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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

> Apple takes 30% and that is not sustainable to run a company and pay salleries

Yet plenty of other companies do business on this model.

And where are they going to go? GNU/Linux? Good luck making a sustainable business selling desktop software there.

Leaving the AppStore doesn’t mean they can’t create MacOS applications. Most MacOS applications aren’t even installed via the AppStore.

If they want to sell them on Catalina and newer devices they surely need to follow similar steps anyway, while paying for infrastructure themselves.

https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=09032019a

You don’t have to have a paid developer account for app signing, your app is never reviewed by a human, and Apple doesn’t get a cut of your app sales.

So how is it “similar”?

> Please note that you must be the Account Holder of your development team in the Apple Developer Program.

https://developer.apple.com/developer-id/

> You can only notarize apps that you sign with a Developer ID certificate. If you use any other certificate—like a Mac App Distribution certificate, or a self-signed certificate—notarization fails

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizin...

That similar.

You can have an Apple developer account without paying for it, there’s a free tier, and I think that is allowed for what your parent is referring to.

I have an Apple developer account...

So do I and I don't pay for it, and I can sign my apps. What's different in your case?

So now developer certificates are available on the free tier?

For at least a few years, they have been. You can set a team and a signing certificate in Xcode with a normal developer account, which does not require any payment. To publish on the App Store, however, requires a paid account.

Sounds like you don't use that dev account much :)

Windows?

Where the future is also sandboxed and they would need to rewrite the applications from scratch?

> Where the future is also sandboxed

Judging from Windows Store/UWP/etc acceptance, it doesn't really seem much of a future.

> they would need to rewrite the applications from scratch

Nah, this is never going to happen with Windows. The worst you can expect is to not get any new features, but even with base Win32 you have enough functionality to build on top of it anything you want (and/or use 3rd party libraries that bring that functionality).

Sure it has a future, that is the whole point of the MSIX move, sandboxing for Win32 and UWP, regardless of the store.

I mean re-writing from Cocoa into Windows.

It might be some future for niche/specific uses, but i'm certain the current model of downloading an installer for applications and games or having a (non-sandboxed) downloader like Steam, Galaxy, Origin, EGS, etc will remain the most common by far.

Unless Microsoft tries to force that, but they'll certainly face a lot of resistance and with their apparent coupling of Windows Store with the sandboxing model they could face antitrust issues that would dwarf the IE vs Netscape case of the 90s as there are way more money and businesses involved nowadays (and of course Valve/Steam waving their Linux support all over MS' face :-P - that story has calmed down now but consider how many companies flared up just because of the idea that MS could potentially lock down Windows with Win8).

Sandboxing is orthogonal to the store.

Yes, but it isn't orthogonal to 3rd party stores in that you need to escape it for them to work. And really the same applies with a lot of other application types too.

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