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Comment by FreakyT | Hacker News Reader

I still believe that Gatekeeper is a blatant cash grab and not a legitimate security feature.

$100/year to avoid a scary warning about how your app is definitely a virus? It's like a protection racket.

It's hard to believe that this would be a cash grab. Even if there are 1M developers in the world, that's only $100M, which should not be worth the friction and cost to implement and maintain this scheme. Consider that Apple's most recent quarterly revenue was just under $60B. Apple made $260B in all of 2019; $100M is not even four hundredths of a percent.

Developer time to build out the signing and notarization features is not free, and running the notarization servers in a highly-available manner is also not free. As much as we all like to call out Apple sometimes for how they don't take good care of their developers, adding hoops for your developers to jump through is not a great idea.

So I think in some ways Apple really does it for the security aspects, and also probably just because Apple likes to maintain rigid control over their experience.

Not exactly how it works though, in a corporation as big as Apple each business unit has it's own budget and profit/loss margins. Apple is simply too big and complex for someone or a group of someones to look at it in the way you are describing.

So while $100M might not look like a ton to Apple as a hole, it might look like a lot to the business unit responsible for apps on macOS

Apple is fairly well known to not do P/L this way.

Not going to argue about the profit based motivations, I'm sure someone else would do it. How about the power that it gives Apple over developers, is that worth their time?

> As much as we all like to call out Apple sometimes for how they don't take good care of their developers, adding hoops for your developers to jump through is not a great idea.

Why not?

Apple has been pushing very hard lately to increase their 'services' revenue, by getting users to sign up for Apple Music, iCloud, etc. It makes perfect sense for Apple to force developers to jump through hoops, not because it makes the developers' lives worse, but because it gives Apple a leg up! Some examples:

• When launching Chrome for the first time, you have to opt-in to Chrome notifications, but macOS pops up its own notification telling you to use Safari instead.

• Similarly, Apple News notifications are allowed by default, but you have to explicitly opt-in to notifications from other news websites.

• Again, similarly, you'll get Apple Music adverts through push notifications, something that's explicitly disallowed in the App Store guidelines.

• System Preferences gets an obnoxious (1) badge next to it, because I haven't signed in to iCloud.

I use SyncThing, rather than iCloud Drive. It definitely benefits Apple to waste the SyncThing developers' time and money keeping up with things the iCloud Drive team doesn't need to deal with — do you really think the sort of company that pulls shit like the above would do anything different?

> • When launching Chrome for the first time, you have to opt-in to Chrome notifications, but macOS pops up its own notification telling you to use Safari instead.

Link to a screenshot of this Safari notification when Chrome is run?

> Similarly, Apple News notifications are allowed by default, but you have to explicitly opt-in to notifications from other news websites.

Reference to an article about this?

> • System Preferences gets an obnoxious (1) badge next to it, because I haven't signed in to iCloud.

This is something other apps can't display...?

Not when Chrome is run, it shows up at some point after you start using your Mac.

> Link to a screenshot of this Safari notification when Chrome is run?

https://danieljwilson.me/2019/10/16/a-catalina-double-standa...

> Reference to an article about this?

It's this article: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/02/17/the-paywalled-garden-ios-...

But it's referencing this tweet: https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/1228431785442381824

> This is something other apps can't display...?

You're right, I should have been more specific: it shows the badge even when I don't have System Preferences open, while other apps (such as my chat client, or mail client) only show badges when they're open. It shouldn't show the badge at all, though.

Oh yeah, this is a great point.

I can definitely see it not really being about money, and more about leveraging their monopoly to push their own competing services.

> Even if there are 1M developers in the world

There are +20M registered Apple developers.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/app-store-hits-20m-registe...

Though don't underestimate the number that gets a developer account to get macOS/iOS beta versions. There are public betas now, but the developer portal gets them faster (and more frequently).

Doesn't matter why they do it as long as they pay the $100/year surely?

Not all developer accounts are paid though, there's a free tier

The money is barely a drop in the bucket for Apple. I was more hinting at that this inflates the number of developers, since a chunk of them are actually people who pay to get early beta access.

It's not the $100/yr that benefits Apple the most, in my judgement. It's the ability for Apple to control what software its users can use, e.g. to promote App Store sales. If they don't like your company, they can switch off your software remotely on all your end users' computers. If you have a competing product, they can just switch it off and there's nothing you can do about it except develop for Windows and Linux.

It absolutely is a cash grab, and part of a series of unethical behaviour from Apple.

Since the latest awful hardware products (terrible keyboard, control strip thing that breaks, no escape key) with MacBooks and a great improvement with using Linux via Purism and System76 I've managed to move away from Apple.

> great improvement with using Linux via Purism and System76

I look forward to the day when I can afford a System76 laptop.

They look to be in the same price ballpark as Macbooks?

Ref: https://system76.com/laptops

Can't afford a Macbook either. :)

Understandable, it's a crazy lot of money.

> latest awful hardware

The latest round fixed all of these problems.

So do I get my money back from all the problems with the last generation?

The newest iteration of Macbooks has a very nice new keyboard (no butterfly mechanics anymore) that reminds me of the really old models, better than my 2013 model IMO, one of the best in a laptop that I've used, though it doesn't beat the really old Thinkpad ones; those were incredible. Of course, this sort of thing is a matter of taste to some degree, but my private 2020 13" and my work 2018 13" are several worlds apart, they've really fixed that issue for me.

There's also a physical ESC key now, and for me, personally, the touchbar is a pretty neat feature after a bit of getting used to it, and some tweaking.

No idea if it is prone to fail, but I believe the rather sizeable fleet of touchbar Macbooks at work hasn't had a broken touchbar yet (there have been other failures)

I've yet to see anyone get a Linux machine and not struggle with something; maybe that'll happen someday soon, but so far everyone seems to have issues that I'd find unacceptable.

Don't forget that after you've paid them your money, they can revoke your certificate and spread lies about your software, and there's nothing you can do!

https://blog.charliemonroe.net/a-day-without-business/

Well, you can voice your complaint on the Internet and hope that Apple notices this problem and fixes it in less than 24 hours. I wouldn’t advise betting one’s business on this, but it did work in this case.

(Hopefully Apple comes up with a more formal process going forward...)

It might be different if it went to a charity of your choice. I've been to conferences where the entrance fee was just a token amount to make sure you didn't register, reserve a spot, and didn't show. Or first-class train tickets: you don't pay for more expensive seats, you pay for it being expensive and keeping other people away.

People from rich countries that have the spare time and skills to write reasonably decent software are likely to have $100 of disposable money per year and would probably be donating anyway, so a donation might be reasonable, and I'd understand if Apple takes a few dollars to do <whatever they claim to currently use this money for, I imagine there is some sort of vetting going on even if it's only to check that you're not on their malware authors blacklist> but it really won't cost a full $100 per developer per year. For that money they can fly in from the nearest English-speaking country to verify my scowl.

I think this is part of a longer term and much larger cash grab of eventually forcing all Mac software to go through the app store. Apple will of course require a modest 30% cut of all sales for providing their benevolent oversight.

It seems infeasible that this is a long-term cash grab. The Mac App Store will be ten years old this October.

The most recent opportunity to attempt this would be with the architecture change this fall, which they have not taken.

It's more of a choke hold than a cash grab. Your app broke our store rules, we removed it and you're suing us? We'll terminate your dev account so your apps won't run.

Assuming you mean Epic, Apple has only given a deadline to cease breaking their developer agreement before their developer account is terminated.

Epic is empowered to get their app back in the store tomorrow if they want to release an updated build without the contract-infringing functionality.

They probably have lost their chance to be features by Apple or to be invited back on stage in future keynotes, but at least to me it appears Apple is trying to not be punitive in their reactions. Epic has consistently been given a no-nonsense way to recover.

The app in question have been removed already, what breach of developer agreement are you talking about? Do developers waive the right to sue?

You mean the contract that Epic claims is illegal? Why would they want to voluntarily go back to that contract?

Do you want the manufacturer of your computer or its operating system - and only them - to be able to specify exactly who can and can't develop software for it, and whose software you can and can't run? I don't, and I don't see any situation where I'd want a single entity to have that power, even if it comes with security benefits (which are not mutually exclusive to this setup either).

Exactly. I'm sure they do basic vetting of tools in their store, and I suspect they will remove the most eggregious offenders. But that doesn't make all of the tools in their store safe, and all of the tools OUTSIDE of their store unsafe.

Especially when it comes to privacy protections, where every user's standard for privacy is going to be unique.

That's peanuts. The 30% cut of revenue for app and in-app purchases is the real cash grab.

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