I am, of course, aware that many (perhaps most) computers in the world are effectively appliances, but at some level, the great glory of this glorious, epochal machine -- the "personal computer" -- is one's ability to program it and make it do something new. It is not just a machine; it's a machine for creating machines.

Take that away, and . . . to what shall I compare it? It's like giving someone a deck of cards and telling them that these cards can only be used to play blackjack. You can't invent a card game, or change the rules, or build a house of cards, or do card magic. Putting such stipulations in place isn't just annoying or inconvenient. It's a kind of basic betrayal of the concepts and affordances that underlie the thing itself.

[edit: grammar]

Not even in movies I've seen so many cases of children desperately chasing their emotionally unavailable parent.

Apple is a trillion dollar company, it's the "parent" who sells you +$40 dongles for everything. "Hobbies" are only good if they make them money AND doesn't increase their risk or any liability.

I've seen this developer-Apple dynamic at least since the late 90s. "Daddy Apple" was more available back then, but it's wasn't like it cater that much to the hobbyist-developer community ( unless we see the past with rose-colored glasses ).

The App Store is a multi-billion dollar business, like a moderately high-end mall, there is no place for hobbies in that world.

I hope for a time when developers understand this and stop feeding Apple execs for free. Ironically that would be the day Apple would be "nicer" to them.

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).

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.

I'm not an apple fan. Most of my personal devices run Linux, but I feel essentially trapped on an iPhone. It doesn't seem like there's a truly useful open phone out there. I don't like Apple, and I don't trust them or their ostensibly pro-privacy stance much, but I want as little privacy invasion and as little advertising as possible on my phone, and I think as bad as Apple is, they're still better than a fully Googled version of Android. Unfortunately, a lot of people, myself included, need at least some apps that require either an iPhone or a fully Googled version of android.

I suppose there's always the option to dual-wield and use a Linux or de-googled android phone for daily use and keep a second device around for the apps that won't run there, but that is both a pain I don't expect many people to buy into. I'm just about at the point of going this route for myself, but it does feel more like admitting defeat than anything else.

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.

Apple exec scribbles furiously

The whole process around entitlements and app review is absolutely maddening for small teams that don't have insider connections at Apple.

For context, there are things that your device is capable of, but the OS will prevent you from doing without Apple's blessing (an "Entitlement"). Even in test code that you're not shipping to the app store. Most apps you'll use day to day will use a bunch of these entitlements.

A pretty common scenario is that you want to be able to remove a notification that is no longer relevant. The process to do that is: 1. Pay the $99 (ugh, okay) 2. Build marketing materials for your app (even if you're the only user) 3. Write a proposal to Apple explaining why you need this entitlement and this is a good user experience. 4. Wait 4-8 weeks for Apple to deny your request without actually reading the proposal. Seriously, they only skim read what you write. 5. Go to 4

If you want to publish your app, you'll go through this all again with app review.

This process is absolutely maddening and is extremely time consuming. Apple's policies assume you have a large team to manage them, create marketing assets etc.

At bigger companies you escalate thus via your Apple internal contacts who chase things up for you. Indie developer? SOL.

I got the same notice.

Had to scramble to rebuild/provision and re-install on my device from my Mac that was in another part of town - for which I had to drive.

And then I got some strange errors because apparently I had to update either my OS or XCode?

Ended up just showing the Android version and that worked fine of course.

It's very annoying indeed, but at the end of the day, complaining probably won't get me anywhere, it's been this way since, what, 2007?

P.S. Developers complain about a bunch of things on the Andrdoid platform too, particularly Google Play, so it's hard to win.

That said, there is a lot to consider for companies like Apple in this world. Yes, it is not only Apple that does this. Apple is just apparent as with the iPhone it became so ubiquitous.

Apple wants to be known for a clean platform for consumers without worrying about viruses and such things. Ever heard about a ransomware on your shiny iPhone? If you want to maintain this, then you need a strict enforcement of who can run what on the platform. These days such enforcement is done via certificates. At first Apple was somehow lax on that enforcement. That allowed side-loading of apps on your iPhone. For development purposes good. Of course for personal use great. But the first actors appeared and used that to distribute their apps. I remember when Google Ingress where a thing way befor Pokemon Go. Ingress was Android only. No iPhone. Because it was from Google. Then some people came along and build an iOS app, which you could download from Github. Then when some shady actors got banned from the Appstore they distributed their apps via shady websites. I assume at one point the decision grew that they need to do something to prevent this.

Another thing is, the development tools are not free as in free beer. Maintaining development tools costs resources. That's why I need to buy the development tools. If I do embedded I may need to buy a Keil compiler. If I do FPGA I may need to buy Altera or Xilinx. But the Apple tool chain is free of charge. Maintenance costs resources. That's why in the past you needed to buy the Development account to have access to the tool chain at all. Now, these days, the tool chain is free-of-charge. So you could ask "Hey, they are such a money maker, why can't they just cross finance that?" That is valid. On the other, why? Why shouldn't that business unit finance itself?

So there are many different things to consider.

Apple effectively decides what can run on macOS, and if you don't pay their yearly toll and jump through their hoops, your apps won't run on users' macOS installations. If you don't pay them, Apple will make it seem like your app is either broken or malicious to unsuspecting users.

It's a racket and it's not worth the trouble to deal with it.

Users don't understand why they can't run the un-Notarized apps they want to run. Those are the people who suffer.

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.

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.

So to this end I've been trying to connive a way to develop an app for iOS without actually having to use a mac for anything I consider actual development. I'm ideologically opposed to buying a mac just to be able to sign, but not practically or monetarily.

Right now, it's looking something like this:

1. Develop my app in Godot (my app is technically a game but I think you could develop pretty much any non-game app in godot afaict)

2. Buy a mac mini. Shove it in my rack with a dummy monitor hooked up. Use VNC to remote control GUI for when I need to poke UI things. Configure SSH.

3. Develop my app in godot like normal, using their built-in runner for normal dev-test loop.

4. Set up a script to pull my app on the mac mini, build it, sign it, and deploy it to either prod or my test device.

As the author mentions, test apps expire periodically. I wonder if I can automate re-installing it every week/year.

I haven't tested any of this out yet, I'm mainly still making sure I like Godot enough to use it for my game. Then I'll expand out, testing out the mac stuff.

And all of this is hedged that if I for some reason switch away from iOS, I just export my game to android and continue with my day. (or at least something close to that, instead of having to rewrite from scratch).

Think about how many Mac Developers have been criticizing many of the policies and features surrounding the App store for their business for years. There's been kerfuffles about lack of update pricing, forced API updates for perfectly working software, bad search functionality, horrendous App approval stories, and many more complaints about features and policies on the App store that causes Apple to make far less money than they should.

IMO, the reason for this is that running a marketplace isn't Apple's core competency.

I do. Isn't that what their extortionate cut is supposed to cover?

Alternatively, make a website like you normally would and in Safari you can "Add to Home Screen". You don't even need a domain name, just save the IP to your Home Screen. Native APIs for websites come a long way.

Don't give them ideas.

If he were a farmer writing angry blog posts about how VW has made it damned-near impossible to plough a field with a VW beetle, it wouldn't be any more absurd.

The simple truth of the matter is that Linux and other open source OSes are the only compute platforms that can still meaningfully be thought of as providing "general purpose computing". ...maybe the JVM does, too, but that's more like a general purpose computing sandbox within appliances that's under heavy guard and for some reason tolerated by appliance makers.

Let me give you another perspective as an apple user - I don't think about Apple at all.

I have a glass brick that sends 20 - 30 text message a day and a couple times I'll use GPS to go to a new restaurant. Sometimes I'll do crossword puzzles. This brick happens to do it best.

I don't think about Apple.

God, could you be any more snide? Please keep your personal vendetta against <whatever MacOS user harmed you> off of HN.

https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/apple-sa...

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.

Downside is that I see bunch of corporate apps that are total trash on app store.

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.

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.

Both of the things you listed are side effects.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Eventually there may be a non-Android 100% free software alternative but as it stands now the above solution works fine and keeps the data vampires from your door.

This is a genuine question, not an attempt to paint Apple as the be-all and end-all or a paragon of perfection (for all that I'm an unapologetic Apple fan, I recognize that they have serious faults).

I think there is a strong case to be made that the limitations Apple has placed on the iPhone are instrumental in guaranteeing the privacy and (relative) freedom from crap that makes it as good as it is. There is also a strong case to be made that it should be possible to create a phone (or computer) with nontrivial privacy safeguards, but without the specific limitations Apple imposes.

I lean somewhat toward the former camp, as I believe that in a space like smartphone apps, bad actors are both willing and able to do whatever is necessary to make their unethical money, whether that's with extra ads, crapware apps, or just actual malware, scams, and theft. But I would genuinely love to be proven wrong, and I hope that there comes a day when we have a meaningful competition in the space without sacrificing our collective ability to use our phones without fear.

The phone will be used for exchanging calls and texts. The computer for everything else.

I was thinking about this but what happens with on-the-spot payments? This seems like a functionality that's really convenient (not having to carry a bank card) but that would be on the official device, not the daily use device due to security issues. But paying for stuff in person is a daily use activity.

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.

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.

> You can't do that

When the others are all shouting:

> Hey do this irrelevant thing

Microsoft has done this many, many times as well.

That's a matter of perspective. If I create a simple bike drawing in crayon, it has none of those things, but everyone knows what the drawing represents if they had it. Maintenance and extensibility concerns are incidental. Framing things to be attractive, was one of SJ's talents.

Programming on an iPad? Forget it. Have you thought about doom scrolling instead?

This gives all the control back to the user. Nobody should be bullied into just accepting all permissions the developer wants. The developer should be forced to gracefully degrade their UX when their dependencies are denied without preventing access to the core service and should be sued into oblivion when they violate this basic promise under accessibility laws.

From a developer perspective virtualization would also make accomplishing this much easier since they no longer have to be limited to crappy APIs that are not just sometimes vulnerable and incompatible but restricted on purpose under bogus pretense.

If the user can't determine what an app does with the resources it wants it should be trivial for the OS to mock the resources, see what happens, and report it back to the user. i.e. when enabling networking the app attempts to phone home somewhere shady, when enabling file system access it attempts to read/write outside its own directories, etc. I am pretty sure this would not scare off users, but make them curious.

For me it is just a terrible feeling to not really own a device I bought, so I avoid them wherever I can. Annoyingly, this is getting increasingly more difficult.

As a potentially interesting aside, today lack of programmability seems to be a sign of a maturing market. I recently researched e-cigarettes that I can program to time me, those that have a computer in them basically all allow for writing your own programs. Same with the smart watch market, although Apple is trying its best to ruin that as well.

Then it auto-deletes and there's nothing you can do about it.

The only class of malware that the currently-mandated friction is preventing is the kind that appears benevolent for 7 days then strikes on day 8.

That level of friction is $99 :/

For a company with Apple's budget, XCode is a disgrace.

If it weren’t for the AppStore, it would’ve been the end of Apple. The iPhone wasn’t released with it at the outset - because this “make your own” wasn’t a part of the ethos. The Mac also suffered tremendously with no love to Final Cut, snipping Aperture, and leaving the hardware to bit rot for the longest.

iPod was a hugely profitable windfall and iPhone was too - somehow the AppStore slipped in there and became the lone remaining ember that reignited the hacker mindset - Swift I believe is that true rekindling; everything else follows M series, OSX continuities, etc

I’m starting to rethink everything I thought I knew.

Apple has publicly said that macOS is unacceptably insecure because users have the option of running unapproved software (https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/19/22444353/mac-malware-not-...). It's not unreasonable to think that they'd be interested in fixing that "problem".

Just give me a simple checkbox in the system settings that this is a "developer machine and I know what I'm doing" which disables all that stuff and it would be fine.

They still haven't, haven't even made any big moves that way, but maybe eventually that crowd will be right in the same way that if you predict a recession every year, you'll eventually be right.

This excuse is exhausting, lacks any principles whatsoever; these are general purpose devices, browsing the web & allowing arbitrary apps to be developed & squeezed into the world, if they pass through the tyrant's gauntlet. That one company offers some modicum of un-tyranny is a poor defense for locking down & excluding general purpose computing, for withdrawing the systems we have in our pockets from our own ownership & ability to control.

Citizens should have some options. The implications that the market is free to do whatever & citizens are free to pick from what's available seems presently somewhat tennable, but if we step back just a little bit here & look at the picture, it's horrifying. The inability to root most Android phones shows that actual freedom, real general purpose computing, is an extremely fine & narrowing little sliver, of the most important & most used general computing world.

My phone is an appliance. I need it to provide 2 way communications and access to the information on the internet. Apple will provide security updates for the foreseeable future. That's all I want as I enter curmudgeonly old man age.

But yeah, I know I bought a locked down device and I'm ok with that. BMW is charging a subscription for heated seats. I'm not ok with that, so won't be buying one. Obviously, they expect some people still will. I agree with them.

If you want an adversarial narrative between Apple and the people, you'll find no greater supporter than me. Europe seems to disagree with Apple's philosophy though, so maybe it's time they reassess their opinions.

That's the key point: I bought it. It's mine now and I have the moral the moral right to do anything I please with it that isn't immoral. Granted, there can be laws that trample that moral right or artificial technical barriers that attempt to restrict it, but both are unjust. Attempted word magic spells such as "by using this product that you just bought you agree that you didn't actually buy this product" are ridiculous, dishonest, incoherent, and not morally binding.

Give it a year of lower than usual profits and some twitter complaints and they will backpedal at mach 10

Oh, wait...