It feels like they are spread way too thin, and individual teams are not allowed to improve their app/services/parts on their own. If I had to work on Apple Notes I would have several suggestions, not all worthy of work of-course, but letting a lot of apps go stagnant is something else entirely.

> spread too thin

It’s a choice though, it’s not like they aren’t the richest company in the world.

Nevermind richtest company. It's like every year they release three new half-baked apps, that will not receive updates in years.

Just focus on a core and let third-party apps do what they're good at.

Apple used to have to roll-their-own to hedge their bets. For example, Safari and iWork came about when there was a possibility that Microsoft would pull support for IE and Office for Mac.

Now it’s done for momentum.

it's the consequence of promotion driven development

Still need people to press buttons though. But I feel too many decisions have to go through a tiny set of people. But I have no insights into the org. I do wish they would do more smaller releases. Like update Notes without a full OS update.

When they're making billions from their cut on app store sales and receiving billions from Google to do nothing, and people buy their devices anyway, why would Apple care?

If people keep buying your devices anyway it's feedback to the company management that the customers aren't bothered and you can keep doing what you're doing, so there's no reason to change anything. It's the PRO of being a monopoly and a money printer.

The more you rely on abstracted (and sometimes leaky) tools—like Swift versus Objective-C, or SwiftUI versus its predecessors—the more likely you are to feel helpless when something goes wrong.