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Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

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Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#91

Post by Ensorceled »

toyg wrote: post #77
isodev wrote: post #49

There are bugs of course, but let's not loose scope of the fact that "Apple has restricted" usually means Apple is preventing bad actors from doing the wrong thing. As a developer, I usually find it rewarding to work with the Sandbox and not against it. Making this part of the product conception very early on results in much smoother experience at the end. Of course, if submitting to the store is an afterthought ther…

> "Apple has restricted" usually means Apple is preventing bad actors Thanks for the laugh! "Apple has restricted" usually means Apple wants to retain complete control in order to extract maximum profit. That's all it is.

While the parent comment is a bit pollyannish, this comment is overly pessimistic.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#92

Post by cesarb »

viraptor wrote: post #41
dcow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Jason’s response and think it carries the right tone and is delivered near flawlessly. It’s clearly frustrating to deal with Apple’s platform lockdown, and he captures such in a professional and rational manner. Bravo. What bothers me is that I’ve experienced an increasing number of maintainers of supposed cross platform projects simply not care about macOS anymore to the extent that they’re openly hostile tow…

You can be "cross-platform" in many ways. In practice if you don't run MacOS yourself, there's just no reasonable way to support MacOS at all. It literally costs hundreds of dollars to get a compatible test environment, while most other systems (including Windows) you can download and run a in VM for free. In practice if the MacOS support takes more than a quick headers / types update, it will likely need more care i…

> It literally costs hundreds of dollars to get a compatible test environment, while most other systems (including Windows) you can download and run a in VM for free.

Not even that; I've developed for Windows using Wine plus a mingw cross-compiler packaged by the Linux distribution I was using. Another alternative would be ReactOS in a VM.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#93

Post by viktorcode »

isodev wrote: post #49

There are bugs of course, but let's not loose scope of the fact that "Apple has restricted" usually means Apple is preventing bad actors from doing the wrong thing. As a developer, I usually find it rewarding to work with the Sandbox and not against it. Making this part of the product conception very early on results in much smoother experience at the end. Of course, if submitting to the store is an afterthought ther…

I agree. For me the biggest win is much less maintenance in the long run. Sandbox hacks will eventually stop working and will have to be replaced. If someone can't make the app they want without going around sandbox, then they should avoid App Store distribution instead of betting the product on "clever" workarounds.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#94

Post by coldcode »

As an iOS developer I can relate, Apple makes amazing hardware, but their software development is often meh. I don't think it's malicious, its just they have so many thousands of teams, often working independently of each other, and your experience with them is like dealing with sightless people describing an elephant. Some teams do amazing things, some mediocre, some downright awful, like any company, but exaggerated because of their central importance in so many other peoples/companies lives. Some of this could be fixed but even there Apple is a huge operation and executives are of all kinds. I work for a F50 company (non tech) with an infinite set of teams and execs and its another mix of amazing/stupid.

No one company can uniformly manage so much code and hardware to boot and do it perfectly. There are things Apple could do to make it less irritating—the hard problem is picking which subset of horrifically irritating things to fix.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#95

Post by viraptor »

SSLy wrote: post #84
viraptor wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, but it's illegal. You're only allowed to virtualise MacOS on MacOS host. You also have to obtain the system which as far as I can tell you can't buy anymore - you can only upgrade to.

Just because something is unauthorized or breaks EULA (mostly void here in EU anyway) doesn't mean it's illegal.

Even if you don't expect EULA to be enforced (will you pay for my lawyers/fine if it is?), you still need a copy of the system which you can't buy directly. You're left with unauthorised copies if you don't have any MacOS hardware and the same question - would you cover my legal costs?

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#96

Post by tasn »

themacguffinman wrote: post #63
tasn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users demand it. You can't have a popular VPN app without Apple support (because at least one person in the org will have an iDevice), so you have to do it. I made another comment in this thread about my experience building EteSync. That's one of the more annoying parts about Apple being the gatekeeper to 40% of the US population (and in effect, to 100% of businesses). As a developer, you are just stuck with no way o…

Does the free and open source Wireguard need to be a popular VPN app? One benefit of being more popular is that they get more contributions, but given that they barely get enough contributions to fix macOS-specific bugs as it is, it's not clear that the benefit outweighs the costs. Apple and Apple users respond to tangible consequences; appeasement doesn't seem to be working, and it doesn't seem to be benefiting the…

Why build it in the first place if you don't want people to use it? Also, a lot of VPN services are moving to WireGuard, they will hopefully contribute to WireGuard development in the future. You can't really do cost/benefit assessment based on current contribution values. If you did that, no startup will ever start, and no open source project will ever be created, as upon creation the usage is almost always zero.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#97

Post by segfaultbuserr »

toyg wrote: post #70
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #31

> We faced rejections in submitting the app, because they decided to change their policy on the app having a link in the "About WireGuard" tool window to www.wireguard.com/donations/ (which they previously had allowed explicitly; now they want 30% or something) Last year Google started to ban donation links in FOSS apps, WireGuard was one of the first victims [0], completely removed from the store. I didn't know that…

> when that button is clicked by, perhaps, only 10% of the users 10%? I think FOSS developers would be extremely happy if even 1% clicked on that kind of button. I reckon the actual stat is closer to 0.01%... This is absolute scroogerism from our mobile overlords. We badly need a really-open alternative to the Google/Apple world of feudal taxes.

I meant 10% click the "About" button, how many of those actually donate is another question...

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#98

Post by comeonseriously »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #31

> We faced rejections in submitting the app, because they decided to change their policy on the app having a link in the "About WireGuard" tool window to www.wireguard.com/donations/ (which they previously had allowed explicitly; now they want 30% or something) Last year Google started to ban donation links in FOSS apps, WireGuard was one of the first victims [0], completely removed from the store. I didn't know that…

So, is does this mean for a charity they take 30% also? For example, here's United Way for Chester County (wherever that is)[0]:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/united-way-of-chester-county/i...

They have a donate button (last image on right). Does Apple take 30% of all that is donated? If so, I find that to be repulsive.

[0] I picked Unite Way because they're a large org, not because of any other reason.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#99

Post by realusername »

viraptor wrote: post #83
SSLy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can put OS X in a Windows or Linux hosted hypervisor, but the Apple doesn't want you to know about it.

You can, but it's illegal. You're only allowed to virtualise MacOS on MacOS host. You also have to obtain the system which as far as I can tell you can't buy anymore - you can only upgrade to.

First it's illegal but secondly the performance is atrocious anyways (at least last time I've tried) so it won't even help you that much.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#100

Post by enriquto »

toyg wrote: post #70
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #31

> We faced rejections in submitting the app, because they decided to change their policy on the app having a link in the "About WireGuard" tool window to www.wireguard.com/donations/ (which they previously had allowed explicitly; now they want 30% or something) Last year Google started to ban donation links in FOSS apps, WireGuard was one of the first victims [0], completely removed from the store. I didn't know that…

> when that button is clicked by, perhaps, only 10% of the users 10%? I think FOSS developers would be extremely happy if even 1% clicked on that kind of button. I reckon the actual stat is closer to 0.01%... This is absolute scroogerism from our mobile overlords. We badly need a really-open alternative to the Google/Apple world of feudal taxes.

> We badly need a really-open alternative

F-Droid is a thing

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