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> 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.

> 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.?

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%?

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'.

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.

> 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.?

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.

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.