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Comment by adabsurdo | Hacker News Reader

personnally i find it quite amazing, and incredibly short-sighted, how developpers are willing to give up the freedom of the web in favor of the golden chains of the apple platform. because, make no mistake, this is where its going: in a few years nobody will want to try your stuff unless its an app, and the web will be a ghetto for porn and 4chan.

haven't we seen this movie before when microsoft controlled basically all of personal computing? at least on windows the user could install anything he wanted. now, not only developpers are at the mercy of apple's policies, but apple has decided to prevent any theoritical disruption from within by forbidding apps that host code (other than its own browser).

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1. What good is the "freedom of the web" when all an application needs is client-side processing of client-side data and client-side user action? It's not even "Client" at that point because there's no server worth mentioning. The decision has nothing to do with "golden chains," and everything to do with choosing the right tool for the job, where "right" is defined by maximizing customer value per unit development BS.

2. Despite the uptick in development BS caused by "unfair" reviews and the "accelerated timeframe" with which Apple moved to enact sandboxing requirements, OS X development and MAS distribution remain a remarkably low-hassle way to monetize the activity of "getting useful, graceful code onto users' machines."

OTOH, the other platform for which I regularly write commercial software is z/OS...so consider the source, etc.

Have you ever taken a job with a company as opposed to starting your own? You do so not because you trust the employer to watch out for your individual self-interest, but because they will pay you more than you think you can make for yourself.

The app store is pretty much the same thing. I think most developers go into it with their eyes open because they figure 30% is an order of magnitude less than the increased sales they expect to get. Is it short-sighted? Maybe, but what can one developer do given the choice of either making lots of money or not? If all the developers abstained sure they could put pressure on Apple, but that's statistically not going to happen, plus Apple has been at the mercy of developers before and now they are very careful to make sure their ecosystem is complete with or without you. They'll dangle a juicy carrot for you, but they do not need to care if you take it.

Web pages are still terrible for rich content. For the web to really work you need something that is A) stable B) ridiculousness cross platform C) Fast both to load AND run D) degrades gracefully on limited Hardware, interfaces, AND network connectivity. HTML has always been a compromise and Adobe was incapable of maintaining and expanding Flash.

An opensource solution might be able to bridge the gap, but until then App's have significant advantages for users and developers alike.

What universe are you living in? The web sites/apps I use do all the things you describe, on desktop and mobile, excepting perhaps that most do not function offline (though the capability exists, the adoption rate is still low).

What's wrong with HTML being a compromise? Most things are compromises. What started off as hyper-linked rich text is a now a pretty-good (and completely open) software platform that really does work on just about any computing device there is, which would have seemed like a crazy pipe dream 20 years ago. What's the problem?

Very few people will probably agree with you, probably even try and bury your comment, even though you're absolutely right.

No one wants to admit that their fav. ecosystem is basically mob-mentality dressed in a sleek, comfortable, suit - but it is.

I love Xcode, the Apple ecosystem - but I'm finding it hard not to look down the road and see the inevitable. Are people willfully blind?

It's a mixture of shortsightedness and comfort. We have this Apple/Google fanboy thing going on, where one is trying to be better than the other. While that happens, the open web, something both sides seem to agree is important, becomes an "old media" way of doing things.

I totally agree. Even Microsoft is going to follow suit[1].

[1]http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/windows-8-app-store-will-...

I dread a world in which every app have to be approved by Microsoft/Apple. In the end customer is going to lose.

No, most customers will win. Their experience is improved by the layer of curating to weed out broken and scammy stuff. Most customers don't have needs that can't be satisfied within the set of apps that Microsoft and Apple approve, plus the entire public browser-accessible web.

It's not black-and-white that "OPEN == GOOD" and "CLOSED == BAD". There are tradeoffs both ways.

I am open source agnostic but I will not allow someone else to control what apps I can install.

Scammy stuff will still exists and only difference will be that customer will never know about it[1] and is going to live under false security.Companies will try to ban every person trying to expose vulnerabilities.

[1]http://www.darknet.org.uk/2011/11/apple-bans-security-resear...

Do you thing a small set of employees sitting in a company's approval department are experts of every single thing that can be ever conceived by a developer?

I am not against the idea of sand-boxing if it is built in the OS API. How approving a sand-boxed application is going to improve the security?

This. Attackers just point their attention to the greatest targets. When one target disappears, the attackers don't disappear - they just find a different approach. The recent iOS security breach proved this, in my opinion, pretty concretely.

I agree that both open and closed can co-exist, but if media drives media (ie, advertising agencies chasing the app-for-no-reason bandwagon) how can we be sure that we don't have a monoculture in software development in the future? I don't think there is any argument that that would be an entirely bad thing.

At my job, I am embroiled in signs that point in this very loathsome direction.

I have a hard time imagining, let alone fearing, such a future when we have an abundance of alternatives. How much can Apple limit developers or somehow degrade our consumer experience when Android, Chrome and Windows are readily available? If you can really imagine Apple kicking Avid, Pro Tools and Blizzard off of the Mac platform (the sure result if Apple forced them on the App Store and demanded %30 of the revenue) then you have a much more active imagination than me.

Apple's building a controlled app store, we get it - that doesn't mean that their only goal is control. To me, this is like imputing in 2003 that since Apple's highest profile products were music related, that Apple would soon be strictly dedicated to music-related software and hardware.

It's definitely interesting to me that some developers call people who purchase their app through the App Store "customers" when, in reality, they have NO way of knowing who these people are, contacting them outside the app, or really doing anything with them at all. That, to me, does not a customer make.

If you don't have a way of "doing anything with" your customers that functions independent of holding their email address and/or credit card number, you're not doing something "with" them so much as doing something "to" them.

Not every application needs to be a goddamned community experience wherein the original transaction spawns a lifetime of subtle sales attempts from the developer. Be happy that someone paid to use what you built. If you want more money from them, or you want their email address, build so much cool shit that they want to hear about what's next.

As Chris Rock said: "You pay to see me? We cool."

Any application that works with media, e.g. audio, video, needs really good access to the filesystem. I can't see Avid Media Composer for example ever conforming to the sandbox idea. What is Apple going to do about that in the long term? Give up on their platform for professional use?

Apps that need access to arbitrary files can ask for it when setting up their sandbox credentials. Apple has to approve that, of course, but that's the cost of "safety."

I'm with the majority here who fear this new feature...

Then you don't understand the sandbox. There's nothing to stop something like Avid Media Composer being able to access your video.

But it doesn't need to access your address book.

I was of the understanding that the sandboxed app needed permission to access certain files that weren't created by them, I'll read the documentation more thoroughly. Perhaps a better example are apps that scan you drive to tell you what your file system is full off (to free up space for example). This type of thing is extremely useful, and would seem to violate the sandbox idea?

My understanding is that it's not permission from the user, but permission from Apple. If you need to do something outside of the sandbox, you need to go through their API calls. And when you submit your application, you need to justify each out-of-sandbox-API call you make.

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