Agree with the first part, the 2nd no. Look at a superb, Mac only raw converter, built by one guy; Iridient Developer.
As a partner in a company that makes a rather simple cross platform software product (three actually;PhotoKit suite), we do need to consider the business model and customers but I can say that either platform has it's own unique challenges. One isn't better, easier than the other. So no, making Apple the bad guy here doesn't wash. Both Mike and Brian have made their own decisions about supporting a single platform, we have to live with that without blame.
There are a number of differences between the software development methods and update frequencies of the parties mentioned.
The main difference is that Mike is very prolific with tweaks and improvements, often weekly. And on the rare occasion it takes a couple of weeks between updates, it's usually because he was inventing another major new feature or improvement. They get added on a regular basis, some for specialized use, like new drone camera profiles, some for all users like a ColorManagement engine upgrade, or a fix for bug introduced by the latest OS version (Win10 Anniversary upgrade not recognizing default printer). Because Qimage supports all printers that use a printer driver, there are lots of different issues that can crop up. And if a user proposes a good improvement, Mike will often implement it within a few days, or over the weekend, like we saw with the addition of dithering to improve the output quality of the usual 8-bit per channel print pipeline.
That's quite different from the occasional maintenance release or update for a new Raw format that the other developers produce, and that can wait for an approval process.
So it's not a blame game, it's just different requirements in responsiveness. Both models work, but they are for different folks.
Cheers,
Bart
