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▲ rpastuszak 8 hours ago

Haha, excellent timing:

I opened HN just now because:

1. I got tired of waiting 2h for my app to get notarized because

2. I can't sell it on the AppStore in the EU... because

3. the AppStore Connect page gets stuck at their DSA compliance form (it's been 10 days).

And, to add insult to injury, the whole thing could be a PWA, without any compromises in the UX whatsoever.

I misread the title, but I still posted this comment as an example of confirmation bias* in the orange book for posteriority. Time to step away from the computer!

* (sunk cost fallacy)

▲candiddevmike 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can't sign into Apple without going incognito in Chrome. I put in my email, and it throws and error before asking me for my password. It's not an extension, it's not a cookie, idk what it is.

And then when I do get past he password, it sends a OTP to a Mac Mini I never use and have to tap around to get it to generate a SMS code. No option for external TOTP, and no way to remove the Mac Mini I don't use from OTP without signing out of it.

▲andoando 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ive made an apple developer account, paid $100 and then it kicked me out and after logging in still said I didnt pay yet. I paid again until realizing it actually charged me. It also took me an hour to try and figure out how to get it to send OTP to a phone instead of an old broken macbook.

Google also gives me a ton of issues with having multiple accounts. Go to calendar app with account 2, switch to desktop mode so I can actually click on the meeting invite, now Im logged back into account 1. Similar issues trying to use any other google service and have to use

I don't understand how these kind of things aren't priority #1

▲mistrial9 6 hours ago | parent [-]

a few years ago a lot of legacy "AppleLink" email accounts where culled without remorse

▲eptcyka 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You cannot even change the password of an apple ID without logging into a macOS or iOS device.

▲qingcharles 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've got this with some sites. How long have you had that Chrome profile? They seem to collect cruft somewhere and it stops some sites from working. On my main Chrome profile I can't use one of my banking sites, any OpenAI site uses 100% of CPU, other sites only hold the login cookies for a few minutes. I've tried disabling every extension.

None of these issues on my other profiles or in incognito.

▲shreddit 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I have the exact same problem. It’s saying something about not being able to confirm my identity? I took a look at the dev tools and it’s apparently making a request to a server which returns an error.

It only works in incognito because it’s using a different ip address there…

▲stringtoint 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Funny, I had this problem yesterday when I tried to login to Apple Business Manager. Thought I had messed up but worked fine in incognito.

▲alt227 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sorry, how is it that you make Chrome incognito window use a differnt IP address?

That sounds like a good magic trick.

▲shreddit 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Beats me. Same computer, same browser. Don’t know whether it’s the exact same address though. Cleared cookies already. Still only working in incognito.

▲candiddevmike 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Exact same problem, exact same error. Glad to know I'm not alone!!!

▲epistasis 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I use PWAs on iOS and they're pretty great. That was the original plan for apps on iOS, before Apple was pressured into creating an app store.

▲ajross 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A PWA on iOS is just a cached web page. Safari remains pretty crippled with regards to the APIs (bluetooth, usb, filesystem, etc...) that make local apps attractive in the first place. Apple is fine with letting people cache web pages, they're not fine with stuff that might displace the app store.

▲epistasis 7 hours ago | parent [-]

And for that I'm quite thankful, if all the stuff that apps could do were possible on the web it would make the web a far far scarier place than it is.

I avoid apps as much as possible due to all the nefarious tricks they play, even with all the sandboxing and review they go through. Without those constraints, I can't imagine the hell that we'd be in.

▲ajross 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Which is fine, for the 90% of people that spend their time on the 70% of common features and interact only with the screen and headphones and internet.

But sometimes people like to do stuff like configure their QMK keyboards or load new firmware for their EdgeTX drone radios or make bootable USB sticks, all tasks that work just fine in easily deployed PWAs on every client platform in existence, except iOS.

For small developers of small-yet-oddball clients apps, PWA's are an absolutely magnificent platform. Write once, deploy once, run... everywhere-but-an-iPhone. It really sucks that Apple's devices are crippled like this.

Edit to reply to this bit:

> Without those constraints, I can't imagine the hell that we'd be in.

Again, that hell is literally every other platform on the planet. It's only Safari that is "protected". In point of fact browser permissions management on this stuff tends strongly to be stricter and less permissive than app permissions, which are much less visible.

▲iknowstuff 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not really, as long as they need permission granted

▲graemep 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Who pressured Apple and why?

I had nor even heard of app stores before then IIRC unless you count Linux repos.

▲epistasis 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> While originally developing iPhone prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser.[10] However, backlash from developers prompted the company to reconsider,[10] with Jobs announcing in October 2007 that Apple would have a software development kit available for developers by February 2008.[11][12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)

▲bartread 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And the irony of this is that a lot of the apps in the app store are hybrid apps that are basically web apps with a thin native wrapper around them because it's just so much less of a hassle to develop for both iOS and Android that way and because, if you're coming at it as an outsider, Swift is such a ball-ache to deal with compared to other languages and stacks.

So PWAs would have been more than fine but, unfortunately, that ship has long since sailed, and Apple make way too much money out of the app store for a course change.

▲raw_anon_1111 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It came out in the Epic vs Apple trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases of pay to win games. The only money Apple is making from these “could have been a web app” apps are for things like Uber where you can use Apple Pay (not in app purchases)- that has the same credit card fees regardless.

If it’s only mean old Apple, where are all of the great Android PWAs and why do developers decide to make native Android apps?

▲bartread 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nah, the hyrid thing has been a big deal for a long time. PhoneGap/Cordova was all the rage in 2012/13 when I was working in that area, and I even went to a VSIP event hawking our Visual Studio hybrid development solution.

Once hybrid became possible it was immediately clear that it was the easiest way to get a decent quality app deployed on both iOS and Android. It was a big enough deal that around the time I attended that VSIP event and then PhoneGap Europe, or perhaps shortly afterward, some backlash against hybrid started off with a few big companies trumpeting about how they'd started off native, gone to hybrid for a few years, and were now going back to native again (principally for native experience and performance reasons).

But I think the pressure has always been in the hybrid direction, particularly if you're resource or budget constrained and need to target both platforms, or the web is your main platform (whether than be mobile or desktop). I'm sure the Epic vs Apple fight didn't do any harm, but I don't know what real difference it's made.

The reality is that maintaining two native apps plus a web app is a pain in the ass, especially when you realise Swift - whilst a good language - is a wrapper over some decidedly tedious APIs and a lot of Objective C legacy that you probably don't want sucking up a lot of time. If you want/need apps, it's so much easier to stick a native wrapper around a responsive web app, and that will work well for so many use cases. Not all, by any means, but most SaaS, LOB, or CRUDy apps will do fine as hybrid.

▲dogmatism 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

answer: adblocking in the browser (and other data scavenging which can be done with native app more easily than PWA)

▲raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago | parent [-]

What “data scavenging” can be done with an iOS app without the user explicitly giving the app permission?

▲graemep 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It looks from the cited sources that developers wanted to write apps, Apple chose to do this in a way that allowed it to keep control of what was installed.

▲alt227 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Less than a year?

Doesnt really sound like Jobs was putting up much of a fight there.

▲al_borland 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They didn’t have much of a choice. In that time people had already developed jail breaks and Cydia, an app store in its own right, was thriving.

Before Apple’s App Store launched, my iPhone was running all sorts of other apps and alternative launchers.

Apple had to move fast to keep things from getting too out of control.

Over the years, as the vulnerabilities in the OS were closed and iOS added features, the need or desire to bother with jailbreaks and 3rd party pirate app stores dropped. I haven’t thought about it in many years.

▲ 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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▲ 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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▲MilnerRoute 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This week Bruce Perens (who wrote the original Open Source definition) remembered talking to Steve Jobs about Open Source back in 2000.

https://thenewstack.io/50-years-ago-a-young-bill-gates-took-...

Perens had accepted a position as senior Linux/Open Source Global Strategist for Hewlett-Packard, which he describes as leaving Apple “to work on Open Source. So I asked Steve: ‘You still don’t believe in this Linux stuff, do you?'” And Perens still remembers how Steve Jobs had responded.

“I’ve had a lot to do with building two of the world’s three great operating systems” — which Jobs considered to be NeXT OS, MacOS and Windows. “‘And it took a billion-dollar lab to make each one. So no, I don’t think you can do this.'”

Perens says he later "won that argument" when Jobs stood onstage in front of a slide that said ‘Open Source: We Think It’s Great!’ as he introduced the Safari browser."

▲xquce 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That's interesting! However I would argue Jobs sadly won that argument, as there really didn't come any open source os for neither phones or major push on PCs in the almost 30 years since that exchange.

While yes some software have come in that format, it took the big 3 to push the server Linux based clouds, Google to push it on phone, tablets and laptops and now Steam to make a push for the average gamer.

This is not to discredit the work being done outside those lab's which very much build on the work for free or by foundations, however the first versions just don't capture a majority of the available markets which the OSes Jobs mention very much did and the others by the billion dollar labs since.

▲pcl 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Have you built a PWA solution for it? If not, why not?

▲zahlman 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> the orange book

?

▲echelon 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> the whole thing could be a PWA

Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails.

I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs.

A single swf file could be kept and run anywhere. For the younger generation: imagine right clicking to download a YouTube video or a video game you'd see on itch.io. And you could send those to friends.

You could even embed online multiplayer and chatrooms into the apps. It all just worked. What we have now is a soup of complexity that can't even match the feature set.

▲tliltocatl 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Flash was cool, but it was also a spectacular dumpster file. Honestly I'm sort of glad Google&Apple killed it. Yes it was an amazing medium, but it feels almost like Adobe kept thinking about it as an animation studio and didn't care to run it as an application platform with all the concerns it entails (i. e. security). And support of anything that's not Windows, while technically present, was abysmal. HTML5, with all it sins and warts, is a better platform, even if it has much higher entry barrier.

▲hyperhello 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The security issue could have been addressed by simply running it in a sandbox.

▲echelon 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Creativity dropped off a chasm with HTML5.

During the Flash era, creativity flourished. It was accessible, too. Seven year olds could use it.

Flash was getting better and better. It could have become an open standard had Jobs not murdered it to keep runtimes off iPhone. He was worried about competition. The battery and security issues were technical problems and fully solvable.

The companies that filled the web void - Google and Apple - both had their own selfish reasons not to propose a successor. And they haven't helped anyone else step up to the plate. It would be impossible now.

Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web.

Smartphones might have pushed us forward, but the app layer held us back.

The 1990s and 2000s web saw what AOL and Microsoft were trying to lock us into and instead opted for open and flexible.

Platformization locked us into hyperscaler rails where they get action on everything we do. This has slowed us down tremendously, and a lot of the free energy and innovation capital of the system goes to taxation.

▲comex 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The thing is, HTML5 is far more technically capable than Flash ever was. It was competitive even at the time: Flash's main thing was 2D vector graphics, but iOS Safari has supported both Canvas and SVG since at least 2010, possibly from day one.

But the creation tools and the culture never really lined up the same way, and developers focused on creating apps instead.

For non-games, HTML has always been technically superior. iOS Safari may have a long history of rendering bugs, but it beats Flash/AIR, which always looked very out-of-place even on desktop.

I do wonder what would have happened in an alternate universe where either Flash or HTML5 took off on mobile instead of apps. We would have both the upsides of openness, and the downsides of worse performance and platform integration and the lack of an easy payment rail. Pretty much the same situation we still see on desktop today.

We wouldn't have had the same "gold rush" from the early App Store, which happened in large part because of the ease of making money. There would probably be more focus on free stuff with ads, like Android but more so.

▲Bengalilol 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I second everything except the fact that Adobe was behind Flash, which IMO is what killed it in the first place (with ten years of hindsight, I can say this confidently). I still do creative, non-standard work, but in a free way using pure vanilla JS (using Haxe). Adobe's mistake was keeping the system proprietary instead of letting it be free. Since then, I've left that ecosystem and what a relief!

(I know I'm mixing different levels here, and my personal experience isn't really an argument).

ps: HTML scope is way more advanced than whatever Flash could have been.

▲pdntspa 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web.

No they wouldn't. We've forgotten just how bad and sloppy flash apps were. The handful of companies that used Adobe Flex turned out awful POS that barely worked. It occupied the same space that Electron does today -- bloated, slow, and permitting cheap-ass devs to utilize cheap talent to develop 'apps' with all the finesse of a sledgehammer

As a kid I loved flash, I was making interactive apps in AS2/3 in high school. But I watched in horror as it became the de facto platform for crapware

▲tliltocatl 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It occupied the same space that Electron does today

This. Except Electron crap at least runs on top of a well-designed and relatively reliable platform (HTML/Chromium) - and sometimes the crap even offer an actual PWA version with all the sandbox benefits a real browser has to offer. Flash didn't even had that.

And let's be realistic, there will always be demand for a crap-running platform for vendors that don't care (or just have their core values elsewhere).

▲pdntspa 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> And let's be realistic, there will always be demand for a crap-running platform for vendors that don't care (or just have their core values elsewhere).

My kingdom for some way of gatekeeping platforms so that entities like this are forbidden from participating

▲tliltocatl 6 hours ago | parent [-]

pls dont

- Lack of gatekeeping was THE advantage that made Web viable and competitive against traditional media.

- You can't gatekeep crapmakers without also gatekeeping that kid in his parent's basement with an awesome idea.

- Crapmakers with enough money will punch through any gatekeeping.

- Sometimes you have to accept that vendors don't care. Can't expect a transport company to give too much love to their timetables app. Yes, they are expected to hire someone competent to do it, but the "someone competent" also rarely care. Still better than having no access to the timetables.

▲pdntspa 5 hours ago | parent [-]

No, there was gatekeeping, it was knowledge. You had to be knowledgeable enough to work the system. You had to have the time to dedicate to learning the system and how the internet and how computers worked. Those twin gates kept the internet as it was in its early days.

Unfortunately every peabrained enterpreneur saw that and began eroding the moat until it was gone. The knowledge required to build things has been on a steady decline, and now with AI that decline has completely destroyed it. Now, every fucking hack with an "idea" is not only able to act on them but now they act like they are as good as the people who paid a heavy price to get to the same level through years of study and hard work.

▲Bengalilol 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As a side note, Apache Royale is still alive (or is it?).

<https://royale.apache.org>

▲nottorp 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The battery and security issues were technical problems and fully solvable.

Seriously? Is that why I ran all my desktop browsers with flashblock even before the iPhone was out?

Dare to tell me Adobe was feverishly working in secret on reducing pointless CPU usage and saving my battery?

▲jodrellblank 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You say the security and battery issues "were solvable", so why didn't Macromedia or Adobe solve them? Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005, the era of Palms, Blackberries, Nokia/Symbian, Windows Phone, Microsoft Tablet PC; mobile devices were not a new surprise by 2005. Adobe did get Flash onto Palm mobile devices and TVs and early Android smartphones, and the experience was poor[1][2] - not just from those two issues; Flash sites weren't designed for mobile or touch or small screens. Customers had a choice of Flash-mobile devices, and preferred iPhones.

> "Ryan Lawler of TechCrunch wrote in 2012 "Jobs was right", adding Android users had poor experiences with watching Flash content and interactive Flash experiences were "often wonky or didn't perform well, even on high-powered phones".[9] Mike Isaac of Wired wrote in 2011 that "In [our] testing of multiple Flash-compatible devices, choppiness and browser crashes were common", and a former Adobe employee stated "Flash is a resource hog [...] It's a battery drain, and it's unreliable on mobile web browsers".[10] Kyle Wagner of Gizmodo wrote in 2011 that "Adobe was never really able to smooth over performance, battery, and security issues".[11]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash

[1] https://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9692/palm-joins-adobe-fl...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/ere0c/how_does_flash_...

▲antod 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Run anywhere" was getting pretty stretched long before it was killed, Linux support was orphaned, old, buggy, vulnerable and hard to run in contemporary browsers.

I was stoked to watch Apple nail the coffin shut, and see it consigned to history along with Java applets.

▲titzer 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Flash was cool, but the plugin was full of bugs and a constant source of pretty serious vulnerabilities. I too miss the flash games era of the web at times, but it wasn't some utopian thing.

▲thisislife2 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Macromedia Flash was indeed a beautiful, innovative piece of software. HTML 5 still doesn't match its features vis the ease and usability that Flash offered in creating and deploying content online. But after its acquisition by Adobe, it just ever so slowly went downhill. It should have been open sourced.

▲ajross 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks

Capcut and Roblox would like words. No, that's kinda just wrong. Content generation for non-technical folks has never been easier or more effective. Flash is just something nerds here remember fondly because it was a gateway drug into hackerdom. Some of us are older and might feel the same way about Hypercard or TurboPascal or whatnot.

▲marcosdumay 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just like Microsoft before them.

But flash specifically deserved to die.

▲NewsaHackO 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Absolutely. Apple had the balls to be the first major tech company to take the first material step to actually end the security nightmare that was Flash for good.

▲as1mov 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm sure it was the security that of Flash that worried them, and not the fact that a third party was encroaching on their walled garden that couldn't be extorted.

▲LoganDark 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

Just because they can be worried about multiple things doesn't mean they were only worried about the worst of them. Security in Flash was a total and utter nightmare. It was awful.

▲teaearlgraycold 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On the other hand you're okay with Adobe having that level of control over the web?

Maybe one day we'll see a JS/WASM framework that is just as portable.

▲echelon 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Ironically, Macromedia / Adobe didn't try to assert any control back then. They were even opening the standard, IIRC.

They learned this much later after learning the game from Meta, Google, and Apple.

▲raw_anon_1111 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This myth that Apple “killed” Flash on mobile should die. When Flash finally came to Android in 2010-11, it required a phone that had a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM and barely ran on that.

The first iPhone came with 128MB RAM with a 400Mhz CPU, it couldn’t even run Safari smoothly. If you scrolled too fast, you would get a checkerboard while you waited on the page to render. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.

Adobe was always making promises it couldn’t keep. The Motorola Xoom was suppose to be the “iPad Killer” that could run Flash , Adobe was late leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t go to the Xoom home page on the Xoom at launch because it required Flash.