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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

It amazes that that this is still considered amazing. Apple is the gatekeeper of software running on the app store, always has been, probably always will be (modulo a successful anti-trust campaign I suppose).

If you want to be able to decide what runs on your device, don't get an iphone. That's why I don't own one myself. If on the other hand you want the peace of mind of letting Apple gatekeep the software you can use on your device, then it makes perfect sense.

As someone who's spent more hours than I really care to count removing all sorts of crapware, browser extensions and website notifications from friends and family's PCs, I definitely see where Apple is coming from here.

Enforcing naming conventions so that apps do what they say and say what they do doesn't strike me as particularly draconian or unexpected in this context. It's not a bug, it's a feature, and if that's a problem for you then don't buy iphones.

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>If you want to be able to decide what runs on your device, don't get an iphone. That's why I don't own one myself. If on the other hand you want the peace of mind of letting Apple gatekeep the software you can use on your device, then it makes perfect sense.

To further your point, people forget that Android devices often (if not usually) come preinstalled with OEM and carrier app stores, in addition to the Google Play Store. The Samsung App Store being the most prominent example.

Carriers love to control the experience (more revenue potential), and they were the original mobile app distribution platforms. If there was such a demand for alternative app stores, the carries would aggressively push their own alternate app stores onto consumers.

Enforcing naming conventions so that apps do what they say and say what they do doesn't strike me as particularly draconian or unexpected in this context.

Uber, Tinder, Twitter, and countless others would dispute the "Apple just want's accurate app name descriptions" theory. And in this case "Crabhouse" is a highly accurate description, or at least more so than many others.

Don't forget 'Apple' :)

I agree that it's very arbitrary, but the justification that it could set a precedent by allowing effectively "copycat" application using spelling to mislead users holds some water IMO. It's especially problematic when application names are translated in other scripts and languages, which is the case here.

Imagine if a south african made a "facebok" app to share pictures of goats (bok meaning goat in afrikaans), I'm sure it would be rejected on the same grounds.

But I agree that the decision is very arbitrary and it can be frustrating if you're on the receiving end, but such is life on Apple's walled garden. Like it or leave it.

Given that, when I search for 'clubhouse' or 'slack' or 'google maps' in the app store, the first result is an ad for a competitor, I'm not sure Apple gives a shit about user confusion?

As usual, Apple's principals are steadfast only as long as they can't find a way to violate them and extract more value from their customer.

As someone who has gone through multiple clean installs back in the day, I finally caved in and switched to an iPhone a few summers ago. I didn’t want to deal with the crapware and security holes that won’t be patched after merely two years.

I still have an old HTC One that I have managed to install a more recent OS on. It’s unbearably slow. My mom’s SE from around the time still works great in comparison.

This - my parents phones keep getting updates after purchase. They never updated their cheap android (or maybe updates lagged badly and there were none). People are our paying EXTRA for Apple gate keeping pretty happily

This is silly. They could still keep the store strict and let you side load apps like on Android or the Mac. We would all lose nothing and only gain.

I was trying to distribute a macOS app to a friend to test it out. The friend said their Mac told them the app was damaged and they should move it to the Trash.

Apparently I have to get a Developer account, obtain a Developer ID certificate, sign every build with this certificate, and upload the build to Apple to have them "notarize" the signature.

The alternative is to teach my friend how to run obscure commands in the Terminal or disable this "Gatekeeper" (yes, such an unironic name) feature altogether, which requires some scary steps such as disabling SIP. I could be wrong about that last part, but I don't own a Mac so I'm more inclined to just not build software for it.

System Preferences -> Security and Privacy.

You’ll find an override toggle there. You can also use Right Click -> Open when launching the app. And no, you don’t need to disable SIP to disable Gatekeeper which can be done through sudo spctl —-master-disable.

Right-click + Open resulted in the same error dialog; I presume this has something to do with Big Sur. The option to allow apps from "Anywhere" is also not available in the preferences pane.

Right-click + Open has to be done twice to work.

The anywhere option is hidden by default, use sudo spctl —-master-disable from Terminal instead, which flips Gatekeeper settings to Anywhere.

Edit: there's also this path: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/415713/verify-code... which doesn't seem to activate Gatekeeper as part of the install process.

Just tell them to right click and select open the first time they launch it.

None of the other stuff you mentioned is necessary unless you need your users to avoid that.

That actually didn't work; see my response to the sibling comment.

> We would all lose nothing and only gain.

It's really not that hard to see how many would lose a whole lot if this feature was available.

If side-loading was allowed and tons of users side-loaded pirated games I'm sure these users would gain, but would the developers? Wouldn't they call on Apple to stop this? I mean the headlines just write themselves: "Apple is complicit and profiting from piracy by selling phones on which it's trivial to install pirated games".

If people started installing random software they heard of on social media, how would the image of the iPhone be changed by the inevitable malware that people would install? "This new iOS virus steals your data and private photos".

What about all the spyware apps that would get side-loaded onto the phones of unsuspecting spouses? "Woman murdered by psycho ex who tracked her every move through her phone".

It takes a little bit more than "it's silly we would all only gain" to make this argument.

> "Apple is complicit and profiting from piracy by selling phones on which it's trivial to install pirated games".

I'm not seeing any of these headlines with Android

I'm also not seeing any of these problems on macOS.

It amazes me that people can still be so obtuse and keep parroting how you just don’t need to get an iPhone. In a market where you are stuck between two choices, it isn’t so easy to just cut one.

Apple’s day of reckoning is coming closer, I believed the EU will rein them in and I can’t wait to see people on HN defend them then.

I really don't care to defend Apple in particular, I think the only Apple product I've ever owned was an old school hard-drive ipod over a decade ago.

It's just that Apple has always been pretty clear that it's going to push whatever arbitrary rules it sees fit to ensure a certain level of quality on its platform and that's par for the course.

I agree that de-facto having to choose between Android on one hand and iphones on the other is not ideal and I'd like more competition in this space, but at least there is an alternative and there are plenty of Android smartphones that can be rooted to give you full access if you so desire. It's not ideal, but I really find it hard to find a flaw in Apple's approach to these things if their objective is to create a somewhat "premium" curated platform.

The problem with that logic is that it doesn’t address how this situation came to be. Apple has been consistent about their product vision since basically day one, and on day one they were the underdog... a drop in the pond. The thing is that over YEARS the market (people) consistently voted with their wallets to validate this vision. That’s why they are what they are now. This has two implications: 1) The reason it’s happening is due to long term choice in the market, i.e. this ecosystem is filling a need that whiners are ignoring, and 2) It ignores the fact that if your stated hopes actually came to pass, someone else would just execute on good hardware with a walled garden (with the resulting more consistent and reliable experience) and become popular AGAIN... after all, that’s what just happened this time.

People will answer this post saying “that’s not true, you can totally have the iOS experience with side-loading/whatever”. Those people also likely believe that the “right communism” just hasn’t been tried yet. If one could actually do this then likely someone would have tried it and succeeded already. Another way to realize that is to understand you are just describing Android, and a perfectly valid existing choice (actually, several choices in a family). Additionally, those people are ignoring the fact that the security/convenience/consistency trade-offs made in any ecosystem do have consequences (positive and negative from varying perspectives).

Which leads us back to the parent: If one wants a different trade-off (which is totally valid and I have happily owned and developed for both systems in the past) then pick a different ecosystem and buy into it. MY personal pie in the sky wish is that people would quit pissing on other people who don’t want to be forced to make THEIR choice. Please take your choices and stop advocating to take MINE away.

> Those people also likely believe that the “right communism” just hasn’t been tried yet.

It’s crazy anyone could believe that, if anything besides Marxist-Leninist or Marxist-Stalinist communism could be possible then of course it would already happened and thus cannot possibly exist. History is over.

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