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Apple's Pitch To Indian Developers: Think Local, Stay Up To Date, and Aim For Design Awards (ndtv.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: With just under half-a-million registered Apple developers in the country, India is among the most active markets when it comes to making apps for Apple's platforms, but the iPhone-maker took its time before getting involved with the local ecosystem in a meaningful way. Things started to change earlier this year, when Apple setup App Accelerator - a first-of-its-kind initiative, in namma Bengaluru, India earlier this year. More than three months later, the company's efforts are starting to shape up. Gadgets 360 spoke to many developers who have signed up for the App Accelerator, and they are pleased with how things are going so far. Registration to the App Accelerator - which is capable of hosting 500 developers per week - as well as attending the sessions, is free and open to everyone. At the App Accelerator sessions, which range between two to four hours, "evangelists" from the company are getting developers up to speed with the newest technologies, and guiding them to improve their apps and make the best out of the available resources. Developers told Gadgets 360 they get to understand what new technologies Apple specifically recommends they target, with SiriKit being one such example. That's a big and helpful change, developers say, because Indian companies often take long time in leveraging new features Apple introduces. The most crucial advice that developers have walked out of the campus with, they tell Gadgets 360, has been to reconsider their target audience. The evangelists have told them to make apps that serve to the needs of the local market, instead of focusing their energies in chasing the Western audience.
Is it just me, or is Apple's development core becoming increasingly cult-like these days?
It's fairly obvious that when you develop for iOS, you're investing in them, and not specifically yourself. The proprietary nature of their SDK is rather startling these days (especially with the heavy push towards Swift). I also question the value of all these new APIs to the end user- a lot of them just seem like marketing gimmicks designed to sell the next iPhone, released in a half baked state and promptly forgotten about in time for the next "major" iOS release (none of which are particularly major anymore).
This seems more like a program designed to get people using Apple's latest shiny shit, so Apple doesn't look so incredibly incompetent when they keep grunting out these new features that nobody really wants to support. I can see why they have a vested interest in that though, if they're marketing $800 phones with super awesome software that does everything, you're gonna need developers to use that functionality so the end user doesn't feel like they've wasted their money.
I guess most of the developers elsewhere have gotten fed up with that kind of nonsense, so now they're turning to the emerging industries and trying to hook them instead. If they can get a cheap labour source producing apps that use all their "great new magical features", then they can keep cranking out new features for new iOS releases and the end users will feel like they're getting what they've paid for, even though I'm sure the quality of those programs is going to be fairly dismal (like the majority of the rubbish on the iTunes app store). I guess if you've run out of innovation and you can't create something that the developers actually want to use, it's easier to just brainwash a new group of developers into using that functionality instead- then you can still call it a "success" even though it would have been an outright failure otherwise.