All I want for Christmas is to sign in with Apple
viorel.me
viorel.me
A few things seem to run deep in Apple’s blood: (1) they don’t give away stuff for free, and (2) they don’t care much about / chase market share. There may be some exceptions here and there, but those seem to be the defaults, so I’m no longer surprised when Apple follows them even when it doesn’t seem like the best plan from my personal POV.
[1] https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/ [2] https://letsencrypt.org/2016/11/01/launching-our-crowdfundin...
Apple used to have a separate, free Safari extension developer program where you can get free signing certificates. Then one day they retired that program and to sign Safari extensions you have to enroll in the $99/yr program.
I highly doubt they made that decision based on the few extra $99 they would make each year. (I certainly didn’t sign up, I just stopped porting my extensions to Safari...) They probably just wanted to unify the developer program, as the separate free program was too insignificant for them to bother maintaining. Same here I suppose. In a way this is similar to getting rid of ports that an insignificant (and sometimes seemingly significant) segment of their user base depends on.
(Not defending Apple’s action, just putting forth my take on their motivation.)
Aside from that, these newer gen Safari extensions are technically a good deal more capable their traditional JS counterparts, because they have access to just about anything that LLVM/clang will compile into a Mac binary — Swift and Objective-C of course, but also the vast majority of AppKit, Grand Central Dispatch, C++, and plain C among other things. Extensions that do more than basic DOM manipulation could see massive performance boosts written this way, but unfortunately I have yet to see a Safari extension that makes novel use of these capabilities.
By the way, in addition to making porting miserable, they also introduced annoyances like not being able to use the 1Password extension on Safari Tech Preview[1].
[1] https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/96182/1password...
This said, Apple’s approach is consistent: “this is a walled garden, you play by our rules, but we will make it worth your while”. The fee helps existing ecosystem developers defend from newcomers and challengers. It’s one of the ways the feudal ruler discharges its duties in the vassalage agreement, and then ensures loyalty by exploiting the sunken-costs fallacy. If you invest even a small amount of money in the agreement, you are much more motivated to actually produce something with it; and you’ll have less competition because a lot of people won’t even bother starting. The ecosystem will be markedly different from others, so that people that live entirely within its borders will struggle to ever leave, and developers won’t have to worry about expanding to other platforms.
I highly doubt it, at least not for the “fee” reason. The number of Safari extension developers without a paid membership when they introduced the fee (or the number of browser extension developers of any kind, really) is hardly even a rounding error compared to the number of iOS developers who already have a subscription.
I believe that, if you're releasing an iOS app that uses 3rd party sign-ins, you will be required to also include "Sign In with Apple". (The fee is irrelevant at that point since you'll already need to have a paid developer account to release your app.)
I hope it causes more developers to opt for first-party sign-in (because fuck 'em).
Whereas I see it as one of their best decisions. Releasing a privacy focused login is irrelevant if nobody supports it, this is Apple telling people that, if they want access to the iOS customer base, then they'll need to support their users' desire for privacy.
It's not strictly required. Devs can use first party logins, newsletter signups and so forth. It's not protecting me from any of the big players that deal in my information. Nefarious actors will work around it if they really want your actual email address.
It's a minor speed-bump for the organizations that we're allegedly being protected against, but one which amounts to a huge excuse for Apple to get their hooks more into your life, getting between you and whomever else you're trying to deal with, all while locking you in more and charging a premium for it without giving you much choice about anything.
But the larger issue IMO, is that depending on your industry, you can't NOT have an iOS app if you're going to have an app at all. Does it really matter what percentage of the market they have at this point? Once you can affect entire industries surrounding your product, you're certainly a monopoly. That's why you don't need a majority market share to be prosecuted as one.
> Whereas I see it as one of their best decisions.
Perhaps the ends justify the means for you. Maybe you haven't thought about the larger issue or you don't care about it. I don't know, but to be completely honest Apple runs their platform like a bunch of tyrannical assholes and I just can't support that.
I value technical freedom higher than comfort. I like a good balance at least. So, I'm going to continue hoping that global anti-trust laws will make this kind of thing harder for them to do. There's already one antitrust suit pending against them. They also got caught price fixing. The higher ups at Apple certainly don't work just to "protect the users". They do it to get control of you themselves.
That’s not at all what a monopoly is.
There are other related terms that also certainly apply to Apple in a stricter technical sense that you can read about here -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
And there also is certainly an antitrust case pending against Apple right now is there not?
Well, they do give away OS updates and Xcode. Those seem like pretty major exceptions to your rule.
I've implemented this elsewhere as well. Charging a measly $5 for an event (and not being chuffed if you don't collect it from one or two people) is a great way to filter out the wishy washy, the stingy, and most of the people who will waste your time without providing any value.
There is a stark difference between someone willing to put >$0 (even $.25) into a group project vs not. And I don't really do business with the second anymore.
Flip it around, "Why would I spend resources on you if the chance that you're going to generate a return on those resources is minimal?"
A business is interested in profit. Apple is no different. If you're not paying in, they're directly incentivized to make your experience suck as much as they can without crossing legal lines, to get you to do so.
I'm not saying I want to be in the fee-gating communities, I agree with you on that point. I'm just saying expecting a multi-billion dollar corporation to be interested in fostering that same sense of community is ridiculous.
You're right that a community is not a business. That's ultimately the fundamental rot in capitalism.
Sign-in with Apple does not make sense as a product with the goal of direct profit, (and the majority of its developer target market already pays, because they only implement it because it's an requirement for them building their apps), so this logic doesn't work so well.
Also, my comment was addressing the direct parent comment, not the entire thread above it.
An example would be free/paid website, where you constantly are trying to automate and improve the free version with features that used to be paid
You are free to choose how to run your biz of course and the market will decide how valuable your idea is, and judging from your experience it sounds like it makes you money, which is a good thing :)
edit, response to a comment below: people can come up with the same ideas independently too. You may have heard of Newton and Leibnitz.
“If you’re [collection of virtue signaling words] there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.”
Why would Apple want to filter out people from integrating with sign in with Apple? I can see they want to filter out junk from the App Store, because junk on the App Store (like junk on Something Awful) reduces the signal to noise ratio. But I don't think there exists a signal to noise ratio when it comes to sign in with Apple. A user wants to join a website, and that website either supports sign in with Apple or it doesn't; there's no noise to wade through.
https://firebase.googleblog.com/2019/11/sign-in-with-apple-a...
While it's valid to want to keep email addresses out of the hands of app developers, it's disingenuous to see this as anything but Apple deepening its moat.
One day Apple will be able to cut off communication to your customers. You can say that's not what's happening, but I never imagined living in a world where we had to pay to distribute our code, and that distribution was finely controlled and revocable.
It's hard to imagine that Apple sees its developers as anything other than dancing monkeys. All they do is take and yet they're still praised.
We should really be rallying against Apple and Google. It disheartens me every time someone says "this is fine".
Avoid this lock-in, and own your own users. Email and password is still the best and simplest way to go.
So what if it’s only 15 out of 100 people who can’t or won’t pay to play that would be the ones to create a poor experience? They decided it’s worth keeping out the rest of them.
This is the same reason why they purposefully break apps on iOS updates (it’s not just about being too lean to care about backwards compat) but it forces people to update their apps and many times this comes with a QoL refresh from the developer.
They also require a DUNS number in order to publish an app as a company rather than an individual, and $100/year to publish at all.
Similar line of thinking, hoops that force people to show that they are capable of meeting a standard, even if it is just the 80/20 rule (20% of the producers who can’t jump the hoops produce 80% of the garbage) but they decided it’s worth the cost of the other 80%.
The other big sticking point for me? You can't develop for Apple without an Apple. I can write code for Android on any OS and don't force developers to pay thousands into the ECOsystem to release a _free_ application
I am surprised to hear the priced decreased - back when I did that sort of development is was $150 to publish free apps
Have you seen the few apps that Apple has ported to other platforms like iTunes?
Personally I have seen fit to centralize all my PII with Google, since GMail was new. If my data leaks I know who to blame.
If I want a product I buy it, if it doesn’t let me down or exceeds my expectation I’ll buy again, but it’s nothing personal, I have nothing to gain from trying to make them look better than the deserve.
Google sucks though they are not loyal to the US, but they do act on their loyalties.
Here we are again at the "Apple-Experience" where the customer base is ready to pay ridiculous prices because it's part of it to show that you can afford it. How this says something about quality is beyond me but maybe you need to participate first before you can come to this conclusion...it's not like you are taking a credit from Apple where you need to show you can pay it back or rent a car where you need to show your drivers license or something.
I don't even understand what you mean by "quality" in the first place. So the quality of the product is not there yet and you have to pay so they can set it up/keep it up? What part exactly does require such a hefty sum?
I think I heard it’s only a requirement for apps that offer alternative social logins? And I’m guessing developers have a bit before that takes effect?
The author speaks about narrowing down this mess, so I think it's quite related.
>To prevent a data grabbing snafu along the lines of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, Google is asking developers who use sensitive Gmail APIs to pay for a security audit that proves their apps play by the rules.
And the cost – anywhere from $15,000 to $75,000 or more, every year – could put some smaller companies out of business.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/11/google_gmail_develo...
They made a privacy-friendly authentication provider and instead of making it easy to use for devs and hopefully getting its benefits for Apple customers in as many places as possible, they discourage its spread by making it the pretty much only paid option in the market.
This was a really anticlimactic reason. There are a lot of things you can do with a developer account. They are essentially just throwing this new feature/benefit onto the pile.
Whining because "I'm not an Apple developer but I still want to use the Apple ecosystem" is kind of silly in my opinion.
Yes. We all get it. Why can't we go back to the days when developer accounts were all free on every platform? Sorry. Those days are gone. Buck up and deal with it.