https://twitter.com/slasher/status/1295434558112960519?s=21
This may have consequences for Unreal Engine too.
Without a dev account, how can they maintain it?
This may have consequences for Unreal Engine too.
Without a dev account, how can they maintain it?
Specifically, in XCode, they can add an Apple ID (any Apple ID) and use that to build on a device.[1] This creates a "personal team"[2] which you can use to test on your devices.
[1] https://help.apple.com/xcode/mac/current/#/devaf282080a [2] https://help.apple.com/xcode/mac/current/#/dev17411c009
Or the other way round: What good would be a personal team for epic if they cannot test their games on actual phones?
If personal teams allow side-loading of apps, why isn't this a way to distribute apps? Why is there no app store for personal team apps?
It's not really an alternative to an app store. There are also enterprise signing certificates for distributing custom apps within large companies without these restrictions, along with cases in the past where people have abused this to distribute; these are usually shut down pretty quickly as a blatant violation of the licencing agreement.
F-Droid.org?
There's also Ad-hoc signing, which I believe is longer-lived, requires a developer account, but has restrictions on how many people you can send it to.
As an enterprise user you can also distribute apps yourself to company employees without going via app store verification, though I think it's much harder to get onto this program https://developer.apple.com/programs/enterprise/ . This is what has occasionally been abused, I don't know how the certificate is revoked centrally though, but it's not for [user] self-compiled code.
It's possible that my knowledge of this is slightly off, because it was a few years since I worked with this stuff.
- your typical user wouldn’t know what to do with it
- every install would run only for a limited time (only apps distributed through the App Store have a certificate that doesn’t expire), so those users would have to reinstall the app every week or so.
- it would make it harder for them to make money from it (they would give away the game for free. The in-game store wouldn’t give away stuff, but the source likely would soon be changed to support alternative stores)
Which is only fair for those who circumvent the original store.
Honestly, for most people the App Store is good enough. For a long, long time, it wasn't good enough, and Apple was much stricter. As it got better, Apple started loosening the restrictions around deploying whatever you want to your device. People didn't really notice, and that's because the App Store was good enough. I suspect this was the game plan all along.
It also requires a Mac; Windows or Linux owners of iPhones are out of luck.
Lastly, you lose access to a lot of features; push notifications, IAP, automatic updates, iCloud, etc.
Basically, if Epic wanted to do this, they'd have to let everyone download the code and assets for Fortnite (likely hundreds of GB), then users would have to build it on their devices (which probably would take hours), then install it on their devices, then they would have to pay via Epic and not through iTunes. Whenever they wanted to update Fortnite they'd have to update the source tree and assets and rebuild the app again.
And again, all of this would have to be on a Mac. I know a lot of people who own Macs which don't even have enough disk space to build something like Fortnite, even if they used it for literally nothing else.
TL;DR Epic would have to open-source Fortnite and users would have to jump through irritating and potentially impossible hoops basically every day.