Apple's issue is it doesn't seem to care. I'm going to speculate that improving the developer experience has a low status on the management hierarchy. So even if some people do care they're clearly not being given the resources to do anything about it.
And the resources required are tiny. Technical writers are cheaper than developers, and you could hire a top team for $1m a year. Doubling that would still be a rounding error in Apple's revenue stream. Multiplying it by 10 and introducing good management would be enough to make Apple's dev docs world-beating and legendary.
Apple could also run developer classes and camps online and f2f, publish its own books, create a regular stream of developer newsletters and tech updates, run forums that are actually useful, and so on.
The fact that none of this is happening at scale is... unfortunate. WWDC is a small plug in a big hole, and doesn't come close to meeting the community's needs.
I came to the same realization that Apple doesn't seem to care when I started learning how to build apps on iOS.
Coming from Android, I was used to having high level conceptual guides on the core building blocks of the framework. In the Android docs, I found detailed explanations of Activities, Fragments, Views, and other major components. It was relatively easy for me to get started, and the system was designed to be extensible. Google even published blog posts regularly, which I could use to learn more about design decisions.
When I made the jump to iOS, though, it was difficult to find parallel documentation for what I was looking for. At the time (this was 2015, mind you), I couldn't find anything beyond API documentation for ViewControllers, Views, Core Data, etc. Most of the major documentation existed on third-party sites like NSHipster. Not to mention code signing. I'm pretty sure I'm one of handful developers at my firm who knows the system well enough to explain how it works...and that was after 2 years of working in iOS full-time.
I doubt that Apple will prioritize the developer experience on their platform anytime soon.
Edit: In case anyone wants to see the difference...
Everyone is pretty expensive when they have to live in Silicon Valley - even if not, anyone who interacts with engineers becomes nearly as expensive due to cost disease.
There are other factors preventing improving it, because documenting a new project is effectively adding more people to the project team (even if they're "just" writers) and they still need to learn it by talking to the developers, who might not have the time, so it's not scalable. Third-party documentation scales by not being able to talk to those people and instead reverse engineering everything, but that would lead to embarrassing incorrectness if it was the first-party approach.
And the resources required are tiny. Technical writers are cheaper than developers, and you could hire a top team for $1m a year. Doubling that would still be a rounding error in Apple's revenue stream. Multiplying it by 10 and introducing good management would be enough to make Apple's dev docs world-beating and legendary.
Apple could also run developer classes and camps online and f2f, publish its own books, create a regular stream of developer newsletters and tech updates, run forums that are actually useful, and so on.
The fact that none of this is happening at scale is... unfortunate. WWDC is a small plug in a big hole, and doesn't come close to meeting the community's needs.