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Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

I find your last line about forcing people to give you control hilarious since it comes after your (false) claims that another entity was taking control from you.

Sounds like you got bit by an ideological bug more than anything else. I'm sure the quality of the AppStore has improved.

Frankly, after its success we had far to many people "Switch" because they wanted to get rich quick and pump out really crappy apps polluting the store.

And of course they bitched about it at the time, every difference was proof that apple was evil.

I'm tired of the past four years of Apple haters thinking their uninformed ideological nonsense is relevant simply because they are a "developer" and have Apple hardware.

Apple is pro-developer, and unlike google actually practices "don't be evil."

But there are people who hate good and will rail against is day in and day out and call it evil.

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What I am seeing is a large number of developers that have been using platform from before iOS was released growing more and more tired of what is happening from Apple.

I also know the a large percentage of business and developers that have relied on Apple consider Apple a risk, or have been bitten in the past and are actively moving away.

Would give examples. but my business can't afford to upset Apple either.

I won't go into trying to get you to see my side, it's clear you can't see anything but the bright shiny world of Steve.

When a company demands 30% of your revenue, even for portions not related to the app, and moves on to a track where developers will be forced to have a cert embedded into their app to be on the platform or be blocked, they ARE practicing evil.

It wasn't Apple that built their customer base, it was the developers who wrote the apps that brought the customers. Without the applications on the platform, Apple would be just like Blackberry, dead.

Now that Apple starts putting all these hurdles in place, like kicking apps because they release their own app in a segment (and disallow ANY competition), despite the fact that an app in that segment has been there for years, it's clear that they are more interested in earnings than building a foundation for developers to earn real incomes.

Just back in May, Apple killed a bunch of apps that used the Dropbox API because they considered it an undocumented or third party API. WTF?? The truth is, Apple didn't want competition with their shitty iCloud service, so they limited what developers could do for their own benefit. One example of THOUSANDS out there.

That doesn't even take into consideration Apple's insistence on NOT allowing any sort of metrics on unique installs.

If you made T-Shirts and a chain said, "just give us the shirts, and we'll tell you how many we sell", YOU would probably do it, but I sure wouldn't.

Apple could be skimming revenues from developers as we speak, and there's really no way to know, since we're not allowed to use any static identifier on the phone to lock the app to a subscriber.

Why? Apple built the platform from the ground up, why is it "evil" for them to demand compensation for selling apps on it? That would make every shop owner in the world "evil", since they all demand a profit margin over the products.

And I don't see the problem with requiring the apps to be signed? Wait, then is Debian evil too? Their packages are sign as well...

Well, firstly, that's clearly not true. The first iPhone didn't have an App Store for more than an year, and it still sold like hotcakes, with huge lines of people literally sleeping outside the store waiting for it.

Secondly, so what? To bring my previous examples, where would shops be without the manufacturers?

I don't own a single Apple device since I have no interest in getting a phone where the manufacturer has more control than me, but all this talk about them being "evil" is frankly ridiculous.

How many shops demand that any purchases related to your product, performed outside of the store months after the initial sale, must give them a 30% cut? That is the evil part.

Wait, then is Debian evil too? Their packages are sign as well...

Come on, you have to be misinterpreting that on purpose. Debian doesn't require programs be signed, it only uses signing to verify official updates. Even if it did require signing that would be fine by itself. The problem is that Apple requires programs be signed with a certificate that is approved by Apple. If they don't want you to be a developer, suddenly you are no longer a developer. Taking control away from the user over what programs he installs on his device is 'evil'.

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