Apple’s Guidelines Now Allow Executable Code in Educational Apps and Dev Tools

It's anarchism at the top and bottom, but there are many layers in between.

Any curated stores (stores for web apps are no exception — like the Chrome store) are going to put limits on what can be published. That is where their value lies.

Here's the dilemma: To have a degree of openness and accessibility for developers while also maintaining convenience for end-users, you have to accept the submissions of new developers that meet a certain (in practical terms, low) bar of standards. So to curate such an ecosystem, while being relatively open to new developers and users at the same time, the below-par apps have to be punished through discover-ability. This is what Apple has done, and it explains why their ecosystem is painful in exactly the ways it it painful. (It's not as painful if you are working at a good company with sharp marketers, or if you have an in with a community that exists outside the app store.)

The web simply has its 'knobs' set differently to mediate the curation/openness dilemma. Discover-ability is better. Curation is DIY/free-market. Caveat emptor.

(Although I'm a little embarrassed that I paid 20 bucks for an app in the app store that's open source. But that's totally worth it to not have to fight with xcode...)

Whether or not that's something that happens here or elsewhere can be argued and I don't necessarily agree with him, but that's where he was going with it I believe

That's my main gripe as well. I'm currently using a Nexus 5 with Sailfish OS as my daily driver, but it's hard. I really do not have the time anymore like I did in the past to make it all work.

I'm running it with Alien Dalvik so that I can run WhatsApp and some other Android apps that do not have a native version yet. Without that it wouldn't really be possible.

(The reason I'm testing SFOS out is that Jolla (the developer of Sailfish OS) has a deal with Sony to release it on their Xperia X on the near future. Also Jolla's got a deal with Russia as well, because more entities are worried about the walled gardens.)

Isn't Android (at least stock) more open, if one so wishes?

I know I did. And I'm a techie. I just don't like fiddling with my hardware.

>Or did the industry quickly lock hardware devices into little gadgets for generating income?

Well, considering that Linux as a Desktop OS is totally open but it's still at very low single digits for desktop use, and that all the "comes with Linux pre-installed" ventures failed to gain any traction, I'd say lots of people don't care for that kind of openness at all over use of use, practicality, polish, etc.

Not to mention that mobile devices are now far less locked than they used to be for the average user. For the first 10 years of mobile phones, they came just with the apps that the vendor offered and no APIs, or very limited crapware (e.g. in mobile Java) -- now there are 1.5 million apps to chose from, many of incredible quality.

What is your suggested alternative: Android? Functionally speaking, how is Android different? That's all consumers care, and should care, about: How does the difference affect my life. They don't care about your grand philosophical argument. If Apple's walled garden actually affected people's lives, they would care. It doesn't. They don't.

Well, it does, within reason.

If they put out apps just because they were crap (subjectively) then devs and press would be shouting bloody murder.

But they do stop the riff raff -- at least better than the "anything goes" camp.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2475964/mobile-security...

https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/03/preinstalled-malwar...

Besides the walled garden of Apple is not so walled - you can install any app you want on your iDevice, as long as you have access to Xcode (which is free). It is the access to the marketing and reach of App Store that Apple denies.

This kind of hyperbole isn't helpful. The differences between voting in a police state and using a walled garden app ecosystem run by a private company should be obvious.

> Freedom is a good thing, even if it comes at the price of some risk, no matter what the context.

What about the freedom to choose an application platform?

Since I'm sure I need to make this disclaimer, I don't own any Apple (or Windows) devices aside from my work-issued macbook.

This article [0] has made points that I'm not certain I completely agree with, but has done enough for me to suggest that my original position might need updating.

The point being, essentially, that at some point we might need to consider the trade off of who we're actually afraid of and where we can get the best protection as part of a trade-off, since things like "freedom", "risk", "security", and "privacy" aren't absolutes in any meaningful way.

[0] http://www.newstatesman.com/2015/11/coming-anarchy-john-gray...

Or how about it's along the vast majority of the people merely wanting the police to guarantee safe cities?

You don't live in your mobile phone: you use it.

>Freedom is a good thing, even if it comes at the price of some risk, no matter what the context.

"No matter what the context" is BS. I presume you lock your house doors or wear a safety belt -- sacrificing freedom of movement for more security.

One could argue that no one was forced to install those apps that always tracked them, or that they could manually switch between the options. However the small minority of people who care about the privacy of their location will now have a lot more apps available to them with less hassle, because Apple is deciding to enforce a rule.

I don't think these new guidelines about executable code in education apps will be a problem, but I can imagine dropping the restriction altogether allowing developers to take advantage of users who aren't vigilant, or simply making people have to be much more suspicious about everything they allow on their phone.

That's a shallow quote, though. You're right, on the face of it – freedom is a good thing. But we accept compromises on absolute, unbridled freedom all the time, in order to trade of some other desirable outcome.

I would be concerned if computers generally were locked-down. But they aren't – competitors to iPhones are freely available, and desktop & laptop computers are ubiquitous. I will continue to oppose restraints on what can be done with them, but the freedom to choose a curated garden is also a freedom that should be respected.

I wish there were more than two options, but the modern mobile market is still only about 10 years old.

Only if you let it.

> No one, except for top companies are able to follow UI guidelines, and most apps has weird UI.

Hmm, I'm not a top company but I try to follow the UI guidelines. In fact, by default, if you use native controls, you're doing that for free!

> Even you are making app as a hobby, you will likely use privacy-invasive ad networks in order to pay back $100/year ad store fee.

That's only if you want to make money. Some people don't; they do it just for fun.

You should check out XFENCE[1], formerly known as Little Flocker, and made by Jonathan Zdziarski who sold it to F-Secure after he was hired by Apple as a security guy.

[1]: https://beta.f-secure.com/key/XFence

I also find file management deeply annoying on iOS, but maybe that will improve with iOS 11 and the new file management stuff.

No, it's pretty easy to set defaults but it is different from, say, Windows 7. See my other comment.

And while ChromeOS and Android make use of the Linux kernel for the time being, for a browser, ART and the quite constrained NDK APIs, whatever talks to the underlying hardware is kind of irrelevant.

In the Default App panel, if I go into Photo Viewer and click choose a default, I will only see Paint, Pain 3D and "Look for an app in the Store". No choice for a dialog with a complete list of app. Again you are probably referring to an earlier version of Windows 10.

I would say that the cryptic watch app was 'obvious' in my mind though. Watch faces are a well defined concept on the watch, and the lack of third party watch faces was about as explicit as one can expect from Apple. I'm not surprised at all, and ignoring the fact of whether they should be allowed, I feel they were skirting too close to the boundary to be able to complain about being removed, but that's just my reading of the situation.

Shameless plug – this is an ongoing collection of vector doodles I've made using Graphic on the iPhone: https://www.instagram.com/shapeslinescolours/

The PC landscape only happened thanks to IBM's mistakes.

Personally, I don't like this, either. I wish this wasn't the direction things are moving. But it is.

I'm not as pessimistic as you are about the future of computing, because I think there will always be a demand for general purpose computers — and therefore there will always be a bunch of companies selling them. So I doubt that we won't be able to get them, or that they will sell for crazy premiums — if they did, somebody would make them and sell them for less.

What I do think though is that the "general-purpose, arbitrarily capable" computer device segment is a small sliver of what it seemed like it was back in the old days when most computers were unrestricted.

I think 95% (or more) of the total "computing devices, including both general-purpose and locked-down appliances" market is happy with shitty locked-down devices, maybe even with ads and invidious tracking.

That's just the way it is. And it would be very hard to change that, because you'd have to change the people who are the market for these devices, and make them care that Apple doesn't allow software lets you see porn, or compile code, or learn about civilian casualties of US drone strikes, or any other thing that they don't want to let you do.

I don't see that happening.

So I think we are indeed headed for a world where the vast majority of computing devices are arbitrarily restricted, less-capable appliance-type devices like Apple's iPad.

That sucks for those of us who want unrestricted devices, because it means we become part of a niche market, one that isn't so interesting to the big multinational corporations like Apple with their huge budgets and economies of scale. So we can get an unrestricted, general purpose table computer, for example — but the hardware probably won't be as nice as an iPad, and the OS might have more rough edges.

It would be way better, for us, if computers really were inherently open by default, or if a most people cared about this stuff. But that's just my fantasy scenario (and apparently yours), not the world as it actually is.

* That word always makes me think of 19th century paupers dying of pulmonary tuberculosis.

Sideloading does not exist on iOS except as a gimmick, an annoying workaround for people who really need it and are willing to spend a lot of time maintaining it, or an unsanctioned use of enterprise signing certificates that go against Apple's terms and can be shut down at any moment if they notice what's going on. (ipadsigner.io is the last one.)

Where the definition of "taking the piss" is determined by Apple alone and is subject to change.