Hacker News Reader

Comment by Craiggybear | Hacker News Reader

Oh no, not ominous at all ... look for this list of three choices being reduced to the first two. Coming soon.

If Apple did that they'd kill the devotion from the development community. They may end up making App Store only the default option, but I have trouble seeing a day where you can only install Apple certified software on your Mac.

Overnight they'd lose many thousands evangelists and unpaid tech support staff (ever help a family member with their Mac?).

If Apple did that they'd kill the devotion from the development community.

Like with iOS? Hackers will be annoyed, but Apple doesn't care about them when there are more than enough developers who are either in it for the money or who agree with Apple's position.

iOS started off as a closed environment unsuitable for development. As a web developer on the Mac I'm constantly using cross-platform command line programs, system utilities, and other development tools that would never make it through an Apple vetting process. If Apple killed the ability to install those programs in an update, I would absolutely have to abandon the Mac, and I'm sure I wouldn't be alone.

I'm sure you wouldn't be alone.

However, from Apple's perspective, if there are "enough" developers who can't or won't leave (because they develop Mac software or iOS software or both), Apple might not care if you do.

They might make it harder to select the third option, but they won't ever remove it -- they're not suicidal.

And it's not like the signing process is particularly onerous -- it won't represent even the slightest barrier or inconvenience to shareware, freeware or open source app distribution.

Yeah, well, until that happens, this is great and I'm all for it. What a simple way to improve dealing with the open attack vector that is "the user being able to install their own software". I wish they had this flexibility on iOS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com