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Comment by newaccount74 | Hacker News Reader

I wish these internal behaviors of macOS were documented somewhere. A lot of these security features are pretty neat, but developers have to use trial and error to figure out how they work.

If something doesn't work, we have to wonder if it is by design or by accident, and the only way to know is to use a tech support incident, hope it gets escalated to the right person, and see if you get an answer.

Every year I worry if Apple breaks something in one of my apps, and when they do I have to scramble to find a workaround that hopefully doesn't impact my users.

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If I'm not mistaken, the point of internal (private) elements and public parts is exactly that: the vendor doesn't need to maintain a public interface for the parts you're not supposed to touch. So as long as you don't use them, you should be safe.

There are of course different problems in the realm of changing public APIs and that just sucks. On the other hand, it sucks less than having 3 decades of baggage that nobody really asks for.

The problem is when those internal changes break existing apps that never intended to depend on Apple internals.

When it happens it's really frustrating to try to figure out why the app suddenly doesn't work as expected any more and what to change to make it work again.

And as a user trying to know how your computer works, you are totally hosed until a year latter someone deep-dives & writes it up.

This article shows clear cases where this crude idea just doesn't work. And it seemingly serves no clear purpose at all right now.

This idea that the vendor's OS is their to do whatever they want with, that they have all rights reserved & anything not announced is 100% caveat emptor, good luck, is a really really shitty & corporate-egoistic way of dealing with the world. There should be a greater than 0 try here, to make things make sense.

And yet y'all keep on the platform as if there aren't alternative.

But somehow countless random hours here and there, countless time over years complaining about it, is all somehow worse than learning the basics of a distro that really just doesn't take that much work when all aspects are truly considered, devoid of the 20+ years of familiarity and stockholm syndrome.

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