Apple docs were never great. They were just better than average in an era when documentation overall wasn't that good. They have always had the broken links, public APIs that are undocumented, crucial information that only exists as a comment in a header file, methods with one line of description that just restates the method name with spaces, and bad sample code.

What has happened is that documentation elsewhere has improved. Mozilla has invested heavily in documentation and now the web platform has great docs. Apple has done the bare minimum for years and it shows.

IDK what time period you're talking about, but I thought around 10 years ago it was pretty good. You could download and install all the documentation locally, they had pretty thorough class documentation and also higher-level conceptual documents around various topics (seems like those are all deprecated now).

Was able to basically just code against the standard library and the documentation actually seemed to be one of the perks of native development, since it was all in a standard place/format with pretty good baseline quality. I'm working with a greater variety of library dependencies now and of course the documentation isn't as consistent.

It's kind of mind-boggling how Apple seems to have gotten bad at this now.

> also higher-level conceptual documents around various topics

Yes! The FOO Programming Guides and BAR References were the gold, and consequently the things that are hardest to see disappear. They explained the whys of the frameworks. And how the pieces fit together. Per-class docs are not any substitute.

I agree. The docs from that time period were wonderful. I'm shocked at how far its fallen.

"What has happened is that documentation elsewhere has improved. "

No, what has happened is that Apple is acting almost as though third party development itself is going to be deprecated at WWDC this year.

They always had issues and ellisions. This is orders of magnitude worse and suggests a significant shift in management intention, the full extent of which has not yet been revealed.

I bet they count on the community to document their stuff via word-of-mouth and medium posts. Too bad 95% of them are variations on “how to write hello world with the latest Swift syntax sugar”.

Thankfully the headerdocs are still mostly intact.

There's also an awful lot of important information tucked away in WWDC videos, unfortunately.

But will that continue to be the case as headerless Swift takes over?

Yes, that's a real problem. Currently the Apple libraries are all Objective-C, so even if you're using the Swift shims you can still use the headerdocs of the original Objective-C framework.