Apple's Swift Language: A Really Big Deal?

[Landguy]

famousringo said:

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.

I never indicated that ios is a cell phone only platform that you seem to imply.  Even though i would argue that they had a much higher percentage of the SMARTPHONE market than 25%.  You seem to be mixing global mobile phone sales with the percentage of the market that Apple was competing in.

I would also like to see what your definition of "80% of mobile development" means.  Are you speaking to the fact that 80% of all apps that are made for mobile are available on the ios platform?  If so, that would only make sense today.  As Apple makes it harder to port programs actually designed for the majority of mobile users, and their marketshare continues to drop, it will reach a point that makes the platform a 2nd tier(like windows phone is today).  Sure the top apps will come, but the other apps will slowly never make it.  This isn't something that will happen overnight, it will happen over years.

All I was saying was that Apple needs to keep the costs to develop for their platform down to ensure that it doesn't become cost prohibitive(WiiU) to release apps on it.