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Comment by thewebguyd | Hacker News Reader

That, and a lot of false positives.

People that run an AD domain for their home lab, people that use apple configurator to create profiles for their own devices (can enable some settings/features that are otherwise gated behind using an MDM profile - like shared iPads), etc.

On the flip side, you are also missing all of the solopreneurs using your software for commercial use but obviously aren't spinning up a whole endpoint IT infrastructure to manage their own single device. Or contractors doing BYOD without MDM enrollment. Or small businesses/startups that are mostly BYOD, or don't do any kind of endpoint/device management...

So who are you going to catch, really?

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A lot of people use MDM for managing their kids devices (pinning DNS for filtering etc.)

First time I've seen "a lot of people" used to mean "practically nobody."

Just joking, but seriously, I've never heard of anyone doing this, and I think maybe 1 in 100 people would even know that it's possible.

I mean, “many” people use SaaS apps which utilize MDM on end user devices, but many parents I know who are in tech roll their own to filter the net for their kids devices and (to a much lesser extent) monitor them proactively.

I can't say much about the macOS market, but I do know that MDM-style APIs are practically the only way to write a third party control app for mobile devices. With the way Apple is moving macOS more and more towards their control, this may happen on the desktop in the future as well.

Schools also tend to use MDMs, but often in combination with Chromebooks which don't typically run third party software anyway.

> I can't say much about the macOS market,

For certain types of apps from the mac app store vs installed directly (mostly VPNs), they also have to use the MDM APIs and install profiles on the device to function.

So if a home user, for example, uses Tailscale and installed it via the mac app store, they'd flag as being MDM managed if the software used the code in the article.

Fonts on iPad work the same way, the font apps install an MDM profile to install the fonts on the device because Apple gates this behind that for some stupid reason.

Like you said, I suspect doing things through configuration/MDM profiles is going to become more and more common on desktop like it has on mobile.

> People that run an AD domain for their home lab, people that use apple configurator to create profiles for their own devices (can enable some settings/features that are otherwise gated behind using an MDM profile - like shared iPads), etc.

That's a tiny minority of your user base. You'll live. They'll live.

> So who are you going to catch, really?

Enterprises that are big enough to manage their fleet, but small enough to not enforce rules. Which is a good chunk of money.

The minority are typically also enthusiasts who serve as a multiplier. Alienating them isn’t the best strategy.

Below the code snippets the post states this is not a silver bullet, but only a starting point.

The code snippets are the easy part here. Too easy to blindly deploy, because it might work for 95% of the cases. You know how these things go: KPM increased, move on to the next thing.

If you aim for large-scale Enterprise sales (which you should if you take this step), no, the folks running home labs are not usually the ones making decisions.

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