As you may have guessed, this simply pushes out smaller devs. This used to NOT be like this. It should NOT be like this.
EV certificates has always felt like an utter scam and extortion to me. At least now there is an alternative.
10 years ago I wanted to build a Love2D game, and release it for the three major OS's. The .love files are effectively ZIP archives, kinda like cartridges, but you need the correct Love2D version (they broke API compat every year or so). Windows and Mac used to be: "cat love.exe game.zip > game.exe".
Linux gave me the most crap, because making a portable, semi-static build was a nightmare; you couldn't rely on distros because each one shipped a different version of love.
Now Linux is actually becoming more viable, not because it's making that much progress, but because the two mainstream platforms are taking steps back.
And game consoles naturally.
Apple is never first to do something.
I started coding for J2ME on a Vodafone contest, based on Sharp GX20, which was using DOCOMO APIs in 2003.
Afterwards I joined Nokia, so I kind of had an idea how we, and our competition was doing in the market.
US was the only market that stayed PDA centric, with exception of Blackberry adoption, until the iPhone came to be.
Traditionally it was the only market where Nokia had issues.
You can use an ad-hoc signature to sign, but people who download the app will still have to jump through hoops to run it.
Bury it as deep as Microsoft wants, but...
1) Everyone can use it
2) It turns off all nanny-checks
3) It makes future checks opt-in instead of opt-outThat random exe link is signed by Microsoft.