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Comment by jil | Hacker News Reader

They’ve also been expanding the reach of TestFlight apps through public invite links. There are some notable apps (iSH, a Unix terminal emulator, comes to mind) that are only distributed through TestFlight, since that sort of thing would never make it through App Review.

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Yeah testflight distribution is a decent workaround, but the limit the number of installs. Also you have to pay Apple for the ability to distribute through testflight.

I want a way for a 16 year old kid to make an awesome app and then distribute it to whoever wants it. Like back in the shareware days.

like, the App Store? Is it just the $99/yr that you object to? Because you could offer some scholarships to promising programmers. The kid already has a Mac, I bet he can talk his parents into a developer account if he's made an awesome app.

No, like apps that don't get approved in the app store. Like some cool springboard replacement, or an ssh client.

> or an ssh client.

FWIW, I have a few ssh clients on my iPhone (Termius, Prompt, iTerminal) that came from the App Store. Termius even offers mosh. Why wouldn't they be approved?

They didn't used to allow them for some arbitrary reason. It was just an example of something I might want that might not get approved.

When did they not allow SSH apps? I remember using an AppStore SSH app on a first gen iPad about when it came out.

I bought Panic's Prompt for my iPhone 3G. I don't ever recall a time they weren't allowed.

There are an infinite number of apps that can be made that aren’t ‘cool springboard replacements’.

Why is that even remotely important?

They were just examples or things that won't get approved that I might want to install.

I know of a lot of apps that are attached to having an active patreon sub (via testflight downloads).

The only thing I can think of that would be a problem for that 16 year old kid (or alternatively, a sneaky black hat) is permissions. Maybe a color coded permissions model where green means can only access the most basic systems, yellow means could access some personal data, red being can access very important or practically all your data, you must trust them implicitly before installing.

Does iSH really run afoul of the App Store guidelines? Seems to me that it's effectively the same thing as the various iOS Python IDEs, just using the Unix stack instead of Python. In particular it's an x86 interpreter, not a JIT...

Apps of this category must be classified as "educational", which is hard but not impossible to justify for iSH.

TestFlight apps do go through a review process, albeit a far more limited one.

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