| ▲ | bentocorp 7 days ago |
| I recently wrote about how Apple now has the most hostile developer ecosystem of any major platform: https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/apple-development/ Good to see VCs and Y Combinator now supporting and pushing for change. |
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| ▲ | dlcarrier 7 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| A family member of mine has an Apple phone, and the lack of availability of not just open source software but even freeware or freemium software astounds me. They make it so difficult to distribute anything, that it's not worth it unless you are getting significant revenue. This means that often the only option is something extremely scammy that charges monthly for the most trivial capabilities. Of course, Apple gets a 30% cut in any scams, so they have absolutely no incentive to do anything about it, and really their policies are what create it, in the first place. |
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| ▲ | foobarian 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You know how we got here? It used to be a free-for-all where grandma could download any software off the Internet on her Windows computer. You know how the rest went. I honestly don't mind it. It's so easy to recommend an iPhone to non-technical users, knowing the app store is still not compromised with low quality/malicious garbage. (Sure it requires a bit of expectation attenuation but the Android app stores are worse yet). | | |
| ▲ | johnecheck 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This is an argument for gating the free-for-all behind a setting technical users can find, not demanding 30% of revenue if a dev would like access to apple users. The security aspect is real, but this is really about maximizing profits by monopolizing access to anyone with an iPhone. | | |
| ▲ | ryandrake 4 days ago | parent [-] | | When a normal user is highly motivated to install software, there is no such distinction from a "technical user". He wants to install AnimeWallpapersTotallyNotATrojan.app. The operating system disallows it. Then he just does a search for how to install AnimeWallpapersTotallyNotATrojan.app on iOS, and finds 20 tutorials walking him through the steps to ungate the install. You can make the expert mode dialog say "Clicking this button will erase your hard drive, drain your bank account, and give your dog cancer" and people will still click it. | | |
| ▲ | foobarian 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Grandma: Help me, Joey! After the neighborhood kid helped me install the coupon code app (he said something about expert mode, he is very smart!) my phone runs slow and crashes. :-( Me: ... | | |
| ▲ | mrandish 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There are many ways to deal with any scenario like this, all of which don't involve the device manufacturer locking ALL device owners out of ANY control over the hardware they own. For example, you can be the administrator on Grandma's device and block access to third-party app stores which cannot be overridden by anyone (including the device manufacturer) without your credentials. Alternatively, you could delegate that authority to a provider you trust. No one is saying you can't keep choosing Apple's walled-garden app store as the only store provider or that you shouldn't be able to block any or even all app stores. Options like that can even be locked by one-time hardware fuses so they can never be changed - even by the owner. The only issue here is Apple forcing a sole monopoly on that control for themselves because it's worth billions of dollars - instead of device owners having a choice. | | |
| ▲ | labcomputer 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > No one is saying you can't keep choosing Apple's walled-garden app store as the only store provider or that you shouldn't be able to block any or even all app stores Err.. Isn’t that exactly what the EU is saying? | | |
| ▲ | mrandish 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Well... no, it's not. As long as device owners can choose which and how many app stores are on their device, regulators and courts will be satisfied. If users then choose number_of_app-stores == 1 and app_store_provider == "Apple", that's the user's choice - and for many users, like Grandma, that may be the right choice. Regulators have never ruled that Apple can't have an app store or that the number of enabled App Stores MUST be more than 1 - only that the legal owner of the device have an opportunity to choose. Scenarios like "Oh no, the EU wants to take away Grandma's one safe, simple walled-garden app store so she's left to fend for herself on the dark web" is a disingenuous straw man exaggeration by Apple and their apologists to protect Apple's multi-billion dollar app store monopoly. Once there's owner choice, even Grandma who chooses Apple as her only app store will pay lower prices and very likely gain other safe options like a full featured Firefox with Ublock Origin ad blocking. Just the existence of competitive choice is beneficial - even to users who choose "no competition". Plus Apple will finally have a real incentive to be more responsive and reasonable with app developers regarding app store prices and policies - which will help solo and small startup app developers. |
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| ▲ | kelnos 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I love how the threat of Grandma installing malware on her phone is the new "think of the children!" And I love how the response to shit mobile security is to lock down devices so the people who buy them don't actually own them. Instead of, y'know, actually cleaning up the security posture of these devices. |
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| ▲ | nsagent 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Then those people deserve what they get as a result. People should have autonomy to make less than optimal decisions if they want. And to provide a counterpoint, my dad can barely navigate his iPhone. I literally spent an hour on the phone with him when he was lost and needed directions; it took 20 minutes to guide him to open the messages app so he could read the address I sent. Someone that clueless isn't searching the internet to figure out workarounds for installing anything. | |
| ▲ | _carbyau_ 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > When a normal user is highly motivated... ...they reap the consequences of their actions. A warning lets a person know it is getting deeper. It is up to the person to realise if they are out of their depth. If a person lacks the self reflection to realise their capabilities then they need a guardian. Children and the elderly routinely have this for other aspects of life. Why not a phone? Why can't I delegate such authority to others when I become old and infirm? |
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| ▲ | rpdillon 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > knowing the app store is still not compromised with low quality/malicious garbage. It absolutely is, the only argument is about to what degree. | |
| ▲ | mathiaspoint 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is more than doable with app stores. The review process never instruments the apps or reads the source, it's trivial and common to hide malware in apps and then use modals/ads to push them on people. | |
| ▲ | 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | SheinhardtWigCo 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Now we have strong sandboxing by default and many other platform security advances to mitigate that risk. You can download any software off the Internet on macOS, so why not on iOS? |
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| ▲ | 1123581321 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How did you conclude the lack of freeware? Both the Apple and Google app stores have a couple million apps, and most of them (about 95% in the App Store’s case) are free. | |
| ▲ | furyofantares 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is that an Apple thing? People trying to monetize anything they make seem to vastly outnumber those of us who just want to make stuff for other people to enjoy. When I turn off an adblocker I'm shocked how many hobby projects spam ads at their users to try to make a few pennies. It feels like a social issue. | | |
| ▲ | nickthegreek 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Giving away free software on the appstore is gonna cost you $100/yr developer license. Sure, the more apps you make dilutes the cost, but it doesn’t seem like that inviting of a space for maintained free apps. | | |
| ▲ | hu3 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You'll also need a Mac computer for the happy path so it's more than $100/year. | |
| ▲ | Aloisius 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Free for non-profits though. I'm a little surprised there isn't an open source non-profit set up to act as an umbrella for open source iOS app development. | | |
| ▲ | oefrha 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Then one bad app and the whole account is nuked. Not a great setup unless with explicit blessing from Apple, which they won’t give. |
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| ▲ | esalman 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's a thing that was started by Apple and now everyone is trying to mimic. The other day I transferred pictures from my android phone to my Windows desktop, and some of them required a codec to open. I followed prompts, which landed me on a page in Windows store asking for $0.99 in exchange for the said codec. We had a good Internet in the 90s and 00s. Apple had to ruin that. |
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| ▲ | frollogaston 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I know this isn't the biggest thing, but it's funny how even simple questions have complicated answers in Swift, ex https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39677330/how-does-string... |
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| ▲ | JimDabell 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Strings and Unicode are a lot more complicated than they first appear. I like the way this article puts it: > Swift’s string implementation goes to heroic efforts to be as Unicode-correct as possible. […] This is great for correctness, but it comes at a price, mostly in terms of unfamiliarity; if you’re used to manipulating strings with integer indices in other languages, Swift’s design will seem unwieldy at first, leaving you wondering. > It’s not that other languages don’t have Unicode-correct APIs at all — most do. For instance, NSString has the enumerateSubstrings method that can be used to walk through a string by grapheme clusters. But defaults matter; Swift’s priority is to do the correct thing by default. > Strings in Swift are very different than their counterparts in almost all other mainstream programming languages. When you’re used to strings effectively being arrays of code units, it’ll take a while to switch your mindset to Swift’s approach of prioritizing Unicode correctness over simplicity. > Ultimately, we think Swift makes the right choice. Unicode text is much more complicated than what those other languages pretend it is. In the long run, the time savings from avoided bugs you’d otherwise have written will probably outweigh the time it takes to unlearn integer indexing. — https://oleb.net/blog/2017/11/swift-4-strings/ I’d encourage you to read that entire article before describing strings as simple. | | |
| ▲ | frollogaston 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm well aware of all of this. Swift strings aren't random-access. There are reasons no other language did it Apple's way. Even in the rare situations when you do care about the edge cases with these multi-code point symbols (basically just emojis), Swift strings still make that a nightmare, while in other languages you have easy ways to deal with it. I was on such a project where we cared a lot about these details, and the whole team agreed to throw Swift strings out the window and build our own array-based string replacement where each slot is a symbol. Which is probably what Apple would've done if it weren't for performance overhead. Didn't help that their API was really unstable. Every major Swift version broke our code in so many places that we started adding extra layers just to protect ourselves. |
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| ▲ | JustExAWS 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Someone hasn’t programmed on Windows… https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp_questions/comments/10pvfia/look... |
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