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Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people here are fixating on the $100/year fee -- and don't get me wrong, that's a problem -- but ignoring another significant part of the blog post: the fact that Apple is demanding what amounts to a non-trivial amount of creative control over the visual appearance of games that can be distributed on macOS/iOS. Just like the other restrictions on user freedom, this is a ratchet that will only get tighter as time goes on.

What would happen to indie filmmaking if every TV and movie projector threw up a scary warning screen, requiring a cumbersome manual override, before playing anything that wasn't certified by the MPAA?

If you develop webapps, would you be OK with not being able to get a trusted SSL certificate unless an anonymous reviewer at Mozilla was satisfied with your UI?

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>Apple is demanding what amounts to a non-trivial amount of creative control over the visual appearance of games that can be distributed on macOS/iOS

Apple is intolerably paternalistic in how it tells people how to use their hardware and it is continuously puzzling to me how much positive press it still gets in particularly in communities like HN, which have the 'hacker' part right in the name.

I'm not the biggest fan of windows but at least windows has, for the most part, left me alone and let me install software on my machine, same for Linux obviously. Not even Google and Android tell me what apks to run on my phone other than giving me a warning.

Apple lets you run your own applications you just have to right click the program and then select run. A warning will pop up but you can dismiss it and run the app.

It's not super intuitive but it isn't hard for power users and normal users generally shouldn't be just running unsigned apps anyway.

> Apple lets you run your own applications you just have to right click the program and then select run.

The iPhone and Apple's slow and steady OS convergence would like to have a word with you.

That doesn't work for iOS devices. Regular Joe User can't really use an app that wasn't approved by Apple. Jailbreaking is far too difficult for any non-techie person and deployment with TestFlight is far too limited in scale, and also could be easily blocked by Apple.

    I'm not the biggest fan of windows but at least windows
    has, for the most part, left me alone and let me install
    software on my machine

The problem is that it's equally fond of letting everybody else install software on your machine. See also all the BonziBuddies every tech has had to put down in their relatives' browsers over the years...

I'm a little confused. Do they exert creative control over things that are submitted for notarization? I was under the impression that only apps submitted for the App store are "reviewed", while notarization is a fully automated process that only does a basic malware check. I do think that charging $100 for access to notarization is preposterous, but it's not the same as having to submit to App Store guidelines.

Who know what apple will decide next year. Despite announcing Apple computer where switching to ARM in 2021 or 2022, leading to obsolescence of intel apps in near future, they annouced they would stop support for 32 bits apps... Every other os platforms still support 32 bit applications : Windows, BSD, Linux. It's no big deal to run 32 big application on 64 bits platform.

But there is still a slight overcharge in work comparing to 64 bits only platform. So Apple, one of the richest company in the world, decided to cut the cost, once again.

I came to believe that every decision apple is making regarding its products, hardwares and softwares is about cutting costs at every corner and maximizing profit.

Switch to in house ARM processor from standard Intel ? No need to pay intel anymore...

These new keyboards ? Well, may be it's about slim design but, having be able to use them for 3 years and having had to remove some of the keys occasionally and comparing them with the ones of the macbook pro 2015 i bought on ebay 2 month ago (I hade to convert the Querty keyboard to an azerty keyboard by switching some of the keys), I can say the quality of the material and the cost of manufacturing of these 2 keyboard are not the same.

This sounds much like the arm wrangling over the PPC to x86 shift. I had just acquired a 17" macbook back then too. Color me pissed... but that's Apple for ya (insert-shrug-emoji)

> Do they exert creative control over things that are submitted for notarization?

No, they don't, but the article covers two different topics: notarizing apps for macOS desktop (for which you have to pay the developer fee, where previously there was no need to), and distributing apps through the iOS app store (for which you have to pay the developer fee and lose creative control). Presumably the app store is relevant because there is no other way to distribute apps for iOS.

But notarizing apps for macOS is free?

Not according to Apple.

If you try to notarize an app, you chase links for a while untyil you get to https://help.apple.com/xcode/mac/current/#/devac02c5ab8, and then to get a Developer ID, you chase links for a while until you get to https://developer.apple.com/support/purchase-activation/

If it's free, it's pretty well hidden, like US tax prep companies' legally mandated "Free File".

To get a developer id, I believe you sign a contract with apple.

Huh. When they talked about notarization at WWDC it sounded like it'd be available as a free service for anyone, but I might be misremembering.

Notarization implies permission.

Additionally, don't you have to sign a contract as a developer to use the notarization service?

Notarization is automated and similar in principle to something like LetsEncrypt. This could serve as a backing off from the push towards sandboxing and in review.

Today it is a layer on top. But my hope is that Apple comes to peace with non-AppStore distribution, with automated notarization and waiving of the $100 fee for open source, students, etc.

Mac OS X was such a joyous platform to learn to program on. But macOS is throwing up more and more obstacles to native apps. When you squeeze a balloon, the air goes to the other thing.

An indie movie can't install ransomware on your TV. An eBook can't corrupt your Kindle to spy on you.†

That doesn't override the need for free expression. Software is art, and no one should have the ability to ban a piece of art. However, it makes sense to design systems which take these risks into account.

So by default, Macs are shipped in a "safe mode" that only runs vetted software, and anyone who wants to run less-safe code—and accepts the risk—can type four words into a Terminal window and go along their way.

I really don't think a single Terminal command is too much to ask—it doesn't take long, and it's a good litmus test. If you can't open a Terminal window, you probably don't understand the risks involved in running untrusted code.

-----

† Outside of extreme scenarios involving zero day exploits.

>If you develop webapps, would you be OK with not being able to get a trusted SSL certificate unless an anonymous reviewer at Mozilla was satisfied with your UI?

Have you ever used the Google Search Console? Your website is indexed well only if you fix the issues that they find with your site.

I was recently told that my buttons were too close together when on a mobile device....

> A lot of people here are fixating on the $100/year fee -- and don't get me wrong, that's a problem

How much should you have to pay for unlimited bandwidth, hosting, downloads, user ratings, reviews, feedback, crash logs, showing up in searches, the chance to get featured, and other features like CloudKit etc.?

> Apple is demanding what amounts to a non-trivial amount of creative control over the visual appearance of games

Where did you get that from?

How is that different from Steam, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony not allowing certain types of content on their platforms? For example, you can't show explicit pornography in your game and expect it to be approved anywhere.

As for not allowing "blue screens of death, simulated error, glitch art, brokeness" that TFA complains about:

Have you seen those "YOUR PC IS INFECTED BY 42 VIRUSES!! CLICK HERE TO CLEAN SYSTEM32! PERMANENT HARD DISK DELETION IN 2 SECONDS!!!" ads?

What if apps start doing that for fun then charge in-app purchases to clean the in-game viruses?

Would you want the job of being an arbiter over whether something like that is malicious deception which preys upon user naïveté, or just a cute quirky joke?

This is not about the macOS store, but about notarizing off-store apps.

But that doesn't include any 'creative control over the visual appearance of games'.

They are not even talking about App Store. The change is that you now need $100/year even if you distribute outside the app store.

If I want to distribute my app on my own website, I need Apple's approval and to give them $100 every year to do so.

Only if it's important to you and your users that they aren't told that no one has vetted the app except you and them.

You don't have to pay the $100/year to run the apps distributed on your website but you do if you don't want them to get a message that says it's from an unverified developer. That seems to me like the system is working exactly as intended.

> That seems to me like the system is working exactly as intended.

Not for me, the end user. Less developers releasing applications for my Mac means less options for me.

That's not what's happening, though. The same number of developers can release their applications. The only difference would be that some applications will say that they come from a source that's known to distribute reliable software.

You can still release apps without notarizing them. You just can't get around the warning message that the application hasn't been verified because, well... it won't have been verified. You can still release it and users can still run it.

This thread is full of developers considering or actively abandoning macOS as platform. That means less options for end users like me.

This thread is also full of people arguing with them. Meanwhile for end users like me, I see only benefits if Apple keeps the bar high.

If I really want to run an app that is not notarized and I trust its developers, I can always manually allow it to run.

I would not develop for mac with this policy.

With respect, then don't. I don't see why your unwillingness to establish trust with your end users is an issue. There are multiple ways you can do that and you don't seem to want to. If that's the case, I don't want to use your apps anyways.

Mostly because they're imagining what the worst-case scenario in the future is. They're looking at it completely from their own perspective, which is admittedly more challenging for them, while ignoring that it makes the experience for their users 1000x easier, better, and safer.

> Mostly because they're imagining what the worst-case scenario in the future is.

I'm one of those developers, and I don't appreciate being strawman'd and dismissed.

I'm doing neither of those things. Unless you have some kind of evidence that shows that Apple is going to prevent software from running if it's not notarized, you're imagining the worst-case scenario and reacting to that.

Now, granted, that statement can't possibly cover every single reason that someone might have for leaving Apple's platforms but those don't seem relevant when having a discussion about this specific context which is what the article and these comments are about.

The fact is that nothing that's been done changes the ability for people to run software as a developer. The difference is whether the end users trust you directly or whether the expect Apple to verify that trust for them. Both scenarios still allow them to run your software.

If you want to bring more clarity and point out where I'm arguing a straw man, I'd appreciate it.

> How much should you have to pay for unlimited bandwidth, hosting, downloads, user ratings, reviews, feedback, crash logs, showing up in searches, the chance to get featured, and other features like CloudKit etc.?

As others have already pointed out, I'm talking about the fact that Apple charges $100/year to make your software runnable on a Mac, regardless of whether you want to use their app store.

> Where did you get that from?

From the blog post that we're all supposedly discussing: "The next reviewer saw the “blue screen of death” art and said that it conflicts with copyright (it’s Microsoft) as well as simulated error not being allowed. So I changed that too. After that it got arbitrarily rejected for another reason… so at this point I changed so much about the game that it wasn’t even my work anymore. It didn’t reflect any of the things that were important to my work. Simulated error, glitch art, brokeness, historic UI’s are deeply important to me because they reflect a computer history. None of that was allowed. I had to change my games."

> How is that different from Steam, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony not allowing certain types of content on their platforms?

Steam is a free service that doesn't prevent me from running non-Steam software on my computer.

As for your other examples, I don't think it's different. I think restrictions on user freedom are made worse, not better, by the fact that lots of companies are engaging in them.

Look the point stands: it’s a non-free as in speech & beer platform

Go work with Purism if you want to ship whatever

What a shock Apple is also nickle & diming for services as hardware sales atrophy. This is business 101.

If we don’t like how businesses work we should stop working for them.

Paying for beer & leaving speech free never works. We end up talking about supporting paid beer. Free speech becomes all about what we buy & sell.

If you want a free society that doesn’t end up in a nickle & dime system of inequality a test should be is life free as in speech & beer? Organized around resource distribution sure, but free of coercion to support paid speech all day (where to be viable in the eyes of society work must earn money).

That’s the DNA of our culture. These are not random things. This is what we and Apple talk about all day: financial justification for behavior.

That’s a complete corruption of free speech.

Those are things Apple provides for its users' sake, not for developers. The amount I should have to pay to allow users to run my app on their machines, is and always has been ZERO.

> The amount I should have to pay to allow users to run my app on their machines, is and always has been ZERO.

You're in luck!! The amount you have to pay to allow users to run your app on their machines, is still ZERO.

Whether you can make them trust you enough to manually allow your app to run without notarization, is another matter.

It's not a about trust. Apple apps ran on mac for 40 years or some without any epidemic issue as it could have been the case with Windows.

It's about money. They want to close down the platform like iOS, as they said a few years ago, in order to bring the business model of the mobile platform to MacOS by forcing them to intall everything through the app Store.

Now there is notarization, but it will not last. They're just boiling the proverbial frog slowly, step by step. In 2 or 3 years, it will also disappear.

It's not only the game but a shitload of little utilities which will get lost with notarization

Once the users get used to not having as much third party software as before from outside the app Store, except big name like mozilla or google, they will stop notarization altogether and impose a 30% fee for every software sold on the platform.

With the system partition permanently set as read-only device, as they currently test on catalina, even if you can still currently mount it in read-write, MacOS bill be lock down like iOS. The only way to install a software outside of Mac App Store will be to jailbreak it thank to a "security flaw".

As i said, it's just about money.

Only technically naive users will stay on the platform and developer whishing to take advantage of them with softwares paid through subscription model.

FYI Steam doesn't even have content restrictions on the marketplace now. There's a ton of adult games on there now. So not the best point.

Yes, Steam allows lewds, but, and I'm not trying to move the goal posts, just reiterating the core point: Can you get away with something that hatefully targets a racial or social group etc.?

The point is there are always going to be limits to what you can release on any platform. Does that count as creative control over developers?

If there truly are no restrictions on what you can publish on Steam, then my initial list of examples is wrong, but that still doesn't make Apple the sole company with restrictions for their platform.

You seem to think that 30% of earnings is not enough for this ... so yeah, how much should you have to pay for that? 50%? 75%? 100%?

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