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Comment by tensor | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to look further than iOS to see that yes, it is a problem. Charging developers a yearly fee aside, excluding apps that Apple is not comfortable with due to competitive reasons is a HUGE problem.

Also, a lot of us who develop on OS X actually use the unix tool chain. Something like homebrew or fink just won't fit into the app store framework.

Edit: that said, I do see the positive aspects of it. So long as it is permanently optional, I think it's a good thing. Sadly, it seems Apple does not have good relationship with it's developers. At least if you take the number of fearful comments as evidence.

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The App Store guidelines pretty much rule out most big applications. Just like the iOS guidelines, you can't download loadable code bundles, you can't use your own licensing system, your own update system, etc.

Matlab, Photoshop, etc, are not compatible with the guidelines, so unless Apple wants to do away with entire market segments, they're going to continue allowing traditional development and installs, with the App Store being an optional distribution method.

Yeah, exactly.

It seems pretty clear to me that this is aimed at enticing small developers who are interested in finding a way to get exposure and don't want to deal with the hassle of setting up their own licensing and billing infrastructure. It's probably great for a one-man hobbyist looking to turn a small profit on the side.

It's manifestly not going to be interesting to companies that already have mind-share and marketing arms and multiple retail channels, and why would it be? They don't need the exposure or the overhead.

That more than anything else ought to indicate that this isn't some dastardly plot to lock down the desktop.

Just a note. If you're a serious Windows developer, you're probably paying the few hundred bucks a year for the basic MSDN software subscription.

...and many of those serious Windows developers started out as amateur Windows developers who weren't paying for that subscription.

Many Mac developers initially learnt by making small apps and making them available to everyone. I bet the iPhone App Store would have a lot less crap on it if new developers were able to learn iPhone development without having to pay a subscription and put their first apps on the App Store (and no, ad hoc does not count).

The fearful comments are not from Apple developers, but from freetards who have hated apple for the past 20 years and been making the same kinds of comments for that same period.

Meanwhile, those of us who have been developers for apple platforms during that time have never seen apple screw us over and find this kind of fear to be asinine.

It makes for good press to boost your page views, though, and so any burp eminating from cupertino is used to rationalize wild speculation and assertiosn that it is proof that steve jobs is a control freak who wants to run your life.

Apple introduced App signing in Leopard. You've been able to produce signed apps since around that time. That's all the appstore on the mac needs. Apple won't care what toolchain you use...

I've used Apple as a dev platform for the past twelve years, doing mostly UNIX application development. I do not have a blog. Thank you for making baseless assumptions and throwing around childish insulting terms. It really goes a long way towards stimulating good conversation.

As a multi-platform developer that doesn't use objective-c, but still finding OS X to be a great development platform, I am very much distrustful of Apple. Why? Because of how they've conducted themselves with iOS.

Is such fear reasonable? I feel it is. Mostly because I don't see users such as myself to be in Apples current or future target market. Few to no new features target users like myself, and the iOS platform is almost hostile towards anything that doesn't fit with Apple technologies and apis.

Not only that, but iOS has been extremely successful for them in terms of income. It makes a lot of business sense that they would want to push OS X towards the same highly profitable model. I do hope that they keep OS X as open as it is now, but I'd say the mistrust is very reasonable.

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