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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this exactly how iOS works currently? You literally cannot develop for it without signing an Apple contract (even non-App store apps require a user account/agreement).

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And with rumours of Apple moving to ARM chips for their laptops, they could well try to take the opportunity to lock out unsigned code entirely...

Before long they could even choose to make you buy an expensive Mac Pro or iMac Pro, or even require an 'iOS dev kit' if you want to develop for their platform.

And if Microsoft had succeeded in the mobile/tablet space, they'd be doing exactly the same...

> And with rumours of Apple moving to ARM chips for their laptops, they could well try to take the opportunity to lock out unsigned code entirely...

Why do these two things have any relationship to each other? They can and do lock down x86-64 machines, you're just able to "opt-out" right now[1].

[1] https://it.nmu.edu/docs/allowing-third-party-applications-in...

Isn't that counter-productive though? I'll just take my business elsewhere and develop for competing environments.

Not if the majority of your customers are in that environment. You want to sell an app to 50 or 5,000 people? Just look at Linux games (which is WAY better nowadays, its incredible what you can play).

I'm an android/*nix user. I'd love it if more devs had your mindset but they typically don't.

>Before long they could even choose to make you buy an expensive Mac Pro or iMac Pro, or even require an 'iOS dev kit' if you want to develop for their platform.

Hopefully this was sarcasm, since this is literally what is required right now to develop for iOS - you need a Mac (windows is not allowed) and a $99 developer account.

FWIW, this has gotten better. It used to be that you could only use the Xcode simulator when developing iOS apps and had to have the $99 developer account to put apps on real provisioned devices. Now you only need to pay to put the app on the store.

My MB Pro cost 2.5k, and I use it primarily to develop for iOS, so there you have your expensive dev kit.

Another 1k for the iPhone X for debugging.

Technically that's just them locking you out of their distribution platform, I don't think they'd have a legal case against you though. People sell apps outside of the app store and haven't suffered any recourse from apple, at least not that I know of.

EDIT: I guess you do have to technically agree to their terms to use the SDK and such, but if one were to get a hacked copy or whatever I think it'd be legal. They can definitely make it very hard to dodge their terms though.

How would a hacked copy make it more legal. Wouldn't using their software without a license also be illegal?

I mostly just meant you wouldn't be breaking laws technically to go around them via reverse engineering. To your second statement that's actually a good point, it could be. I mean in general overall it's going to be pretty outrageous to try and legitimately develop going around apple entirely, so the OP's point is valid de facto, just saying in principle they can't lock people out in the absolute sense under current law.

> I mostly just meant you wouldn't be breaking laws technically to go around them via reverse engineering.

Considering that their terms of service explicitly prohibits this, I'd say that it's illegal. Will Apple go after you if you do it? Probably not.

First, violating terms of service isn't illegal - ToS isn't the law, it's a contract; breaching contract terms isn't illegal but may expose you to some liabilities depending on the contract.

Second, terms of service don't always apply, you may refuse them, and then you're not even in breach of contract. Things like shrink-wrap/click-through EULAs aren't binding contracts in Norway; so the default provisions of copyright law apply, which allows reverse engineering without the permission of the copyright holder.

> Wouldn't using their software without a license also be illegal?

Which law?

Copying software without permission might be illegal - loading it from disk into memory isn't counted as copying btw - but running the software?

If there's any copy-protection, you'd need to circumvent it, so plausibly the DMCA.

No. You can build a web application, and people are free to navigate to it using Safari.

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