usage falls by the wayside because by and large it's not neccessarily better than a good screen for other things.
Yeah this tracks. There was quite a lot of disappointment at Vision Pro's launch because people couldn't watch porn on it.
Personally though, the people I know who own VR headsets use them overwhelmingly for VRChat and basically nothing else.
Well, they probably also use it for porn, but they've never admitted it.
I've come really close to buying a headset myself, but I couldn't justify the price of an Index and the Quest's Facebook account requirement was a hard no. I'm still really put off by the hardware's association with
FacebookMeta. For now I'm just waiting in a weird limbo for the Deckard to maybe be a real thing or for something else to come along.I can wait though. The only games I'm aware of and interested in playing are Half-Life: Alyx and No Man's Sky
I’ve been playing NMS in PS VR2 and it’s pretty enjoyable. Visually, it looks phenomenal but has some quirks that put a damper on things… it doesn’t do room-scale very well, or even a standing playstyle; feels like it was designed for seated play. The HUD doesn’t track with your head, but is fixed in alignment with some canonical “front” direction, which feels like a weird choice to me. As I’m exploring I always have to remember which way is forward, and if I have my back to it I can’t see any of my vital info without reorienting. It does work better if I just remain sitting since I can’t get my body turned around that way, but frankly I don’t wanna play that way. I didn’t buy this fancy immersive thing to use it in my chair.
Also, the controls in VR are pretty arcane, and flying a ship is especially unintuitive. And (this is just a limitation of VR in general) after a lengthy play session my eyes start to hurt and I get a headache, but I want to keep playing. Non-VR mode in NMS is a completely different experience, and switching to it can be a bit jarring and frustrating.
I think 'cockpit simulators' are the current sweet spot for VR . There are lots of standing games that are fun. Room-scale can be lots of fun too but once you need to move they always feel a little cludgy. No one has quite figured out the 'killer app' way to do movement. Teleporting + walking works well enough, but really varies on how natural it feels. I like the games more that lean into you being in a confined play area and you move that around or move between those areas.
I got a quest, and the account was off putting to me too but I just created a new dummy account just for the quest, and I never let anything crosstalk if I can help it, so I think my two Facebook/meta accounts don’t know about each other.
I use mine primarily for Rumble, which is probably analogous to Beat Saber in that it’s a game that accidentally becomes a hella workout. I still get a bit motion sick in the really high movement games, so I’ll only ever pick it up for small bursts to try and increase my tolerance.
Not interested in porn games, but pretty sure they won’t just be on the meta store and I’m not interested in jailbreaking my headset yet.
Honestly, I might recommend a Quest, just because it's cheap enough that when it becomes a paperweight, you won't feel too bad about the expenditure.
My wife and I bought one late last year and I can't even tell you definitively that I've used it at all this year, same for her.
There are some neat games on it, but as I knew going in, it's just not the way I am able to or want to play games. When I play something, I'm looking to sit down and veg out, not to mention I really only get 15 minutes, at best, at a time. Plus, by the time the kids are in bed, it's getting late and using the VR just seems like...a lot.
We did end up buying Alyx, but haven't even played it yet.
I’d like to know more about your stance on Meta. I recently turned 40, so I’ve thought about reactivating mine. I left years ago when the Snowden leaks were revealed.
sounds like we need more high quality VR games in that case. But that can be its own topic of discussion.
It's more of a professional niche, but having 2-3 virtual monitors that you can carry on the go is quite a killer feature for people on the go. You may look silly in public wearing a VR kit, but this can allow for some nice productivity in places like a hotel or a satellite office you visit. Given the pricing it feels like this is more targeting those kinds of professionals than the average gamer.
I feel like a 300 dollar pair of nreal/xreal glasses would work better for your last situation vs. 3500 for Apples VR goggles.
Huh. My fondest VR uses are (1) exploring the streets of Hong Kong, and other locations, using google earth, (2) sitting on a grassy knoll, watching Slime Rancher slimes frolick, and (3) VR museums where I can, again, sit down and stare at stuff for a long time. Or heck even walk around the art work a bit.
Beat saber is awesome as well but not my personal top 3.
I dislike them because they barely innovate. Just more and more variously sized rounded rectangles/squares each year (even the headset is just an extremely rounded rectangle).
https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html
Edit: It seems like Samsung and a few Chinese/Taiwanese phone makers are the few companies at least trying new things, e.g. Samsung's line of folding phones, and various gaming phones with extra buttons (I know, it's not much, but more than more rounded rectangles).
Given my own (admittedly somewhat dated) experience with a platform Apple clearly doesn't really care for and does not understand, this does not really surprise me.
My experience is with browser extensions for Safari. Besides the very rough experience trying to communicate with Apple about store entries, the entire platform has been problematic.
About then years ago Safari did support their own browser extensions with their own API. But it was all JavaScript based and this time all browsers had their own API. This is also the only time we did manage to develop for Apple and get the extension in the store for a short time. A very short time because at some point they did not accept updates but didn't give us feedback about it either anymore.
But we could still self-publish and host it elsewhere. Which we did for a little while, but eventually they did put a stop to that as well.
Then at some point they decided that a 100 dollar development fee was a good idea. And that developing in JavaScript/html/css for browser extensions made too much sense. So they threw out their old API and introduced one that heavily leaned on Xcode. Which made having one unified code base for all browser extremely difficult, and also severely limited the ability of devs on other platforms to even help out.
Honestbleeps, the person that created the popular RES extension for reddit also wrote a medium article about it around that time.
Then at some point Apple made a big fuzz about supporting the web extensions API for Safari. Which is the standard based on Chrome's API which is also used by Firefox these days. This would be great, except that:
And as recently as two years ago people at Apple really didn't seem to understand people's problem with Safari.
Big disclaimer: I am mostly writing this from memory with a few things included I could quickly find back to verify stuff.
It is also entirely possible that these days all the relevant webextension APIs are supported, performing smoothly and that publishing an extension is actually a smooth process. But I am no longer actively involved with extension development (except for personal use) and even when I was, we basically already gave up on Apple getting it right.
For what it’s worth, the newer Safari extension architecture is built on App Extensions, which is the extension platform that everything Apple that’s not a web browser makes use of. They might’ve thought it strange for Safari to be a unicorn of sorts that has its own totally separate (and third party) standard.
That’s not to say I’m a staunch defender of not adhering perfectly to the web extensions spec, but it’s not as if it doesn’t come with its own perks. The App Extension architecture that Safari extensions are based on gives developers access to all the same APIs that macOS/iOS developers have access to and aren’t limited to JS — if llvm/clang can compile it, you can use it in a Safari App Extension (and I think to some extent in Safari Web Extensions too). So if you wanted to drop down to Swift or C++ for some intense, number-crunchy task or take advantage of system provided hardware accelerated OCR for example, you can.
Things haven’t quite worked out that way but it feels like they don’t want Safari to be “just” another browser target in a list, but rather to be host to uniquely capable Safari-exclusive extensions and enhanced versions of cross-platform extensions.
It's not worth much, to be honest, it only further reinforces my point about Apple not (wanting to) understand a platform. The web simply is a different platform from the application landscape of macOS/iOS with a different basis in technology. People that develop extensions by large are people who have a history in web development, and that makes perfect sense. So, it is a different developer base to begin with, and I'd say user expectations are also different.
Even if their reasoning about a separate and third party standard did hold some water.
It doesn't make much sense anymore once they started their "support" for web extensions and made a big splash about it. Which, as far as I am concerned, was mostly marketing at the time. In fact it is a good example of Apple not understanding a platform and not really wanting to make an effort in doing so. Other than the minimal amount of effort, they feel they can get away with to deflect most negative feedback.
Really were really excited about the possibility of extensions they use on other browsers now possibly making it to Safari. Only to get angry at us when we had to point out the performance issues, missing apis, etc meaning that their extension in fact would not be available on Safari.
Even ignoring all the technical details. The overall experience of trying to deal with Apple support, having to pay 100 dollars to only be stonewalled when running into issues, etc are all still there. So given the relatively small potential user base and the fact that most people on macOS have a different browser installed anyway it simply was not worth it for us.
In addition to that, and more broadly speaking, it has only been in recent years that Apple started actively developing webkit again (which as far as I understand has once again slowed down) as it had started to lag behind to such a degree that people en masse flocked to Chrome (and a lesser degree firefox. At which point all that nice integration with the rest of the OS hardly matters anymore.
In fact, if anything I feel like modern day Apple is actively hostile towards the web as an ecosystem. Which I'd say is almost influenced by greed, as they want as much as possible to be exclusive to their own ecosystem which is not possible in the context of the web.
Getting back to the overall topic of this thread. I feel like a very similar thing is going on with gaming. They had to re-invent the wheel and develop metal and make it the only way to do game development on macOS. A lot of the same reasoning can be applied here, that metal allows better access to the hardware and other things. Which completely ignores the fact that the majority of games are not developed for macOS specifically but for other platforms. So where developers might be inclined to support Vulcan as that will also work on Windows they are less likely to target Metal. So, of course, they made a lot of fanfare about their porting toolkit for games towards M3 hardware. And to be fair, from what I have seen it seems to work recently well at demonstrating that games could run on macOS it is still up to developers to actually port the games.
Which is likely why we haven't seen the massive uptick in games on macOS you would have expected given the coverage it got last year. Because it puts game devs in a very similar position as extension devs with much higher risks and costs involved as well.
It’s idle speculation, but based on my experience, most Mac users switching to Chrome (or one of the many Chrome clones) are doing so not as a result of weakness on the part of WebKit, but rather due to the increasing tendency for developers to not test or develop their web apps against anything but Chromium, resulting in broken or subpar experiences under anything that’s not based on Blink (including Firefox). WebKit has problems sure, but it covers most basics reasonably well, and most devs don’t need the APIs it’s lacking (for example WebUSB).
On the topic of Metal, it’s worth pointing out that it was announced before Vulkan existed and came about out of a need for something more modern than OpenGL. While I agree that some they should probably add some form of Vulkan compatibility, they’re never going to abandon Metal because that’d mean giving up interlocking graphics API and GPU development and leave them at the mercy of Khronos group for API improvements.
For modern Safari I'd say that is about right, Apple has put in the time and effort to bring Safari back up to a reasonable standard a little while ago. But just a few years ago Safari was actually being neglected by Apple and lacking in several areas. Making even Firefox on macOS a better alternative, even though, as you said, it has its own issues due to the chrome focus.
And again, I can't stress enough how incomplete and broken (performance wise) their webextension implementation was when they first announced it and how utterly slow their development was in that area.
As far as Metal goes, I am not saying they should give it up. I am just saying that by refusing to add Vulkan support in addition to it, they are stubbornly shooting themselves in the foot as far as game development goes. Certainly once they deprecated OpenGL on macOS.
Not sure I'd agree that Firefox has been an all-around better alternative to Safari. While it's not as bad about eating your battery as Chrome is, it still trails behind Safari to a significant degree, and in my usage of it as a secondary browser I've seen odd behaviors from it, like it forgetting all of my tabs every so often (which I've actually observed under Windows and Linux too).
Honestly I find the browser landscape increasingly bleak.
Not a big fan of Apple but I'm surprised to hear the developer experience for the Vision Pro is as bad as it is. In my very limited experience, outside of making sense of XCode's hieroglyphic interface, the iOS/iPadOS DX was decent. Surprised that the Vision Pro puts up more of a fight. Disappointing to hear that Apple is behind on royalty payments though. There is simply no excuse for any company, especially one of Apple's scale, to be behind on them.
So then...don't? Apple is a horrible company. If you're having a bad experience, then don't put your product on their shitty platform? Easy enough. If people actually did this, Apple would lose popularity as all the good products are elsewhere and they would slowly wither and die
I'm guessing (not really basing this on anything) that these developers have signed contracts (either exclusivity deals or deals to develop games for them by porting existing ones to Arcade) with Apple, which makes sense why they are hesitant to leave that platform. Even tho they could argue that Apple had broke that contract first by not paying them the back payments, but Apple would have access to better lawyers that would sue the developers by arguing that the developers were in fact the ones that breach the contract first, and not Apple. So, it is a lose-lose situation for the developers and the average Apple user won't care about this situation.
I hate the world we live in