I’m sorry you feel this way @gjzwart, because that’s definitely not the feeling I want readers of our site to have.
I thought it might be helpful to share a bit of info about what we’re doing on our site, that you might not be aware of.
The content was fantastic, and it was the Apple developer community first. Now it’s money first…
Every week, we publish at least 2 tutorials for the community that are 100% free. In the first 5 months of 2020 alone, we have released 75 free tutorials, which you can see here.
These tutorials cost us money to develop, since we have to pay the authors, editors, and leaders who create them (over $700 per tutorial), but making free content for the community has always been very important to me and our team.
In addition to that, we are currently embarking on a huge effort to help the community, given the current COVID-19 crisis, which you can learn about on our Community Care page. Myself and many other members of our team are donating a lot of our time on a volunteer basis to help the community out with free office hours, talks, moderated chat, bootcamps, and more.
I can honestly say my team and I have spent a huge percentage of our time, effort, and money in the past several months doing the best we can to help the community (including working nights and weekends). I’m sorry if you feel we aren’t doing enough, but we are doing the best we can.
and quality is slipping fast
Quality is very important to us as a team. The way I see it is developers have very limited learning time, so we have to do our best to make sure that our tutorials 100% work, and teach the reader the topic as efficiently as possible.
As such, every tutorial we create goes through three rounds of editing: a tech edit, and english language edit, and a final pass edit. Each editor tries to improve the tutorial a grade level, so we’re sure that when a tutorial is published, it’s something the entire team can be proud of.
I’m not aware of any other tutorial site that puts so much effort into ensuring quality in their tutorials. Sure, we might mess up sometimes, but we’re aiming for high quality every time, and we’re also working to improve as a team in every single tutorial we make.
Customer service is non existent.
We regularly check the stats of our customer support team, and on average we respond to every ticket within 24 hours. We regularly get happy emails from customers about the speed and quality of our customer support. If anyone ever has a time they feel they don’t get support promptly, please email me directly at ray@raywenderlich.com.
Updating books to the latest version is also taking way too long, or not happening at all.
We update all of our non-deprecated books about once a year. My philosophy is within a year, something will break in pretty much any technical book, due to things changing in technology.
For example, we’ve now updated the iOS Apprentice every year for 8 years now: it’s gone from Objective-C and XIBs to Swift and Storyboards, and even SwiftUI!
And this is just one of our books; last year we updated 22 books in 1 year:
In fact just this week we released a bunch of free book updates, and announced several more.
And best of all, these updates are 100% free for existing customers, as our way of thanking everyone who supports our site.
I’m not aware of any other publisher who puts as much effort into updating their catalogue as frequently as we do (and for free).
But luckily there are lots of other sites with amazing content.
I agree, we’re lucky that the mobile development community has grown, and there are now tons of amazing sites out there!
That’s the great thing about being a part of a growing community, there are plenty of options out there to learn from.
RW sold his name, now it’s not much of the original RW left.
I’m still here, and I’m working with my team each and every day to make the best tutorials we can.
I’m proud of my team and what we’ve accomplished - we have so many smart and talented people on our team, and I know from my conversations with them that the primary reason they’re doing all of this is to give back to the community.
Sure, there’s always something we could do better, but in my opinion the most important thing is to do the best we can with the resources we have, and then iterate: learn from what we’ve done, and get better each and every time. This is one of our team values in fact:
If you feel we’ve let you down I apologize, but I hope this helps you understand that we are doing our best here, and I hope we can make it up to you in the future.
