Apple's Swift Language: A Really Big Deal?

[famousringo]

Landguy said:
Ouch, what a step back for Apple.

They clearly are going even further down the path of becoming irrelevant. The writer of this article misses the whole point here. By making it even more proprietary, it hurts Apple long term. Already, Apple products are shrinking dramatically in market share. If Apple makes it even harder to port things to their system or out to other systems, they only increase the chance that they become the "second" system that gets the app, not the first. Apple had 70-80% of the market for a few years, and the development community had to give them first position on everything. Now, they are less than 40% of the tablet market and less than 30% of the smartphone market.

Apple never had 70-80% of the smartphone market. They peaked around 25% worldwide. They're still growing in key markets, pushing as high as 70% in Japan, almost catching up Android in the US.

What Apple has always had is a majority share of mobile development. 95% of mobile software revenues a few years ago, down to around 80% these days.

As the dominant platform for mobile development, the idea that Apple should be making it easier for projects that succeed on their platform to get ported to rival platforms is just plain odd. They want to make development faster, easier, and more powerful on their own platform, and that's exactly what Swift, CloudKit and Metal do. How easy those apps are to port to rival platforms is somebody else's problem.