Hacker News Reader

Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

> as a developer you should expect that none of your users will have disabled those protections and your release plan should have notarizing as a step.

I don't want to spend $99/year for the rest of eternity for the privilege of having a slightly less scary warning when my users run my app for the first time. Thus, the readme for the one macOS app I made that has gained a bit of popularity instructs users to right-click, then select "open". Works reasonably well so far.

I would absolutely have embraced notarization if it was offered for free. Otherwise it feels like straight up extortion.

View on HN

Is it $99/year regardless of local cost of living?

In that sense yes that is understandable.

As an American developer, $99/year is something I can afford, can write off as a business expense, and hopefully make back with software proceeds.

It should be noted, keeping the bar annoying but not prohibitive with a token fee does cut down on both junk submissions and malware.

Play Store account cost me $25 as a one-time fee and that does the job of keeping the junk out just fine. There's no good reason why it has to be a recurring payment.

> can write off as a business expense, and hopefully make back with software proceeds.

That's if your software involves money. Mine doesn't — it's all pure altruism. I just want to put my stuff out there for other people who might want it.

Are you also on F-Droid?

Apple is probably lucky that so few people use Macs, because the EU would have a field day with this notarization bullshit if they'd managed to get a 10% market share on computers.

Yet somehow, Windows 10 and 11 are dripping with contempt for the user, but the EU still hasn't acknowledged that as an antitrust problem worth investigating. Their insistence on pushing users into Edge alone should be enough IMO. Stuff like Edge "accidentally" opening on startup and some links "accidentally" opening in Edge instead of your default browser and your default browser setting getting "accidentally" reset to Edge and the taskbar shortcut for Edge "accidentally" reappearing.

The EU seem pretty soft on Microsoft these days. The Activision-Blizzard buy out when off without a hitch in the EU.

Since Edge is built ontop of Chromium and it is a distant 2nd to Google’s Chrome would that trigger EU compliance issues?

It doesn't matter which engine it uses if it does a lot of stuff to represent Microsoft's own interests. Data collection, Bing integrations, other bullshit features like offering loans in payment forms (I remember reading about that), etc

>Yet somehow, Windows 10 and 11 are dripping with contempt for the user, but the EU still hasn't acknowledged that as an antitrust problem worth investigating. Their insistence on pushing users into Edge alone should be enough IMO.

At this point, I'm not sure it's worth investigating. This isn't the 90s when everyone was running application software directly on their PC; now everything is done in the cloud or through your web browser somehow. I honestly find it funny when Windows users have all kinds of agony because of that "contempt" you refer to; if they don't like it, they're free to switch to another OS. I've been watching this for over 25 years now but people just won't give up Windows, even when they only use it for web browsing, so I've lost all sympathy for them, even though the Windows user experience keeps getting worse.

The fact so much is don’t in the browser now makes their abusive pushing of Edge even more egregious.

I agree. It's high time the EU took action against Microsoft.

how is it bullshit?

windows is/was laden with malware, requiring antivirus, just full of crap for decades.

Yeah and Macs didn't have that problem back before signing apps was a requirement either.

Agreed, and during those decades legislation and execution thereof sorely lacked.

Now in the DMA/DSA times, things are different. It took them a couple of decades, but the EU is starting to take action.

> the privilege of having a slightly less scary warning

That’s what you see. Users see it differently. I’m not running random exes on my computer. Even package managers are run in containers and VMs

>"Otherwise it feels like straight up extortion."

Which it is

Reply on news.ycombinator.com