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Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

This has smelt bad for a while. Here’s a Twitter thread from January where the CEO explained why it couldn’t be an app. In it, he makes weird claims like:

> by submitting as app, you submitting all your codes to them. think about it. remember there’s one of the most popular apps you want early days on app store was called ‘flashlight’ now see what happens? apple just incorporated that feature in iOS. so are building apps sustainable to a startup? maybe not.

— https://twitter.com/jessechenglyu/status/1745555882291646689

I think it’s pretty clear that Apple didn’t need to plagiarise some dude’s flashlight app code to build their own version, and you don’t submit your code to Apple/Google anyway.

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Love the idea that it was the submission of the flashlight app’s source that enabled Apple to build that feature into the OS. Also love that it completely ignores that the flashlight being part of the OS is significantly better UX than installing an app to do the same thing.

Pluralizing code or code as a verb is always a red flag.

Seems more likely that its an artifact of being the guy's second language.

Pluralizing code always sounded weird to me, but I think it was more common in certain regions and timeframes.

Code as a verb seems pretty common though.

That's an English-as-a-foreign-language thing. Particularly from Asia.

One of my favourite pieces of trivia is that the "nuclear codes" that were so often the subject of some Cold War plot were not necessarily codes as in launch codes, but were/are simulation programs, which were, in aggregate, "codes" (though I'm not 100% clear if a single simulation is a single "code"). Which makes a lot more sense, because simulations would help development, and launch codes would be useless almost immediately as they would change [1].

The IAEA still calls them "codes": https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/oncore/SitePages/Home.aspx

[1] unlike the Permissive Action Link code locks on some weapons, which were deliberately set to all zeroes for decades.

+1000%

As if the issue with the iOS flashlight apps was that their developers did not instead hire teenage engineering to make an android box with a LED

Ask the creators of f.lux

https://justgetflux.com/news/2016/01/14/apple.html

Did Apple steal something from them other than idea?

f.lux isn’t (and wasn’t?) open source and never had an iOS app in AppStore, AFAIK they had a custom Cydia repo for that.

It was possible per side loading

https://justgetflux.com/sideload/

But you do have to submit your signing keys to apple now, iirc :(

You’re thinking of the Google Play Store.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

So weird. Especially since Apple will build their LLM based AI assistant regardless of rabbit being in the app store or not.

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