What should new Apple leadership do? That’s the question posed in Apple Turnaround by John Siracusa, which explores a new deal for developers, better software reliability, and harder paths to growth. It’s a great post, and the developer side of things especially gets me. I remember being at an EA meet around 2010, with a slew of indies excited about iPhone. They didn’t care about Apple’s cut, because everything else was, for them, better than what existed on other platforms, including the (relative) freedom to do whatever they wanted. Amazingly, Apple was less prescriptive than others in the gaming space. Then things all went very wrong.

Apple prioritised IAP over traditional game models, training users to want games for nothing. App Store editorial led to iPhone game sites shuttering – but they’d given new titles far more visibility than Apple ever would. And competitors quickly learned and evolved to compete with – and then better – Apple’s offering to game creators. Whereas we once saw iPhone-first titles head to other platforms, the reverse quickly became more commonplace. Elsewhere, major mobile creators like Simogo quit, which should have set alarm bells ringing – but it didn’t. Because Apple just counted the cash.

More widely, across apps and games, Apple has also found itself in a space where it’s not just showing – as Siracusa suggests – disrespect for developers as much as outright disdain. Various emails, now very much in the public domain due to emerging in lawsuits, suggest too many senior figures at Apple believe their own press to the degree they think Apple is responsible for all developer success and the success of the platform as a whole. They argue developers should be grateful to Apple and not the other way around. I have two words to counter that: Windows Phone.

I hate doing a “what would Steve Jobs do?” and it’s naive in the extreme to think his Apple wasn’t out to make huge piles of cash. But there are questions today about where Apple’s priorities lie in a whole range of spaces. Perhaps, as one developer said to me, the Jobs version of Apple only appeared to be on the side of devs because it needed to be, and now it doesn’t. So was this disdain always there or not? Was it a culture ingrained in Apple when Jobs was CEO or is it a more recent thing? Because I’d say that if it’s the former, Apple has an even bigger problem than Siracusa suggests.