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Comment by whatthesmack | Hacker News Reader

We have a few thousand apps on the App Store and got bit by this today.

The SDK is very useful for a smooth login experience if the user has the Facebook app installed, because your app can offer Facebook as a login option, then just pop the user over to the Facebook app, they can tap “okay” (or whatever), and jump back to your app.

That said, we’re going to rip this thing out of our apps ASAP. No framework should be calling network code in “+load”. The convenience for the user (and the dirty tracking Facebook apparently does) is just not worth the trade-off of handing our app’s stability over to Facebook.

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How can one developer have thousands of apps? It sounds just like a giant scattergun for malware. There are not 1000 distinct useful ways to use an iPhone.

A consulting company or a company that makes "white label" apps like for restaurants or stores.

Can we agree that each restaurant having a separate app is one of the dumbest outcomes imaginable?

Sure, unless you’re one of those restaurants that wants their own app.

That's not how it actually is. Apple actually rejects those type of template apps. The restaurants use an ad-hoc way of installing the apps. So those apps are only available to the restaurant for example.

No, Apple accepts white label applications. Their requirement is that if you're going to release a white label application, then it should be released under the customer's own individual Apple developer account rather than having them all under one developer account.

I think individual businesses (I am talking about the neighbourhood grocery stores and restaurants) ought to move to their own websites, their own apps (at least branding if there are template apps) as much as they can. I believe we have had enough of centralisation and consolidation which aren't problematic only when they are about a messaging service or a social network.

Yes, this should have been solved by the web, but you can't push notifications to it or rely on local storage (thanks to Apple). Also, generally people' don't even want to know what an URL is.

>Can we agree that each restaurant having a separate app is one of the dumbest outcomes imaginable?

Nope, can't agree there. Every outlet/brand should have it's own app in my book.

For what purpose? Why not just a good website? Why do I need some integrated solution when its probably just a shim around their website anyway? That sounds awful tbqh, download a binary for every website that I have little control over.

They probably do contract app development, with 1000s of clients

>There are not 1000 distinct useful ways to use an iPhone.

This comment reflects badly on your imagination. There are 00s of uses for a concrete brick -- let alone a single device with a plethora of distinct functions.

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