Are you very familiar with iOS development? I ask because those people I know who are were very happy with the improvements and APIs added in past iOS releases and seem to be delighted with what's being released with iOS 6.
Perhaps you've found yourself hampered by the lack of certain APIs that Apple has yet to add or yet to promote from SPI. I know some devs in that boat. But I don't think you can accuse Apple of having lost focus on the iOS platform, or that they aren't feverishly working to give devs more power.
A very important missing feature is external keyboard event support. I don't want to go too far into the details, just let me tell you this: ESC, Function Keys,CTRL, ALT are all dead.
I submitted a feature request among other developers like the month iPad came out. So far, no any sign of adding it. Yet we continue to see Apple adding this message that reminder.
I'm probably not the worlds biggest Apple fan, but:
A very important missing feature is external keyboard event support
Umm.. no it isn't. It's pretty clear iOS is designed for devices without a physical keyboard, and if that is important to you then you will always be working on something Apple doesn't think is important. Their priority there is quite clear and I don't think it is reasonable to blame them for that.
(Written by someone who likes a physical keyboard and is very happy with my Asus Transformer)
As a platform provider, why bother work on an app that thousands of developers can do better, and not work on a missing feature that can enable further innovation? We are not talking about a Siri level of feature, we are talking of a trivial platform feature that basically a decent engineer in Apple should be able to do it in a week, testing included.
As a platform provider, why bother work on an app that thousands of developers can do better, and not work on a missing feature that can enable further innovation?
I'm not sure if you want to hear the answer to that or not.
It's economics & platform strategy. Ping was created to attempt to increase the stickiness of the iTunes platform, to appease the record labels (who wanted an alternative to MySpace) and to bring Apple closer to Facebook. All of those things were major strategic goals for Apple at the time.
Making the iPad something more like a laptop when the MacBook Air already exists? The only way your "bug" will get traction within Apple is if someone decides that is a goal of the iOS platform. That might happen, but pulling an Apple engineer for a whole week off other projects to work on it seems unlikely to happen without fairly major executive sponsorship.
There are tons of cases where iPad could be better off with a keyboard, especially for productivity apps. Come on, android has full keyboard support from day one.
And what percentage of users actually use the full keyboard support? I mean, with Android tablets we're asking "what is a low percent of a tiny number of people", but still. Being able to use an external keyboard with your phone/tablet is a very, very niche activity.
Perhaps you've found yourself hampered by the lack of certain APIs that Apple has yet to add or yet to promote from SPI. I know some devs in that boat. But I don't think you can accuse Apple of having lost focus on the iOS platform, or that they aren't feverishly working to give devs more power.