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Comment by gergles | Hacker News Reader

So this is another step for Apple to try to get everyone paying them their software development tax, since "notarization" requires you paying the $100 annual fee.

While you currently can still run digitally signed software that is not notarized, this document admits that in the future signed software will require Apple's approval, so Apple will make everyone's software LESS secure (by forcing developers to not sign the code if they aren't paying Apple) so that it will continue running.

Sigh.

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So this is another step for Apple to try to get everyone paying them their software development tax, since "notarization" requires you paying the $100 annual fee.

I don't think Apple really cares about the fee. I know that the three platforms are now bundled together under one developer program, but suppose that there are 100,000 Mac developers that publish signed or App Store applications (which is probably an overestimation), the fees will make Apple 10 million. This is less than pocket change to them.

To me it seems that the $100 annual fee is to prevent fraud: (1) using a credit card to tie the developer account to an actual person; (2) make it expensive enough to avoid playing whack-a-mole with malicious account creation.

Indeed. Plus don't underestimate the psychological barrier that value can provide. 100$ are a sweet spot: it keeps everyone and their dog from signing up just because ("it's free, I might give it a go"), but at the same time it's not too much for a motivated developer who wants to dabble into programming for the Apple ecosystem of devices.

>it's not too much for a motivated developer

living in a first world state.

We're talking about owners of a Mac. They're not likely to be that strapped for cash, regardless of where they live.

Plenty of people out there with hand-me-down or 2nd (or 3rd) hand Macs.

At a global level, those are called "rich people". I'm sure you can find some individual exception somewhere, but by and large every mac user will be able to scrape or borrow $100 by the time their software is developed, tested and ready to ship.

That is so hilariously out of touch I feel hard not to consider this wilful ignorance.

That seems uncharitable of you.

And will they be same set of people proficient enough to make paid software on mac platform?

...paid? You think only paid software needs certification? Also, yes, they will be the same people anyway, not every worthwhile project gets VC funding. Also, unpaid software is _already_ suffering from the certification situation.

You don't pay to develop, just publish. So hobby developers are fine.

> it's not too much for a motivated developer

This is pretty subjective.

Ok, what entitles anyone to be able to publish their software in the repository of a for profit company? Why should it be open for free to everyone? You don't want pay that fee? Cool, there's Android and many other open platforms to program for. I will never understand the sense of entitlement people have against Apple. You are free not to buy Apple products and services if you think they are overpriced. Plus, no, it's not subjective. It's objectively low compared to many other access or licence fees a developer might pay in heesh professional life.

I'm not sure where you get a sense of entitlement from my comment. But my point about the fee is that even if it is low compared to other fees, that doesn't mean all developers who want to publish in the Apple ecosystem can afford to do so.

And making it expensive enough to turn down hobbyists or teenagers. I don’t think I agree with this approach.

The $100 is for distribution that apple can provide via its store and signing. You can build a non-signed version or a local only version for free.

Isn't all this achieved with a generic code signing certificate? What additional benefit does Apple's "notarization" offer, other than further fragmenting the market?

The page has a list. In short, you get a better experience with regards to Gatekeeper, and you will need to notarize your apps if you want them to continue to work on later versions of macOS.

As others have pointed out, you already have to pay the tax to get a trusted signing certificate. So as far as the economics go, this isn’t a change.

It's actually a big change. One issue is that Apple may not approve you(for whatever reason) or keep you on the waitlist for weeks(happened to me). Not to mention that there won't be any competition. Next would be to make Safari and any browser running on osx accept only Apple tls certificates. That would be "awesome"! Finally Apple "secures" the internet

It's a big change because Apple may keep you on the waitlist for weeks, which already happened to you?

Why is a time traveler speculating on the future?

You don't need to be a time traveller to see that Apple will be the only one accepted as issuer. I really don't understand how people can feel comfortable with that. The next step is making the browsers trust only Apple's tls. At some point Apple will have to "obey the law" and ban any application that either violates certain country laws or its own TOS.

I don't think Apple is making any significant money out of these $100 subscriptions. The payment fee is the best SPAM detector out there.

$100 is nothing compared with game consoles fees, or enterprise software licenses.

Hopefully Apple's platform continues to be a general purpose computing platform and not a console.

Interestingly enough I only see such complains from devs that are using OS X as pretty Linux, and seldom from those that are actually selling OS X apps.

We all know that software devs love Apple because its a walled garden. No competition from F-droid or piracy to worry about it.

We love Apple because of their Objective-C and Swift stacks and related OS APIs.

Having a POSIX layer is a minor detail.

Anyone that buys Apple, but actually wants a GNU/Linux laptop should do so.

Your post is full of assumptions.

First of all, $100 per year merely covers the costs for this service.

Apple will never force apps to always be notarized, although they might enable admins to enable such a feature for security purposes which I think is great.

> Apple will never force apps to always be notarized...

Apple's website actually says that they will:

"Note that in an upcoming release of macOS, Gatekeeper will require Developer ID signed software to be notarized by Apple."

I think this is about what is required. To get the benefit of being signed (i.e opening without user interaction to get past Gatekeeper) will in the future require being notarised.

So you will still be able to ship an unsigned app, but you won't be able to ship a signed, un-notarised one.

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