How do you get around it though? Genuinely asking. I guess you try to source your own parts outside of controlling companies and only work on open source OS's and software run by super transparent groups? It just seems like a ton of work for something that might not even be viable. I don't know how I could possibly operate outside of apple, microsoft, google, etc. all of which have massive ethical issues.
To be very clear I'm not saying "it's hopeless why bother you're wrong" etc. I'm just curious what your solution(s) is. I'd love to decouple myself from these groups as much as I can over time.
> How do you get around it though? Genuinely asking.
Parent only talked about Apple so it could be that they're running Windows on a "PC" instead.
But Linux is also perfectly usable. If you're someone who tinkers with hobby projects, I don't see how it could be a real impediment. Everything that you would do on a mac is available to you, except for Xcode which is mainly for projects that target Apple devices anyway.
I'm a video producer (and do a lot of editing) so codec/NLE compatibility is absolutely paramount. I've always been weary of swapping to linux because of that.
These are general purpose computers. It ought to be possible to access their compute in ways that are not influenced by their manufacturer.
For instance, even though I hate google with a passion, I got this $150 android tablet and I've been using https://github.com/t184256/nix-on-droid to access pretty much the same tools that I use on my Linux desktop. I have the same setup on my Android phone.
I was at the university library the other day, surrounded by windows machines (I'm no fan of Microsoft either), and I wanted a big screen and keyboard, so I ran https://github.com/yudai/gotty on my phone and used a browser on the windows box to access the nix-enabled shell on my phone, which had everything I need, configured how I like it.
Other times I'll use a google cloud shell, clone my nix config, and have the same experience there.
Sure, I'm relying on Google and Microsoft in some capacity here and there, but I've reduced my reliance on software that they wrote to the point where they're pretty much just a dumb pipe between me and the hardware. They might be able to break my workflow, but that's about the limit of their control.
Unlike Apple, they'd rather attempt to control me in other ways so they don't break my workflow. They're ok with failing a certain percentage of the time, after all they're still getting my money. Apple doesn't seem to be able to let go to that degree.
Apple products are good but not unique. Plenty of alternatives exist. There are some people who prefer to be friends only with other friends whose iMessage bubbles are the right color. That problem solves itself through attrition.
Developing for that ecosystem is a tougher question, because Apple has made it hard to do so legally without buying their products. But if your objections are based on personal values, presumably you'd also avoid supporting their ecosystem by developing for it.
The upside of an ecosystem that thrives on brand exclusivity is that it's really easy to exclude it.
As someone else pointed out, your reply expanded the parent's concern from anti-Apple to anti-all-big-tech. My reply continued with the original "I never buy Apple products" sentiment. I'm not an Apple fan. I don't have much of a problem with the other companies.
Switch to Windows. All those programs are available on that platform (I have never heard of FCPX, so that might be an exception). You'll be just as productive, and you won't find the ecosystem as stifling as Apple's.
Almost all the same functionality can be found in the other NLEs, but if your workflow involves handling client's FCPX (and/or iMovie - which is very popular on iPhone) projects, you're forced to use macOS.
You try step by step.
Run grapheneOS, use f-droid, try open source alternatives and so on.
Its not complete, you still need a pixel which is made by google, and might also need google services for some apps, but its still better than doing nothing.
I've gotten off chrome and now use firefox + Proton VPN, so browsing I've done to some degree. I think Gmail is the next thing to go then Gdrive. The issue I'm having is ditching the Apple ecosystem. I've been editing on Apple machines for over a decade in Premiere/FCPX/DaVinci Resolve/etc. and the idea of breaking it all down - losing probably 70% of my plug-ins due to licensing restrictions, for instance - and moving over to /rebuilding on Linux or something is just so intimidating. Not to mention I have to buy/build a new computer. It just seems like so much work and I worry it will threaten my ability to do my job.
I am a Linux user, I will say just save your time and stay on macOS.
Unless all you use is just davinci resolve (PRO), which works on Linux well (RHEL/Rocky with more steps needed for others), Creative apps on Linux are still not good enough.
In a limited capacity, web apps might help. They won’t be able to cover all cases, but to have a viewer or a remote access/control cases, they are free to use.
It all depends on how far you're willing to go. If you merely object to Apple's iron fist approach, you've got Windows for desktop/laptop and Android for mobile. For some of us, that's not good enough and so we opt for a fully open source (typically Linux) solution. The advantage is that this gives you a world of options (think SBCs and all sorts of IoT-scale doodads) but often has the disadvantage of lacking polish and being on your own when things go wrong especially if you opt for one of the lesser used devices/platforms. (i.e. non-x86/ARM or a unique configuration/form factor)
One thing that will absolutely not work: buying Apple products and thinking they'll change direction on this. They are immensely profitable so from their vantage point everything is fine. Short of large numbers of customers jumping ship or government action, things are going to keep going in the current direction.
I use Android and Linux. I selfhost my cloud services using cloudron to avoid the big g. I will be the first to admit that the end solution is substandard compared to apple but freedom has its price (and i am happy to fight the fight)
What are some other examples of "controlling everything" that Apple engages in?
I mean, I ask, because I haven't found that to be the case with OS X at all. iOS is indeed a walled garden, and I think it's a stronger platform BECAUSE of it (though I understand that this view is heretical at HackerNews).
If I wanted to build Apple apps, yeah, I'd pay the $99. I don't do that now -- no time -- but I have in the past. I can install any software I want on my Macs. I have greater control of my experience on the Mac than I do on the abomination that Windows has become, and I still get access to software with a level of finish that remains super rare under Linux.
From what I've seen, a lot of startup are Mac-only - with the local dev stack and built system being built specifically for OSX. It's only a matter of time before vendor lock-in become so strong that companies would pay another four-figure a year fee to unlock development on OSX.
I do doubt it. Apple has specifically been removing language runtime environments but doesn’t stop you from installing them. And as far as I know they’re on good terms with (at least) Homebrew. Stopping you from running Python—which they ship to /usr/bin/python3 as part of the free Developer Tools—would have consequences on your other binaries.
I was positively surprised when Shortcuts for macOS shipped with specific support for AppleScript and other language runtime environments. I was convinced they would just not do it as the feature is not available on Shortcuts for iOS and that they’d use that as a way to add another nail in AppleScript’s coffin. The fact they did ship the feature commits them to support it. Maybe not forever, but removing it would require a non-immediate deprecation.
We haven't encountered this use case yet with our product.
The only thing we ask for permission to use is the camera for purposes of imaging barcodes & documents. This seems to work really well, with the only caveat being that iOS will not grant access to most (any?) privileged resources unless the site is secured with TLS.
Push notifications and install prompt have not landed yet/enabled by default AFAIK. Once that happens, I am seriously considering leaving the App Store.
I hate the review process, I hate having to use capacitor, I hate their billing APIs, and I hate having to have a Mac build pipeline.
> Push notifications and install prompt have not landed yet/enabled by default AFAIK.
"In Safari 16 in macOS 13 or later, Safari supports web push — push notifications that use the cross-browser Push API, Notifications API, and Service Worker standards."
Why you ever need to if you can just ask user to install app and collect more data? Google never seems to limit the system from allowing app to extract unnecessary data from user properly.(whatever it is intended or just incompetent)
There should be a option like: tell app that it can get my phonebook but don't actually give them. And give app no way to tell which option is actually selected.
The line between making a profit and greed is often the subject of vigorous debate on HN. At heart it's a philosophical question. I'm reminded of discussions about price here often centering on Teenage Engineering's products, and whether their stratospheric prices are justified or not.
This types of replies aren't really helpful, unless your goal is to elicit some form of "And this response reeks of bootlicking" styled response. Which I can't imagine was your intent.
They aren't not offering something for free, they are actively obstructing the localised and personal exploitation of an inherent device capability by its owner.
There are TONS of 3rd party apps in the app store. This has nothing to do with 3rd party apps. It has to do with side loading open source / hobby apps.
> Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with this idea when it comes to apps that I plan to distribute. I’m using their servers, and their infrastructure to handle updates, reviews, payments, etc.
Even when you do plan to distribute it it's hard to justify that it's for a good purpose. The review process is so broken and infuriating that I often find myself thinking that _they_ are the ones who should be paying us to go through the stress of trying to publish an update to an app.
The review process is completely random. One day they accept your app completely, the other day your "iPad screenshot is a strechted iPhone image" or something. Its just frustrating.
It does seem random - I have submitted apps multiple times, and provided demo credentials for them to use (the app is gated, so you can't do anything without an account and logging in first).
In 80% of the cases they never even logged into the app before giving us the OK (all logins and actions are logged, so it is easy to tell)
I have a pet theory that the reviewers have some quota of rejection that they must meet, so they're encouraged to reject apps for bullshit reasons.
About 20% of the updates to my app get rejected for no reason other than that the reviewer clearly didn't bother reading the attached review instructions. I have a hard time thinking that _all_ of them are this stupid, so nowadays I started thinking they do this on purpose.
They should be paying developers, yes, but not for the pain of going through review but instead for the simple fact that an iphone without any app developers is almost completely worthless. Apps make their platform more valuable.
> an iphone without any app developers is almost completely worthless
The iphone has plenty of app developers even if there isn't a single third party app anywhere. Those app developers just work for Apple instead of a third party. I don't think Apple cares about having a thriving third party app ecosystem.
I'm not so sure. Apple's selling point is tight control over the entire stack so that the experience is consistent everywhere on all of their devices. It seems like there is a substantial market segment that wants that and doesn't care what Apple has to do to get it.
I agree that the $99/yr stops me from making side apps (that could blow up into the next big thing, who knows) for Apple, I’ll just focus on the web platform instead. Sorry to go on a tangent here to the bird site, but I can’t help but think how hysterical it is that the bird site wants to charge developers 12x the cost of the Apple developer program. $100/mo for twitter api access
I really don't understand your take. not one iota.
To me, it seems that you're complaining about something that was once free, isn't anymore. It's a business and it's their data, electricity, servers, users, etc...
Is that a good comparison though?? I mean, an API is a luxury if it’s exposed to the outside world for free, you’re still free to screen scrape Twitter. Or cross post your own feed to RSS. Twitter, like any company, isn’t obligated to facilitate programmatic access by third parties for free. Usually that kind of thing is done to build an ecosystem but obviously Twitter feels they get less value out of this deep access now than third party developers do. Not sure how this is anything like “a web host preventing you from publishing RSS”.
Huh? Publishing a website “on the open web” costs money. I pay Google to host my website. If I hosted it on my own machine I’d still pay domain registration and ISP fees plus electricity and hardware costs. It’s not totally indefensible for Twitter to charge a small fee for access, although I’m not sure it’s a good idea in this case.
I wrote an Android app for my little programming news aggregator, and published that on the Play Store because it was basically free (IIRC there might be a one-time signup fee). $99/yr is a ridiculous sum for the "privilege" of publishing in Apple's walled garden, and it's just not something I'm willing to do.
The arguments for paying for review, distribution, advertising, search, etc feel so disingenuous when the company is worth so much money and these apps are contributing to its bottom line.
I really hope that the EU is the one that finally breaks down this annoying wall. I might consider using an iOS device at that point, but absolutely and definitely not before that.
I don't know where Apple went wrong -- third-party software made them as big as they are today, and they decided to turn on developers at some point and make them jump through hoops for nebulous "reasons". And yet the app store is still just filled with so many low-quality apps, scams and the like. They just look semi-pretty on launch and don't crash within the first minute or so.
>> The arguments for paying for review, distribution, advertising, search, etc feel so disingenuous when the company is worth so much money and these apps are contributing to its bottom line.
No, they are not. We are talking about hobby apps and maybe free ones. Those don't contribute to their bottom line.
We might say they contribute to the platform. For hobbyist they make it viable. But for paying customers maybe they add a lot of low value junk to the store. If a developer doesn't feel their app is worth a few dollars, maybe it's not worth having on there at all.
This is the same disingenuous argument. The $99/year isn't preventing junk from showing up on the AppStore, and a lack of $99/year payments doesn't make the Google Play store a dumpster fire of garbage apps. [1]
The AppStore is currently filled with low-value junk published by people paying $99/year (1.8 million apps out there, of which most outside of the top X lists are terrible). Will hobby apps really decrease the average quality? I highly doubt it.
[1] I'll admit that this appeared to be the trend early on, but in the long term both platforms have converged to something similar.
Exactly, the real reason that people don't want to realize is that the $99 is not to keep garbage out of the store, it is to take the $99 per year from each developer in the world.
>The $99/year isn't preventing junk from showing up on the AppStore
It's not "preventing junk from showing up on the AppStore", but it does prevent "a whola lot more of junk from showing up on the AppStore"
>and a lack of $99/year payments doesn't make the Google Play stor a dumpster fire of garbage apps
You'd be surprised. Google Play store is notoriously more insecure and loaded with junk, with estimates that close to 90% of mobile spy/malware are on Android rather than iOS.
"According to the whitepaper, Android devices were responsible for 47.15% of the observed malware infections, Windows/ PCs for 35.82%, IoT for 16.17% and iPhones for less than 1%" (Panda Security)
"Over 98% of mobile banking attacks target Android devices"
They "went wrong" to the tune of being a 2.4-trillion dollar company. If that's what going wrong looks like, I'd love to know what going right looks like. $100/yr may be too much for you, but there seems to be plenty of crap in their app store so it could be argued that it should be higher.
> That they hurt developers that got them there in the first place? Who cares.
I mean this fee has been there since forever no? Early on not even the iOS updates were free. You can argue about the merits of the fee but don't frame it as some recent change that disparages early adopters.
> $99/yr is a ridiculous sum for the "privilege" of publishing in Apple's walled garden
It’s a token amount, just enough to prevent spammers from creating thousands of accounts. It’s $99 for your entire organization for a year. Go check what Microsoft charges for a Visual Studio license per seat, per year.
$99 doesn’t even buy you 1 hour of a developer’s time. Even if you develop apps a a hobby, this is not a large amount of money. Few hobbies are a cheap as this.
> It’s $99 for your entire organization for a year.
This seems reasonable when you look from the point of view of a corporation. But hobbyists are single individuals, not corporations. So this basically makes development a privilege for corporations or for people in the first world for whom $99 is nothing.
Visual Studio Community Edition is free and quite capable for the individual hobby developer, same with VSC. Compared to developing for iPhone, which requires me to still have macOS (and legally Mac hardware) at my disposal somewhere to even get the app built completely, right? That would be the proper comparison between their approach to enabling developers on the tooling side, not the App Store fee. What’s the barrier to entry for the Windows App Store? I think it’s like $25 bucks and $99 for an org, or something very similar.
Obviously the glaring difference is that you can side load apps on Windows without using the app store at all. The day that becomes a serious barrier is definitely a line too far in the history of computing. But Apple has always been a very closed off ecosystem - going back to the nineties they were never very friendly to developers or third party hardware. To me this is just Apple doing Apple - their phone, IMO, is still miles ahead of anything else, though.
> that you can side load apps on Windows without using the app store at all
It's unfortunately not that simple anymore on Windows either with the SmartScreen popup getting in the way and the "Run anyway" button hard to find (not as bad as on macOS but still...).
Your executable needs a big enough "reputation score" for SmartScreen to remain silent, even when properly code-signed (unless it's signed with an expensive EV-certificiate apparently).
> Even if you develop apps a a hobby, this is not a large amount of money. Few hobbies are a cheap as this.
Let me guess, you’re from a 1st world country and probably make 6 figures a year (pre tax), likely working in FAANG?
As a guy in a 3rd world country, $99 is a hell lot of money. Your comment comes across as quite tone deaf. If you grew up middle-upper class and relatively sheltered that’s not necessarily your fault, but trust me in many parts of the world $99 is worth much more converted.
Are they, though? If you don't have the $99 for a dev account, you don't have a marketing budget either, so your app won't make money, so Apple doesn't care.
I think the best argument to be made for catering to hobbyists is to attract new developers to the platform, but I doubt Apple cares about that any more. Apple wants developers who care about making money. Developers who care about making money will come to Apple because of how much Apple users spend on apps.
I feel this developer's pain, I remember writing a vituperative blog post about Apple's habit of buying or building their own clone of some independent app and muscling developers out of their market. With time I've mellowed. Running a business means that you have to say "no" to a bunch of things for which there is a perfectly plausible and rational reason to say "yes."
The reasons for saying "no" to good ideas are sometimes incredibly important, such as "Putting more wood behind fewer arrows, i.e. Focus." And sometimes they make no sense that anyone can discern from reading the tea leaves, but they aren't fatal to the business and so there's no incentive to figure out how to say "yes" to them.
I am in no way saying that I like living in the world where Apple treats ISVs and hobbyists as irritations. I remember having to pay outrageous amounts of money for photocopied developer documentation in the late 80s and early 90s... From Apple! I remember flying to Cupertino for OpenDoc training that cost us three grand a developer. Outrageous, were they trying to recruit a developer ecosystem? Or gatekeeping so that the only OpenDoc developers would come from companies that were already behemoths?
But sigh... OpenDoc failed, Copland failed, Pink was spun of as Taligent and failed... Easy to criticize Apple's choices, but nevertheless they survived and here we are decades later dealing with the fact that throughout its history, Apple has always had a love-hate relationship with hobbyists and ISVs.[1]
And throughout that time, we've all complained. We're not wrong, but then again, we're not right, either.
———
[1]: Guy Kawasaki, Apple's first developer evangelist, wrote at length about how he was trying to drum up interest from indie developers to write software for the Mac. It was a good fit, as being an indie means you can jump into a new platform and exploit first-mover advantage, without any baggage from your existing success to hold you back.
Corporate always shit on that, they wanted big announcements from Microsoft and Lotus and Wordperfect and Ashton-Tate. And how did things play out? The "killer app" turned out to be PageMaker from Aldus, a company nobody had heard of. Later, people wrote business apps for Mac. Did they build them on top of Ashton-Tate's popular database? Nope, they built them on top of something called "Silver Surfer" from France of all places, which was eventually renamed "4th Dimension."
Apple's disdain for small developers is in their DNA.
> I remember writing a vituperative blog post about Apple's habit of buying or building their own clone of some independent app and muscling developers out of their market.
The difference between the PC and the Mac through time is a study in contrasts of how to engage independent developers though.
As OP said, going back decades Apple has never been a hobbyist platform because of its closed nature to software and hardware.
The love affair of developers for MacBooks after Apple went BSD was a rather surprising turn in their fortunes and experience (and a highly valuable wake up call to Microsoft). I understand how a kid coming of age in that environment might see Apple as a developer’s company through this association. But it’s anathema to Apple’s longer term track record, IME, demonstrated by the difference from the traditional relationship apple has had with independent developers and to which they seem to be bending back towards.
The annoying part for consumers is that now installing apps on iOS is arguably even more spammy and full of nuisance than the early Android days. It used to be that iOS apps were $1 and high quality, and Android apps were free and crappy or full of malware. Now, EVERY small utility on iOS wants me to sign up for a subscription. I wanted a simple calendar countdown widget the other week and all of the top promoted search results were apps with subscription models. For a countdown (eg. 37 days until X)! This to me to worse than sifting through malware and ad spam on Google Play.
I doubt this is "Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps", so much as "Apple doesn’t want dev accounts to be an easy backdoor for sideloading apps" and hobby apps are an acceptable casualty.
The difference is that not being able to develop hobby apps is a side effect of that policy, not that the policy's main aim is to prevent hobby apps from being developed.
The side-effect is in the eye of the beholder. Apple claims they lock down the App Store for security, and a convenient "side effect" is that their stranglehold on platform transactions makes them upwards of $80 billion annually. From the perspective of the shareholder, it's obvious that Apple's motivations are more driven more by profits than ensuring universal security. Regulators worldwide agree!
The original comment didn’t say that Apple was doing it for security, just that they were doing it so people couldn’t sideload apps easily.
I think you are both right. Apple wants to make sure all app sales happen through their App Store so they get a cut, and they are willing to make hobby apps difficult to load in order to make that happen. They don’t care about stopping hobby apps, but they care about making sure they get a cut of all sales.
All of us who still have to help people in our lives -- particularly elderly parents -- are very grateful for a platform where the users are not expected to be sysadmins. Which they will do quite badly. We have a 25+ year history of trying to get most people to not install random spyware/crapware/viruses on their computers, and it's fair to say the results are a complete and total failure. Except for ios and sometimes android.
Which is not to justify Apple's attempt to tax every dollar that flows through their platform, but something can be two things at once.
iOS isn't impervious to malware either. Pegasus was deployed effortlessly to tens of thousands of iOS devices, and the App Store had nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, Apple still green-lights exploitative gambling and lootbox services as long as they're promised a cut of the loot.
There is merit in pursuing a more secure future for computing, but there is zero merit in doing so alone.
> Pegasus was deployed effortlessly to tens of thousands of iOS devices,
I can't stop a G20 nation or the people they pay from hacking my mum's phone to steal from her bank account, but I can offer to buy her an iPhone and have her be immune to nearly all real world attacks.
it's of course fine if you don't care about the security difference (or think Google does nearly as good a job with their first party phones), but not sure why you're making hyperbolic posts arguing against some strawman?
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Policies are often designed so that their main goal is seen as a side effect.
They probably can't say explicitly that they don't want sideloading, as this could turn an eyebrow of a regulator, but making it more difficult to create hobby apps, which achieves the same effect does not explicitly show an intent and may keep regulator at bay.
Talking about "side effects" in systematic policies is meaningless. There may or may not exist someone that wants those, and you are not inside everyone's brains to decide for yourself.
Sure, it's a difference, but not one that is actually meaningful to anyone outside of Apple. An affected customer doesn't care about why the policy exists (nor should they have to). The effects are the same regardless.
It's just a comment on the title of the posting. The title assumes an intention that's possibly incorrect. If intention doesn't matter, then why is it in the title?
The actions Apple has taken prohibit using self-written apps without paying Apple a relatively large yearly fee (and in many cases, also going through pointless store review).
So at best - Apple does not care about hobby apps (written by owner, for owner) because they have taken no actions to mitigate this impact if it truly is just a side effect and not intended. At worst - Apple is actively hostile to this usage and the policy is working as intended.
That distinction is mostly moot from the view of a user outside of the internal discussions at Apple regarding that policy. The impact of the policy clearly discourages hobby app usage.
Because the policy exists, a reasonable interpretation is that Apple does not want you developing hobby apps.
I'm not the author, so I don't know. But I would say the title is intended to be provocative and, in terms of what this looks like from the outside, isn't an unreasonable supposition.
But, ultimately, it's not an important point either way.
I think intention is important, and in many ways more important than the end result, and it's worth highlighting potential mischaracterisation.
If it's not important to you fair enough, but I don't understand the point of you both contributing to the discussion as well as saying the discussion isn't worth having.
Intention is very important in many circumstances, yes! But in this sort of thing, where a user is being adversely affected, intention is of very little importance to that user. Regardless of the intent, the user is still adversely affected.
> I don't understand the point of you both contributing to the discussion as well as saying the discussion isn't worth having.
I didn't say the discussion isn't worth having. I think it is, because it's interesting.
This isn't a comment on the magnitude of the effect, but on intention, though.
The thesis is: Apple are not doing this to harm hobbyists. That may be a side effect, but it's not the main effect.
For example: it's good to discuss the very real side-effects of drugs, but it would be silly to write an article called "Cancer Chemotherapy Drugs Exist To Induce Vomiting". I would equally push back on the misattribution of intention there.
+1 people who are largely consumers and not producers don't seem to understand the facets of filtering as a business. A necessary but practically essential part of staying successful as a business
The latest saga with Twitter's API going paid is a whole other can of worm, but APIs everywhere have been closing down and becoming more restricted in the past few years.
I guess the bot and scam usage of APIs cause more headache for companies than the hobby usage benefit they get.
Trash apps according to whom? Apple considers all browsers that don't use WebKit as "trash" as well as other entire categories.
Apparently the nanny state is repugnant to many, but nanny corporations that don't trust us to make our own choices, or have our own tastes and standards, is much more acceptable. The huge loss of customer freedom doesn't actually achieve the exclusion of "trash" apps nor malware.
Sideloading should be allowed — that's non-negotiable for me. That's the main reason why I ended up with the configuration I have, a Mac but an Android phone.
Apple tries really hard to pretend they own the relationship between the app developer and the user because they made the iPhone and iOS, when in fact, for most developers, the necessity to publish on the app store isn't the godsend Apple thinks it is. It's an asinine obstacle they have to clear to get their app out to the world. I've seen Apple reject iOS apps for nonsensical reasons on many occasions. For most developers, the discovery aspect of the app store is, in fact, irrelevant. They do their own marketing and user acquisition anyway.
Mac shows this very clearly. There's the same app store, with the same rules, but with one exception: its use is not mandatory. So most developers end up simply ignoring it and doing their own app distribution. In other words, this model doesn't work very well when it's not the only distribution channel and when there's no draconian lockdown on the OS level. The notarization requiring a $100/year account is also optional. So you can, if you wish, distribute a Mac app without any Apple involvement whatsoever.
The casual use of the word "sideloading" is dangerous to society. It is literal newspeak with the intent to eliminate even the idea of "installing" and make it so people cannot even think of applications outside of a corporation (or institution's) walled garden.
Users installing applications is the default. Walled gardens are the weird dangerous thing.
Even the concept of 'installing' is rapidly disappearing. Most smartphone users aren't installing new apps or downloading music files. Most computer users don't install anything besides Microsoft Office, and in a lot of cases, it comes pre-installed and only requires activation.
Video games seem to be an outlier, as the enormous size of most games means it can't be streamed well just yet.
Almost everything associated with the iPhone is a casualty of "We need to collect our 15-30%".
They apparently strive for a superior user experience, and then go about destroying the customer experience of what they seem to consider is their phones.
Yes, Apple wants their piece and I for one would like to see it at least reduced. I would also love to see an option to opt-in to at least sideloading personally built apps.
That being said, what customer are you referring to when you talk about "destroying the customer experience." Hundreds of millions of users express very high customer satisfaction with the experience. The vast number of users have no interest in sideloading and they love the simplicity of the app store. Apple is bringing in about 85% of the smartphone market profits and they have huge repeat purchase numbers. That is not because those billion users are unsatisfied or feel the experience has been "destroyed." The numbers are just too overwhelming.
Many HN readers are not the target market if openness is of paramount importance to them. It is hard to avoid, but we need to try and avoiding generalizing our preferences to the broader definition of "customer."
When the mac came out in 1984 people had very much the same complaints as it was the first microcomputer to be released without software development tools.
True, but BASIC on home computers wasted so much potential that it was more or less just a gateway drug (about 100x slower than hand-written assembly code - and even assemblers cost money - so for free options you only had the choice between a very slow BASIC program, or typing hex opcodes into the machine ;)
PS: ok, except Acorn/BBC BASIC which had a frigging inline assembler :)
Does he or does he not want to publish to the App Store?
And it is kind of weird. Apple only wants signed applications on their devices. They grant a one-week exception for developers because they expect that application to be in constant flux. You should never need more than a week.
But you need to sign your code to run it on a more permanent basis. I look at it more like buying an SSL certificate.
Whether that's right or not for a smartphone/tablet, that's another discussion.
SSL certificates are not the same thing as code-signing certificates. I'm not aware of any service which hands out free certificates for code-signing (and AFAIK on Apple mobile devices at least, you need to purchase the code-signing certificates from Apple only, via the $99 developer fee).
It would be nice if I could compile my own little demos onto my own iOS device for showing them to others, and not have to care about doing this every single week. There's simply no justification for such bullshit.
If you are developing an application and there is no change at all to it over an entire week, the most likely scenarios are either you haven't worked on it or it is effectively complete.
Now, if you've let it lie for a while, I can see wanting to run it cold just to refresh your memory of the state of the application, but other than that, I can't think of anything that wouldn't be a very uncommon edge case.
$99 per year is pennies if you are truly spending time with the platform. Apple could charge 10 times this and still make away like bandits, I think $99 is a good price point because it weeds out folks looking for an easy system to hack at. This is good.
Let's say you are from Egypt (~$1400 median income) or South Africa (~1600). You have already saved for a long time to get a used iPhone for $100. It might be possible with enough effort but you can't say it's not a big barrier.
It's about not gatekeeping the people who are future devs, wanting to learn, want to try making their own hobby apps to share with others, maybe prospective employers. Also, the credit card requirement brought up in a sibling comment is a barrier.
> It's about not gatekeeping the people who are future devs, wanting to learn, want to try making their own hobby apps to share with others, maybe prospective employers
I assure you that Apple and this developer program has very little do to with the barriers those folks face.
> if you are truly spending time with the platform
I don't think folks who make $500 a month are going to have an Apple computer and the time to develop. Why are you using illogical examples to make your point?
A few years ago I was earning less than $500 a month (based on exchange rates), had an Apple computer (years behind the latest) and had time to develop. I've left the country now.
If I remember correctly, I discovered this timeout existed when I tried to show someone a mobile game I had built with Unity3d.
Now they're just exceptions? You couldn't even think of the existence of exceptions earlier. See the problem? The Apple world is designed to work in a certain way and that is ok but people are saying some exceptions exist and those exceptions should be 'handled' instead of assuming they don't exist.
Also, to be clear - I said I was earning $500 a month a few years ago. At that point, I could afford the $99 fee but discovered the superficial constraint imposed on local development in an unexpected situation. The figure is also beyond the minimum wage I mentioned earlier. Essentially, your $500 hard line doesn't reflect how people can adjust their cost structures depending on their local economy, preferences and ambition.
I initially ignored your offer because I'm not from the two countries mentioned. There's a dev talent program I know of that occasionally gives out PCs and Macs to people who are getting started in tech but can't even afford a decent PC/Mac - can I link you up so you can donate?
I'm sure they can also target those that have already benefitted from the free devices to meet your specific intent.
The problem is not the $99, it's the fact that you can't publish anonymously. You must show ID to pay and participate, because of payment cards and the dev program signup.
Because there is no alternative that users can choose instead of Apple's marketplace, and with only one source of apps for a billion+ devices and no way to configure those devices to use any other, Apple has effectively banned anonymous publishing for a seventh of Earth.
20 years ago we didn't have app stores. I'm not sure where your level of entitlement comes from, Apple doesn't have to allow anonymous publishing and I fully understand why they have put reasonable barriers to entry into their ecosystem. You don't.
The sense of entitlement comes from the purchase of the device, which is then remotely controlled by a party who has no property interest in the device following purchase.
If you bought the phone, you should be able to run all the apps you want on it, not only the ones Apple and the various regional governments say you are allowed to. Surely you see the abuse potential (which is not theoretical - iPhones in China cannot type or display the flag of Taiwan or install VPN apps) there?
Why do people defend vendors remotely disabling functionality in devices end users have bought and paid for?
This, combined with the locked-down nature of iDevices, are the main reasons why I don't own iPhones. This isn't a slam against iPhones at all -- it's just that I'm clearly not their target market.
I’m not defending this, but after 15 years, I don’t see the point in complaining. We complain (rightfully) about the amount of crap in the App Store and Apple's capricious review policies that don’t stop the scammers, but for better or worse, the $99 fee IS a barrier to entry that I would argue has made the iOS ecosystem better than Android.
I’ve been paying $99 a year for early access to iOS betas and for my own test apps since the program debuted in 2008. I’ve never published an app in the App Store under my own account. But if I’m honest, I do feel I’ve gotten value out of that $1500 or whatever.
If it isn’t worth $100 a year to you, that’s fine. Plenty of people will sell you a slot on their account for less and give you a signing key. Or you can choose not to play. But it seems silly to bitch about something that has literally been the status quo since the inception of the App Store back in March 2008, when the iPhone SDK was released.
I should also note that the $99 in 2008 was significantly less than Apple used to charge for student access for Apple Developer Accounts for Mac before that. (Although those gave you nice Apple hardware discounts).
> Just because a company's gouging and gatekeeping has a side effects of keeping the great unwashed masses away, doesn't mean it's the right thing.
And yet, in a world filled with actors with malicious intent - cybercriminals, spammers, secret services, dark spyware vendors, scammers cashing in on "popular" brands or sometimes outright cloning applications - it is the only way to enforce some honesty.
I don't like it either, but I do not see an alternative.
Can’t the same be said about going to an amusement park since it’s not something you leave with other than an experience? (The experience in the GP case being access to the open betas)
If you think the only value that exists is value that can be measured in dollars, then I would assert that you have a very limited and shallow understanding of the human experience.
> A "value" you cannot really describe nor measure, and that will leave you nothing once you stop paying or Apple goes away.
I think this is a strange and unfair criticism. I'll bet all of us, including you, can think of things that we value without being able to concretely describe why. We'd default to "because I like it".
I guess a $30,000 car that will leave you with nearly nothing after several years also has no value? How about a $5000 vacation with your family? How about a great bottle of wine? Many, many things we choose to value enough to invest in are temporary. That is not a useful criteria.
> a $30,000 car that will leave you with nearly nothing after several years also has no value?
It has metal and plastic, assembled in parts that you can sell for a total amount that will be surprisingly high, or that can be sold for scrap metal, or driven until the end of days, or or or... It's obvious that it has some sort of value, however low - it is a thing made of resources in the real world. You can argue about the price, but you can quantify it in so many different ways (weight, dimensions, speed, consumption, age, etc etc etc).
It really does suck. I made a stupid little companion app for a video game just to help track my own progress and it was so depressing to learn that I could only use it for a week at a time. So backwards.
The one and only reason I've had an Apple Developer account is to accept Apple Pay payments through Stripe for my small business' web site that has existed since 2008, and I can't get them to accept my perfectly good credit card for the $100 annual fee for that privilege. This time around I just threw in the towel.
534 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 366 ms ] threadTo be very clear I'm not saying "it's hopeless why bother you're wrong" etc. I'm just curious what your solution(s) is. I'd love to decouple myself from these groups as much as I can over time.
Parent only talked about Apple so it could be that they're running Windows on a "PC" instead.
But Linux is also perfectly usable. If you're someone who tinkers with hobby projects, I don't see how it could be a real impediment. Everything that you would do on a mac is available to you, except for Xcode which is mainly for projects that target Apple devices anyway.
For instance, even though I hate google with a passion, I got this $150 android tablet and I've been using https://github.com/t184256/nix-on-droid to access pretty much the same tools that I use on my Linux desktop. I have the same setup on my Android phone.
I was at the university library the other day, surrounded by windows machines (I'm no fan of Microsoft either), and I wanted a big screen and keyboard, so I ran https://github.com/yudai/gotty on my phone and used a browser on the windows box to access the nix-enabled shell on my phone, which had everything I need, configured how I like it.
Other times I'll use a google cloud shell, clone my nix config, and have the same experience there.
Sure, I'm relying on Google and Microsoft in some capacity here and there, but I've reduced my reliance on software that they wrote to the point where they're pretty much just a dumb pipe between me and the hardware. They might be able to break my workflow, but that's about the limit of their control.
Unlike Apple, they'd rather attempt to control me in other ways so they don't break my workflow. They're ok with failing a certain percentage of the time, after all they're still getting my money. Apple doesn't seem to be able to let go to that degree.
Developing for that ecosystem is a tougher question, because Apple has made it hard to do so legally without buying their products. But if your objections are based on personal values, presumably you'd also avoid supporting their ecosystem by developing for it.
The upside of an ecosystem that thrives on brand exclusivity is that it's really easy to exclude it.
It's less about Apple and more that I need to be able to stably/reliably run Adobe Premiere, FCPX, DaVinci Resolve, and more + plug-ins
Switch to Windows. All those programs are available on that platform (I have never heard of FCPX, so that might be an exception). You'll be just as productive, and you won't find the ecosystem as stifling as Apple's.
Almost all the same functionality can be found in the other NLEs, but if your workflow involves handling client's FCPX (and/or iMovie - which is very popular on iPhone) projects, you're forced to use macOS.
Its not complete, you still need a pixel which is made by google, and might also need google services for some apps, but its still better than doing nothing.
Unless all you use is just davinci resolve (PRO), which works on Linux well (RHEL/Rocky with more steps needed for others), Creative apps on Linux are still not good enough.
In a limited capacity, web apps might help. They won’t be able to cover all cases, but to have a viewer or a remote access/control cases, they are free to use.
One thing that will absolutely not work: buying Apple products and thinking they'll change direction on this. They are immensely profitable so from their vantage point everything is fine. Short of large numbers of customers jumping ship or government action, things are going to keep going in the current direction.
> You can't do that
When the others are all shouting:
> Hey do this irrelevant thing
I mean, I ask, because I haven't found that to be the case with OS X at all. iOS is indeed a walled garden, and I think it's a stronger platform BECAUSE of it (though I understand that this view is heretical at HackerNews).
If I wanted to build Apple apps, yeah, I'd pay the $99. I don't do that now -- no time -- but I have in the past. I can install any software I want on my Macs. I have greater control of my experience on the Mac than I do on the abomination that Windows has become, and I still get access to software with a level of finish that remains super rare under Linux.
Apple is a 2+ Trillion dollar company. So yes, they are greedy.
Apple exec scribbles furiously
From what I've seen, a lot of startup are Mac-only - with the local dev stack and built system being built specifically for OSX. It's only a matter of time before vendor lock-in become so strong that companies would pay another four-figure a year fee to unlock development on OSX.
Apple could sell the security angle on this too.
I do doubt it. Apple has specifically been removing language runtime environments but doesn’t stop you from installing them. And as far as I know they’re on good terms with (at least) Homebrew. Stopping you from running Python—which they ship to /usr/bin/python3 as part of the free Developer Tools—would have consequences on your other binaries.
I was positively surprised when Shortcuts for macOS shipped with specific support for AppleScript and other language runtime environments. I was convinced they would just not do it as the feature is not available on Shortcuts for iOS and that they’d use that as a way to add another nail in AppleScript’s coffin. The fact they did ship the feature commits them to support it. Maybe not forever, but removing it would require a non-immediate deprecation.
Don't give them ideas.
The #1 reason we are moving away from iOS native to web app is because of Apple's policies and how convoluted the signing experience is.
The only thing we ask for permission to use is the camera for purposes of imaging barcodes & documents. This seems to work really well, with the only caveat being that iOS will not grant access to most (any?) privileged resources unless the site is secured with TLS.
I hate the review process, I hate having to use capacitor, I hate their billing APIs, and I hate having to have a Mac build pipeline.
"In Safari 16 in macOS 13 or later, Safari supports web push — push notifications that use the cross-browser Push API, Notifications API, and Service Worker standards."
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
Meanwhile Android is 70% market share worldwide with that desired "full PWA support". Where are these amazing PWAs?
There should be a option like: tell app that it can get my phonebook but don't actually give them. And give app no way to tell which option is actually selected.
Apple is a for profit company.
I could turn this around and say that it's greedy to expect a company to offer these tools for free. There's an investment on their end as well.
I'm not saying I'm happy that it's so closed. I wish it weren't, but I also respect that they have their own freedom to choose as well.
The line between making a profit and greed is often the subject of vigorous debate on HN. At heart it's a philosophical question. I'm reminded of discussions about price here often centering on Teenage Engineering's products, and whether their stratospheric prices are justified or not.
Even when you do plan to distribute it it's hard to justify that it's for a good purpose. The review process is so broken and infuriating that I often find myself thinking that _they_ are the ones who should be paying us to go through the stress of trying to publish an update to an app.
In 80% of the cases they never even logged into the app before giving us the OK (all logins and actions are logged, so it is easy to tell)
About 20% of the updates to my app get rejected for no reason other than that the reviewer clearly didn't bother reading the attached review instructions. I have a hard time thinking that _all_ of them are this stupid, so nowadays I started thinking they do this on purpose.
Wouldn't you just assume "about 20%" of them are that stupid?
The iphone has plenty of app developers even if there isn't a single third party app anywhere. Those app developers just work for Apple instead of a third party. I don't think Apple cares about having a thriving third party app ecosystem.
And that's how you know a platform is obsolete.
Windows Phone, Zune, etc.
It is frustrating that HP got this right with WebOS and still fucked it up. Having a touchpad was a sublime pleasure for a few years.
To me, it seems that you're complaining about something that was once free, isn't anymore. It's a business and it's their data, electricity, servers, users, etc...
It'd be the same as a web host prohibiting certain browsers, or trying to block you from publishing RSS.
- They use Twitter resources?
- They use Twitter's platform?
- If Twitter went down, they wouldn't be able to post their Tweet?
> It'd be the same as a web host prohibiting certain browsers, or trying to block you from publishing RSS.
You have a wild imagination.
Hell, deploying your app to your phone without a developer license used to require that $99...
The arguments for paying for review, distribution, advertising, search, etc feel so disingenuous when the company is worth so much money and these apps are contributing to its bottom line.
I really hope that the EU is the one that finally breaks down this annoying wall. I might consider using an iOS device at that point, but absolutely and definitely not before that.
I don't know where Apple went wrong -- third-party software made them as big as they are today, and they decided to turn on developers at some point and make them jump through hoops for nebulous "reasons". And yet the app store is still just filled with so many low-quality apps, scams and the like. They just look semi-pretty on launch and don't crash within the first minute or so.
No, they are not. We are talking about hobby apps and maybe free ones. Those don't contribute to their bottom line.
We might say they contribute to the platform. For hobbyist they make it viable. But for paying customers maybe they add a lot of low value junk to the store. If a developer doesn't feel their app is worth a few dollars, maybe it's not worth having on there at all.
The AppStore is currently filled with low-value junk published by people paying $99/year (1.8 million apps out there, of which most outside of the top X lists are terrible). Will hobby apps really decrease the average quality? I highly doubt it.
[1] I'll admit that this appeared to be the trend early on, but in the long term both platforms have converged to something similar.
It's not "preventing junk from showing up on the AppStore", but it does prevent "a whola lot more of junk from showing up on the AppStore"
>and a lack of $99/year payments doesn't make the Google Play stor a dumpster fire of garbage apps
You'd be surprised. Google Play store is notoriously more insecure and loaded with junk, with estimates that close to 90% of mobile spy/malware are on Android rather than iOS.
"According to the whitepaper, Android devices were responsible for 47.15% of the observed malware infections, Windows/ PCs for 35.82%, IoT for 16.17% and iPhones for less than 1%" (Panda Security)
"Over 98% of mobile banking attacks target Android devices"
They didn't go wrong. They are making money - the most important thing.
That they hurt developers that got them there in the first place? Who cares.
Then even few years ago I heard: "If you don't like that platform, create your own!" I wonder where that crowd is now.
I mean this fee has been there since forever no? Early on not even the iOS updates were free. You can argue about the merits of the fee but don't frame it as some recent change that disparages early adopters.
It’s a token amount, just enough to prevent spammers from creating thousands of accounts. It’s $99 for your entire organization for a year. Go check what Microsoft charges for a Visual Studio license per seat, per year.
$99 doesn’t even buy you 1 hour of a developer’s time. Even if you develop apps a a hobby, this is not a large amount of money. Few hobbies are a cheap as this.
This seems reasonable when you look from the point of view of a corporation. But hobbyists are single individuals, not corporations. So this basically makes development a privilege for corporations or for people in the first world for whom $99 is nothing.
Obviously the glaring difference is that you can side load apps on Windows without using the app store at all. The day that becomes a serious barrier is definitely a line too far in the history of computing. But Apple has always been a very closed off ecosystem - going back to the nineties they were never very friendly to developers or third party hardware. To me this is just Apple doing Apple - their phone, IMO, is still miles ahead of anything else, though.
> few hobbies are as cheap as this
Quite true.
It's unfortunately not that simple anymore on Windows either with the SmartScreen popup getting in the way and the "Run anyway" button hard to find (not as bad as on macOS but still...).
Your executable needs a big enough "reputation score" for SmartScreen to remain silent, even when properly code-signed (unless it's signed with an expensive EV-certificiate apparently).
Let me guess, you’re from a 1st world country and probably make 6 figures a year (pre tax), likely working in FAANG?
As a guy in a 3rd world country, $99 is a hell lot of money. Your comment comes across as quite tone deaf. If you grew up middle-upper class and relatively sheltered that’s not necessarily your fault, but trust me in many parts of the world $99 is worth much more converted.
Are they, though? If you don't have the $99 for a dev account, you don't have a marketing budget either, so your app won't make money, so Apple doesn't care.
I think the best argument to be made for catering to hobbyists is to attract new developers to the platform, but I doubt Apple cares about that any more. Apple wants developers who care about making money. Developers who care about making money will come to Apple because of how much Apple users spend on apps.
I think that what you buy with your 99$ is the privilege of asking for the privilege of publishing (which is not given at all).
The reasons for saying "no" to good ideas are sometimes incredibly important, such as "Putting more wood behind fewer arrows, i.e. Focus." And sometimes they make no sense that anyone can discern from reading the tea leaves, but they aren't fatal to the business and so there's no incentive to figure out how to say "yes" to them.
I am in no way saying that I like living in the world where Apple treats ISVs and hobbyists as irritations. I remember having to pay outrageous amounts of money for photocopied developer documentation in the late 80s and early 90s... From Apple! I remember flying to Cupertino for OpenDoc training that cost us three grand a developer. Outrageous, were they trying to recruit a developer ecosystem? Or gatekeeping so that the only OpenDoc developers would come from companies that were already behemoths?
But sigh... OpenDoc failed, Copland failed, Pink was spun of as Taligent and failed... Easy to criticize Apple's choices, but nevertheless they survived and here we are decades later dealing with the fact that throughout its history, Apple has always had a love-hate relationship with hobbyists and ISVs.[1]
And throughout that time, we've all complained. We're not wrong, but then again, we're not right, either.
———
[1]: Guy Kawasaki, Apple's first developer evangelist, wrote at length about how he was trying to drum up interest from indie developers to write software for the Mac. It was a good fit, as being an indie means you can jump into a new platform and exploit first-mover advantage, without any baggage from your existing success to hold you back.
Corporate always shit on that, they wanted big announcements from Microsoft and Lotus and Wordperfect and Ashton-Tate. And how did things play out? The "killer app" turned out to be PageMaker from Aldus, a company nobody had heard of. Later, people wrote business apps for Mac. Did they build them on top of Ashton-Tate's popular database? Nope, they built them on top of something called "Silver Surfer" from France of all places, which was eventually renamed "4th Dimension."
Apple's disdain for small developers is in their DNA.
Microsoft has done this many, many times as well.
As OP said, going back decades Apple has never been a hobbyist platform because of its closed nature to software and hardware.
The love affair of developers for MacBooks after Apple went BSD was a rather surprising turn in their fortunes and experience (and a highly valuable wake up call to Microsoft). I understand how a kid coming of age in that environment might see Apple as a developer’s company through this association. But it’s anathema to Apple’s longer term track record, IME, demonstrated by the difference from the traditional relationship apple has had with independent developers and to which they seem to be bending back towards.
I think you are both right. Apple wants to make sure all app sales happen through their App Store so they get a cut, and they are willing to make hobby apps difficult to load in order to make that happen. They don’t care about stopping hobby apps, but they care about making sure they get a cut of all sales.
All of us who still have to help people in our lives -- particularly elderly parents -- are very grateful for a platform where the users are not expected to be sysadmins. Which they will do quite badly. We have a 25+ year history of trying to get most people to not install random spyware/crapware/viruses on their computers, and it's fair to say the results are a complete and total failure. Except for ios and sometimes android.
Which is not to justify Apple's attempt to tax every dollar that flows through their platform, but something can be two things at once.
There is merit in pursuing a more secure future for computing, but there is zero merit in doing so alone.
fortunately no one made this hyperbolic claim.
> Pegasus was deployed effortlessly to tens of thousands of iOS devices,
I can't stop a G20 nation or the people they pay from hacking my mum's phone to steal from her bank account, but I can offer to buy her an iPhone and have her be immune to nearly all real world attacks.
it's of course fine if you don't care about the security difference (or think Google does nearly as good a job with their first party phones), but not sure why you're making hyperbolic posts arguing against some strawman?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
They probably can't say explicitly that they don't want sideloading, as this could turn an eyebrow of a regulator, but making it more difficult to create hobby apps, which achieves the same effect does not explicitly show an intent and may keep regulator at bay.
The actions Apple has taken prohibit using self-written apps without paying Apple a relatively large yearly fee (and in many cases, also going through pointless store review).
So at best - Apple does not care about hobby apps (written by owner, for owner) because they have taken no actions to mitigate this impact if it truly is just a side effect and not intended. At worst - Apple is actively hostile to this usage and the policy is working as intended.
That distinction is mostly moot from the view of a user outside of the internal discussions at Apple regarding that policy. The impact of the policy clearly discourages hobby app usage.
Because the policy exists, a reasonable interpretation is that Apple does not want you developing hobby apps.
But, ultimately, it's not an important point either way.
If it's not important to you fair enough, but I don't understand the point of you both contributing to the discussion as well as saying the discussion isn't worth having.
> I don't understand the point of you both contributing to the discussion as well as saying the discussion isn't worth having.
I didn't say the discussion isn't worth having. I think it is, because it's interesting.
The thesis is: Apple are not doing this to harm hobbyists. That may be a side effect, but it's not the main effect.
For example: it's good to discuss the very real side-effects of drugs, but it would be silly to write an article called "Cancer Chemotherapy Drugs Exist To Induce Vomiting". I would equally push back on the misattribution of intention there.
Both of the things you listed are side effects.
I guess the bot and scam usage of APIs cause more headache for companies than the hobby usage benefit they get.
Thanks apple for reminding me why I'll continue with the lesser evil for now.
Downside is that I see bunch of corporate apps that are total trash on app store.
Apparently the nanny state is repugnant to many, but nanny corporations that don't trust us to make our own choices, or have our own tastes and standards, is much more acceptable. The huge loss of customer freedom doesn't actually achieve the exclusion of "trash" apps nor malware.
Apple tries really hard to pretend they own the relationship between the app developer and the user because they made the iPhone and iOS, when in fact, for most developers, the necessity to publish on the app store isn't the godsend Apple thinks it is. It's an asinine obstacle they have to clear to get their app out to the world. I've seen Apple reject iOS apps for nonsensical reasons on many occasions. For most developers, the discovery aspect of the app store is, in fact, irrelevant. They do their own marketing and user acquisition anyway.
Mac shows this very clearly. There's the same app store, with the same rules, but with one exception: its use is not mandatory. So most developers end up simply ignoring it and doing their own app distribution. In other words, this model doesn't work very well when it's not the only distribution channel and when there's no draconian lockdown on the OS level. The notarization requiring a $100/year account is also optional. So you can, if you wish, distribute a Mac app without any Apple involvement whatsoever.
Users installing applications is the default. Walled gardens are the weird dangerous thing.
Video games seem to be an outlier, as the enormous size of most games means it can't be streamed well just yet.
Stadia worked great until Google did its thing...
They apparently strive for a superior user experience, and then go about destroying the customer experience of what they seem to consider is their phones.
That being said, what customer are you referring to when you talk about "destroying the customer experience." Hundreds of millions of users express very high customer satisfaction with the experience. The vast number of users have no interest in sideloading and they love the simplicity of the app store. Apple is bringing in about 85% of the smartphone market profits and they have huge repeat purchase numbers. That is not because those billion users are unsatisfied or feel the experience has been "destroyed." The numbers are just too overwhelming.
Many HN readers are not the target market if openness is of paramount importance to them. It is hard to avoid, but we need to try and avoiding generalizing our preferences to the broader definition of "customer."
PS: ok, except Acorn/BBC BASIC which had a frigging inline assembler :)
Does he or does he not want to publish to the App Store?
And it is kind of weird. Apple only wants signed applications on their devices. They grant a one-week exception for developers because they expect that application to be in constant flux. You should never need more than a week.
But you need to sign your code to run it on a more permanent basis. I look at it more like buying an SSL certificate.
Whether that's right or not for a smartphone/tablet, that's another discussion.
SSL certs are free now.
The parent post was arguing that they see it as an SSL cert, however.
> I'm not aware of any service which hands out free certificates for code-signing.
Once you pay the one-time fee, Google does, effectively.
True, I was mis-reading/mis-understanding the parent reply.
Oh, come on. Don't say "never" just because you have no need or want here.
Now, if you've let it lie for a while, I can see wanting to run it cold just to refresh your memory of the state of the application, but other than that, I can't think of anything that wouldn't be a very uncommon edge case.
I assure you that Apple and this developer program has very little do to with the barriers those folks face.
I don't think folks who make $500 a month are going to have an Apple computer and the time to develop. Why are you using illogical examples to make your point?
If I remember correctly, I discovered this timeout existed when I tried to show someone a mobile game I had built with Unity3d.
Privilege is blinding.
Perhaps you are just blind to the fact that I _offered_ to pay for anyone's Apple developer fees in a similar situation to yours.
Pretty ridiculous all around, you'll stay poor with a mindset like that.
Also, to be clear - I said I was earning $500 a month a few years ago. At that point, I could afford the $99 fee but discovered the superficial constraint imposed on local development in an unexpected situation. The figure is also beyond the minimum wage I mentioned earlier. Essentially, your $500 hard line doesn't reflect how people can adjust their cost structures depending on their local economy, preferences and ambition.
I initially ignored your offer because I'm not from the two countries mentioned. There's a dev talent program I know of that occasionally gives out PCs and Macs to people who are getting started in tech but can't even afford a decent PC/Mac - can I link you up so you can donate?
I'm sure they can also target those that have already benefitted from the free devices to meet your specific intent.
20 years ago we didn't have app stores. I'm not sure where your level of entitlement comes from, Apple doesn't have to allow anonymous publishing and I fully understand why they have put reasonable barriers to entry into their ecosystem. You don't.
The sense of entitlement comes from the purchase of the device, which is then remotely controlled by a party who has no property interest in the device following purchase.
If you bought the phone, you should be able to run all the apps you want on it, not only the ones Apple and the various regional governments say you are allowed to. Surely you see the abuse potential (which is not theoretical - iPhones in China cannot type or display the flag of Taiwan or install VPN apps) there?
Why do people defend vendors remotely disabling functionality in devices end users have bought and paid for?
I’ve been paying $99 a year for early access to iOS betas and for my own test apps since the program debuted in 2008. I’ve never published an app in the App Store under my own account. But if I’m honest, I do feel I’ve gotten value out of that $1500 or whatever.
If it isn’t worth $100 a year to you, that’s fine. Plenty of people will sell you a slot on their account for less and give you a signing key. Or you can choose not to play. But it seems silly to bitch about something that has literally been the status quo since the inception of the App Store back in March 2008, when the iPhone SDK was released.
I should also note that the $99 in 2008 was significantly less than Apple used to charge for student access for Apple Developer Accounts for Mac before that. (Although those gave you nice Apple hardware discounts).
And yet, in a world filled with actors with malicious intent - cybercriminals, spammers, secret services, dark spyware vendors, scammers cashing in on "popular" brands or sometimes outright cloning applications - it is the only way to enforce some honesty.
I don't like it either, but I do not see an alternative.
If there would be a significant competition without a subscription: yes, people would keep on complaining.
If everybody would jump on the train: probably no, because people would have forgotten what "normal" was.
I find option 2 quite unlikely so the answer to your question is: yes.
Citation needed.
Are you seriously asking them for a citation on their own opinion?
In your opinion, it's akin to BMW's heated seats subscription.
On the face of it, whether I agree or disagree, the first opinion at least makes more sense.
Since both are opinions, "citation needed" is a non sequitur. Or do you have citations for your opinion?
I think this is a strange and unfair criticism. I'll bet all of us, including you, can think of things that we value without being able to concretely describe why. We'd default to "because I like it".
That's not invalid at all.
It has metal and plastic, assembled in parts that you can sell for a total amount that will be surprisingly high, or that can be sold for scrap metal, or driven until the end of days, or or or... It's obvious that it has some sort of value, however low - it is a thing made of resources in the real world. You can argue about the price, but you can quantify it in so many different ways (weight, dimensions, speed, consumption, age, etc etc etc).
Apple's main feature is being locked down.