@MarkusWinter First of all, thank you for putting your time and effort into researching and creating this article. While a great deal of it feels like bagging on Xojo, the end result shows that it comes from a sincere place of worrying and a desire to see Xojo succeed.
It is interesting to me, because your solution has a similar result to the one I proposed some time ago, get some of the more experienced Xojo customers to actually help the Xojo product evolve and grow. My mechanism was different in that I suggested Xojo be burned to the ground, the Framework be ditched and it be rebuilt entirely in Xojo (using declares or interops to tap into system functionality).
Which would allow the more experienced developers to assist in providing bug fixes, and new components for Xojo. For a price of course, only Apple expects you to spend 1000s of a dollars a year to QA their products for them.
I want to see Xojo thrive and I am know that they do too. I don’t believe for one minute that they deliberately make these decisions to piss off their existing customers, but I do think they could work on handling the situation a lot better. I have given them feedback on their handling of the two major issues that we’ve experience recently as I don’t think Xojo did very well.
You know that I’m very unhappy with Apple at the moment, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that some of the things they’ve changed which have hurt a lot of indie developers, were not done to hurt indie developers, they were done to keep the profit as high as possible, so when combined with share buy backs, this keep the share price as high as possible, which in turn causes the poor CEO to get massive bonuses, because lets be honest a couple of hundred thousand a year is peanuts, right?
I’d like to believe that Xojo operates in the same way, they don’t do these things that irritate us, to irritate us, they do it because that is what they believe works best for them financially.
Same with Subaru, who no longer make a performance mid-sized SUV, because they make enough money selling underpowered mid-sized SUVs, even though every dealership knows that they’re turning away customers who want a mid-sized SUV with Subaru’s AWD, and can do 0-60 in less time than it takes to boil a kettle.
I think to say that your article was pure-speculation is unfair as you provide your sources. However it does suggest that Xojo isn’t performing as well as they could be, but without seeing actual unit sales, we’ll never really know if they are or not. We do know that in recent years they’ve made some questionable decisions that has cost them a number of Xojo enthusiasts, which means that these enthusiasts are no longer assisting in Xojo promotion. I hope that Xojo learns from this and will put extra consideration in to serious decisions like this in the future.
I know that you’re hurt and probably nothing I can say will make you feel better, I believe that you wrote that article with a serious intention of trying to help Xojo and I am sorry that Xojo didn’t see it the same way. Please don’t give up just yet, hopefully there is something we can do that will incur a positive change, that we can all prosper from.
Meanwhile, I’m off to Cupertino, I’ve got a 12" MacBook that’s started to melt it’s keys when charging, I’m going to go post it through the windshield of a certain CEO’s Mercedes (after making a hole in the windshield to post it through) The fine for property destruction will probably be cheaper than the cost to replace the battery (just under $1000 USD is what I was quoted).
Edit: I forgot to mention that I am flattered that you think App Wrapper and the Ohanaware App Kit are great additions to Xojo and should be bundled with it. Thank you for your kind words.