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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”

#121

Post by pyrale »

furyg3 wrote: post #43
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…

I couldn't agree more. You're not paying for the app, or the service, those are free and you are simply making a donation. I can imagine that Apple may want to define 'FOSS' to some extent (donations need to go to a non-profit with a board, software needs to be licensed under one of the following licenses, etc), but there should be some room for supporting FOSS that is included in an App Store.

> Apple may want to define 'FOSS' to some extent

"The stuff we won't pay for, but will make other people pay for, even tho we did nothing for it"

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

#122

Post by mschuster91 »

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…

> while most other systems (including Windows) you can download and run a in VM for free.

For what it's worth there are many "click and run" virtual machine creators for OS X. It's not acceptable for corporate use because of the license violations, but to be honest I see very little issue for open source developers using such a solution if they don't have a Mac.

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

#123

Post by cesarb »

nuker wrote: post #67
JD557 wrote: post #21

In case the author is reading this, I recently started using Wireguard in Mac OS with the Mac app and the experience has been great. Not only is it much faster other VPNs that I used in the past, but compared to other clients (Forticlient and Tunnelblick), the overall experience feels much nicer, IMO. Thank you so much for your work!

> Not only is it much faster other VPNs IPSec is as fast as Wireguard. And there is native client in MacOS. As for bloated codebase, there is an OpenBSD iked rewrite.

Doesn't IPSec need a "clean" network connection, without any NAT in the middle? Wireguard was designed to work well even in the presence of NAT.

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

#124

Post by literallycancer »

fxtentacle wrote: post #59
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…

Oh you absolutely can. You'll lose 40% of your users, but for a free project, that shouldn't matter much.

It's much less than 40% outside the US.

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

#125

Post by dessant »

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…

Jason was planning to challenge the App Store rejection after the fix for the WireGuard regression has been published, though I'm not sure what's the current state of the issue.

The rejection is wrong, because the App Store review guidelines clearly spell out that apps may request donations through Safari. On the other hand, apps cannot use in-app purchases to request donations, unless they are published by an approved nonprofit.

3.2.2 Unacceptable

(iv) Unless you are an approved nonprofit or otherwise permitted under Section 3.2.1 (vi) above, collecting funds within the app for charities and fundraisers. Apps that seek to raise money for such causes must be free on the App Store and may only collect funds outside of the app, such as via Safari or SMS.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

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

#126

Post by literallycancer »

tasn wrote: post #66
fxtentacle wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh you absolutely can. You'll lose 40% of your users, but for a free project, that shouldn't matter much.

Many apps (e.g. EteSync and WireGuard) are almost useless if they don't work for everyone within a certain group. A more extreme example is a messaging app. Will not having iOS support for a messaging app lose you 40% of your users? No, it will lose you 100%. In WireGuard's case it's maybe less obvious than messaging, but if WireGuard doesn't work on macOS, it's enough to have one Apple user in your whole organisatio…

What organization is it, that can't order an employee to use a different OS on a work computer?

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

#127

Post by Lievelingsduif »

SSLy wrote: post #73
murphy1312 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed, as a developer i don't need an android device to test, just open a simulator and most things will work. on the other hand you cant even compile for ios with a linux/windows pc.

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

Hackintoshes break the TOS last time I checked.

Some stuff can be built for Macs from Linux, stuff like the Godot game engine supports this.

It is however a guess if they're going to allow that build or not.

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

#128

Post by Lievelingsduif »

mschuster91 wrote: post #122
viraptor wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> while most other systems (including Windows) you can download and run a in VM for free. For what it's worth there are many "click and run" virtual machine creators for OS X. It's not acceptable for corporate use because of the license violations, but to be honest I see very little issue for open source developers using such a solution if they don't have a Mac.

The problem is that you're not a reviewer at apple, or an apple lawyer...

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

#129

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

pilif wrote: post #39
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple can't possibly get rid of kernel extensions - that's the only way to really extend a system in new and innovative ways (user-mode drivers are more like glorified serial-port applications). So much of Apple's platform today is made up of features that were only possible by extending the OS (e.g. Multi-Finder). Apple's going to have trouble if they keep on hindering the people that made their platform and support…

> Apple can't possibly get rid of kernel extensions they are though. It's getting harder and harder to get them loaded (on an M1 Mac, getting an extension loaded will require 4 reboots and a journey through the recovery environment). I'd say that within the next 2-3 macOS releases, kernel extension won't be loaded at all any more and only user-space APIs will be available for third-parties (including drivers). From a…

There's a lot of software which runs on macOS that depends on kernel extensions: think about hardware accelerated operations in Photoshop, or how does Apple plan to support any PCI Express expansion cards in the Mac Pro line - or Thunderbolt accessories for their laptops?

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

#130

Post by ubercow13 »

plg- wrote: post #113
tasn wrote: post #44

The iOS and macOS apps have been the biggest point of stress and frustration when building EteSync[1]. The API is buggy as hell and very limited (if at all available) and the review process is arbitrary and can cause updates to be rejected. You can never know if your workarounds will be accepted or rejected. Sometimes they can even get rejected in future app updates. The EteSync experience is subpar on Apple devices,…

> it's beyond me why would anyone willingly use an Apple product Final users don't see this mess.

But it seems they do, eg. rachelbythebay stopped using Wireguard because of the mess.
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