I never connect my OSX box with my personal email and I will not in the future. I get it, but I just won't buy software from that store, hands down.
Maybe I'm just in the dwindling minority of Mac users.
I mean, I'm sure you are, but you're not alone. Same boat here. In principle Mac App Store could have been a really wonderful thing, I think Apple in the 00s had a real opportunity to do a great service to their users by creating a unified, solid and flexible licensing system for all devs (and then offering a fully optional vetted software store beyond that). Unfortunately they didn't do that and the MAS sucks. There is no upgrade system which is just absolutely fucking insanity. There are huge restrictions on useful functionality, so it can never be a one-stop place. The licensing and Apple ID management is a total fucking mess too, can't consolidate or transfer licenses like just about every previous Mac system in existence, all sorts of normal concepts like vol or other discounts are a pain/non-existent. I have an old iTools account, and I'm not even allowed to change the primary email address!
The MAS experience, and Apple's online service experience in general over significant time, is just miserable, completely unnecessarily too. Maybe they'll fix that someday, but it doesn't seem to be a priority so here we are :(.
But given the option I'm perfectly happy to buy from devs. They don't have to give Apple a cut, there's no "drag the whole hard drive on to the window" sandbox workarounds, and they can structure their upgrade pricing however they want instead of not being allowed to do it.
IIRC there used to be a way to get things like Garageband and Numbers from the store without providing credentials, but sadly that appears to no longer be the case.
It's been 15+ years and this still hasn't caught on. Not interrupting whatever I'm trying to get done with software updates and relaunches is one of the major reasons I'd rather just get things from the Mac App Store.
Plus there are other tools to further layer if it was ever a problem, like virtual credit card numbers. In practice the very nature of credit cards means it doesn't seem to generally be a problem, has been less of a real world risk than hacks of physical retailers. If I see a bad charge, I just report it and get a new number.
Also FWIW, I've seen plenty of sites starting to offer Apple Pay as an option at checkout, I assume it's getting built into more payment systems now. That itself is solid defense, at least as good as the MAS though sometimes the checkout flows seem a bit wonky still.
Too many times I’ve tried to run App Store apps and been bothered with my Apple ID. I prefer the decentralization and not relying so much on Apple’s cloud services.
Trivial to pull up old license info from 1Password or email if necessary.
It's not a good user experience, and Apple's actions elsewhere with app stores are so utterly beyond the pale I cannot support that financially.
(Side note: to further deny us users our right of choice, ownership and control over our device, Apple has already crippled ALL application firewalls on its newest macOS to allow all Apple authorised software to BYPASS any such application firewalls, even if the user has explicitly blocked such software).
This is why you can download a wireguard installer from wireguard.org for Windows, but have to provide your identity (name, phone, email, address) and device hardware serial number to Apple to get the Wireguard app on that platform.
Show ID for privacy software.
I was staring at a red dot on the System Preferences because Apple decided that logging in with iCloud was important enough to remind me of daily.
I made an effort to do this for Mojave, but macOS is not designed to be modular, and after a week of chasing weird bugs related to interdependencies of system services, I stopped my efforts. If you'd like to collaborate, reach out.
1. By the kernel using a root certificate hardcoded into the CoreTrust kext;
2. On Apple Silicon only, by the kernel using a trust cache that's supplied to the kernel by the bootloader;
3. By userland (amfid) using a root certificate hardcoded into Security.framework.
You'd have to modify or intercept all of those things, and key components aren't open source (e.g. the AppleMobileFileIntegrity kext which is responsible for querying CoreTrust, the trust cache, and amfid). Probably best to do some targeted function hooking rather than recompiling anything.
Of course, you would still have to turn off Secure Boot in order to load a modified kernel in the first place. But that's largely orthogonal to SIP.
No, macOS is fine without SIP! SIP just defines a set of actions that Apple thinks no user, including root, should ever be able to perform. Consequently, disabling SIP empowers root users to do whatever they want, which is exactly what root is supposed to mean! You're still protected by the standard UNIX permission system—just don't grant root to software you don't absolutely trust!
Security is all about layers—but in the case of SIP, the security comes from delegating control away from the user in favor of Apple. If you're a power user, I'm not convinced this is necessarily good, because you're giving Apple almost absolute trust. What if they get compromised?
And, if you're the sort of person who would want a de-Apple-ified version of macOS, I would think you'd have already disabled SIP.
I agree with Apple here.
> Consequently, disabling SIP empowers root users to do whatever they want, without Apple having a say in the matter—but you're still protected by the standard UNIX permission system.
It also empowers malware. The Creative Cloud, for example, installs as root and installs admin-permissioned services. The standard POSIX permissions system is crap, and SIP is a huge improvement and valuable tool against malware.
So don't use apps that do that! Creative Cloud has no business installing itself as root.
I realize that's probably not feasible if you e.g. need Creative Cloud professionally, and that's a perfectly valid reason to leave SIP on, if applicable. Although Adobe and similar vendors still need to be yelled at.
I think SIP—like Gatekeeper—is a great default setting for novices, who should trust Apple over themselves. But if you're a power user, turning off SIP is not going to spell disaster. It leaves you with equivalent security to most Linux distros like Debian.
More importantly, there's no way to have a feature like SIP while also granting users full control. I get really frustrated when I see people say they're switching to Linux because macOS is too locked down. If you want to switch to Linux, that's wonderful, Linux is great! But if you otherwise prefer macOS, just go ahead and open it up for yourself.
Perhaps they are not referring to just permissions. Maybe how the system as a whole is setup.
This is why I don't run desktop Linux, either. That's not a good security model.
> To add this entitlement to an iOS app or a Mac App Store app, enable the Network Extensions capability in Xcode. and
> To add this entitlement to a macOS app distributed outside of the Mac App Store, perform the following steps:
Did they change it recently? Have you tried it? I don't have a developer subscription so I can't test it.
No, you are not. And even if we are a minority, we should definitely abandon the macOS platform if our right to choice, ownership and control is deliberately denied to us on it just the sake of apple's profit margins.
I'm pretty sure I'm on my original Apple account from back when it was iTools and then .mac and finally iCloud. If one of those transitions didn't carry over, then maybe it's from 2004ish when I needed an account to redeem Pepsi caps for iTunes downloads.
But I've heard the "I accidentally have purchases on 8 different Apple accounts" story from enough people that the account/license management is clearly a problem that needs dealing with.
Most independent software developers should not care about units sold, because it comprises far too many $200-$400 PCs that don’t buy much software.
They should care about the $1,000+ PC market, those are your best customers, and where Apples market share by units is at least 25%, and surging higher with the M1.
I also cherish having control over subscription renewals from one list and the Apple's easy refund process in the event of a third-party app not turning out to be worth the money (or an outright scam).
And as a dev I like knowing that anything I publish will be available to all Mac users.
I do hate the crappy App Store.app UI though. Feels like navigating a clunk web page, and why the fluff did they remove the download progress stats?? You have to hit F4 to see the actual size/downloaded numbers in the Launchpad (or in the Applications folder I guess).