3. App Store search results that are actually relevant
4. Ability to respond to negative reviews
5. Mac App Store sand boxing that doesn't suck
Of course, there are many more issues but the primary problem is that Apple has addressed exactly zero of these issues and the App Store itself is virtually unchanged after 5+ years.
This is a common but completely unfair criticism of Apple. Plenty of people complained when iOS 7 was made available for the iPhone 4 (because the hardware was too slow to run it properly). And Apple still sells and supports relatively ancient hardware (the iPad mini) as a result of their current strategy of selling last year's model as the second-best option.
I think you are splitting hairs. What would be the point of "legally" allowing you to build an app that could not be submitted to the App Store? The only way to distribute it would be to "illegally" jailbroken devices.
> For both Larson and Pollak, one of Swift’s biggest advantages over Objective-C is that it does what’s called “automatic garbage collection.” Basically, this means that it will automatically dispose of unneeded information that’s sitting in a machine’s memory, and the result is that developers won’t have to spend a lot of time and energy trying to deal with memory management on their own. This is the primary reason that Larson believes Swift can reach a much larger number of developers.
Ummm... Automatic Reference Counting is not new to Swift (nor is it "garbage collection"), and has been part of Objective-C since 2011.
And of course it is not possible to write a Swift compiler in Swift before the language exists.
So no, not odd at all. Quite logical actually.