Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisan | Hacker News Reader

> I've always wanted to ship some basic apps that do things without any ads or purchases or whatnot.

Besides the developer program cost (which I assume will still exist in this EU world) what is stopping you from doing this now?

View on HN

On top of $100/year developer license, you also need an Apple laptop (or desktop) to develop for iOS devices. You are legally (though not technically) forbidden to run a copy of macOS on non-Apple hardware, even if a legitimate copy were obtainable without purchasing some hardware.

Apple is a hardware company, an appliance company if you wish, and also a media company. The fact that they are forced to also produce general computing devices as a wayto run stuff like Ableton or Photoshop is, I suspect, seen as a pesky legacy of Apple II days.

> , even if a legitimate copy were obtainable without purchasing some hardware.

Pedantic, but the license agreement line requiring that 'MacOS can only run on Apple hardware' is, itself, in service of the fact that they only license the software to you if you purchase their hardware.

Exactly. IIRC you can legitimately run macOS on a VM, but the VM should run on Apple hardware.

A Hackintosh is a transgression.

The price of a developer account? FOSS is a big enough giveaway as is, most people doesn’t like the idea of paying for giving away their own free time

This won't be solved by 3rd party stores. You need to buy a mac and pay the developer fee just to BUILD apps for iOS.

You don't need to pay a fee to develop an app, only to publish it

You can build them without a developer account, but then you will have to re-sign your own apps every 7 day and can only have 4 such app on your phone at a time.

Yes. That should be solved too.

Apple's review process and their rules about the kind of apps and code that are allowed to run? Heck, do they even allow GPLv2 and GPLv3 apps on the app store?

It doesn’t matter whether they do. The anti-tivoization clause in the GPLv3 license (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#Tivoization) forbids developers from selling iOS apps that contain GPLv3-licensed software (the situation w.r.t. GPLv2 is less clear)

I don't think that would apply if it is possible to compile the app yourself and install your modified version by side loading it.

Not really the problem.

It would violate the terms of those licenses for Apple to distribute binaries in the same manner that they currently are.

Not the original poster, but maybe:

Dealing with the capricious app store approval processs?

Not being allowed to use GPL code (might still be a problem for 3rd party app stores, but maybe not for sideloading. Maybe.)?

Having to develop on a mac (which will still be a problem)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com