Live data from Hacker News

Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

techradar.com

221–230 of 344 posts

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#221

It's funny how the 30% tax and App Store nonsense automatically makes me want Apple to lose every single court case in perpetuity. Having such a monopoly on a device you purchase really means the legal system needs to take you down a notch.

The saddest event this generation is Epic vs Apple going in favor of Apple. It's tough to imagine Apple weren't a monolopy enforcing monopolistic policies.

Eeeh, if only Epic hasn't signed an agreement (as any iOS developer did) where they explicitly agreed with this policy, then it would be so simple.

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot express how frustrating and unprofessional Apple comes across, that you have to sit and watch YouTube videos, to try and find some documentation for iOS development. > WWDC videos can be immensely useful to get inside information about how things actually work Imagine if we could have proper text based documentation on how things actually work? I don't know why this isn't the case. I'm sure they can afford i…

Jobs made it clear in the 1997 WWDC speech[1] that Apple's priority is never the developers, but solely the customer experience and the final product, and if programing languages, frameworks or developers will be casualties along the way, then so be it. His words, not mine. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

Yes, but it's unclear how having a proper documentation detracts from customer experience or the final product.

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#223

What I want to do is not have to have a unified build system for multiple platforms and ABIs without any problem, but for some reason, to target anything apple, I have to use a physical apple machine. It's absolutely abusing market position, because it ends up being that in my profession, you end up purchasing mac computers for the whole office, because then you can target all platforms without any fuss. Not because…

> It's absolutely abusing market position,

It’s definitely a “dick move” but, I’d have trouble calling it abusive. Having to buy expensive development kits is common in our industry

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot express how frustrating and unprofessional Apple comes across, that you have to sit and watch YouTube videos, to try and find some documentation for iOS development. > WWDC videos can be immensely useful to get inside information about how things actually work Imagine if we could have proper text based documentation on how things actually work? I don't know why this isn't the case. I'm sure they can afford i…

Jobs made it clear in the 1997 WWDC speech[1] that Apple's priority is never the developers, but solely the customer experience and the final product, and if programing languages, frameworks or developers will be casualties along the way, then so be it. His words, not mine. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

Without developers there would be no customer experience. But developers keep prostituting themselves and become the victims that you mention.

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically it's possible, but possibly not legal: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross > Please ensure you have read and understood the Xcode license terms before continuing. According to the EULA you may only use the SDK on Apple-branded computers. But you can use Linux to cross compile to Apple. Do the Visual Studio build tools have more permissive license terms? AFAIK you can have clang-cl on Linux, but you d…

It's unfortunately not legal. Makes it also not commercially viable. Cross-compiling is nice, but if the build toolchain requires xcode, then it doesn't help all that much, since the last and most important step has to be done on apple hardware.

At least you can build on docker runners instead of fragile shell runners on MacOS. But any benefits are probably not worth the cost of complexity of cross compilation.

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is not anti-VM. It is anti VM-on-non-Apple-hardware. ;-) Presumably they have determined that lost hardware sales would offset any increased app or service sales from allowing VMs on non-Apple hardware. Though I don't actually know what platform macOS and iOS VMs run on in GitHub Actions and Azure pipelines. Edit: apparently Azure pipelines uses Mac pros. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines…

Apple is anti-VM - there is a soft limit on how many VMs one can run on their M1/M2 Macs. The number is 2.

That is the number of macOS VMs. Linux windows etc is not limited

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and I wonder why do we have Wine to run Windows stuff on Linux, but we have no equivalent to run OSX programs on Linux ... Is nobody interested in implementing the OSX APIs on Linux?

It's a very fast moving target. Apple keeps rewriting and deprecating stuff faster than they can write the documentation. As a newcomer to native macOS development, I'm sometimes struggling to even find working examples.

I am convinced this is by design. Apple has leaned heavily into service based revenue. This means recurring revenue. So in their App Store, they heavily incentivise subscriptions over one-time purchases. One of their tools is frequent and rapid API deprecation. This breaks older apps which aren't maintained. Developers must therefore spend much more effort on maintaining software on iOS and macOS (I can still run software on Windows from 20 years ago). This makes the value proposition of selling one-time purchase software poorer. It also means that older software has a much shorter lifespan, so users are forced to purchase software more frequently. I think this is one of the reasons revenue on iOS is so much higher than Android.

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#228
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs made it clear in the 1997 WWDC speech[1] that Apple's priority is never the developers, but solely the customer experience and the final product, and if programing languages, frameworks or developers will be casualties along the way, then so be it. His words, not mine. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

Yes, but it's unclear how having a proper documentation detracts from customer experience or the final product.

It's not that it detracts from the customer UX, it's simply that they don't care about the developers.

They know developers will walk on glass for the privilege of accessing a large high value consumer market.

It's exactly what Jobs said and it paid off for them as you can see in Apple's current valuation. Why is that still unclear to you?

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#229
post #175
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of when Apple tried to make it so that you can't own an iPhone, only lease it. The effort might be still ongoing, I'm not up to date. A few different turns in history and your sentence would have been "THEIR machine" and "THEIR software".

The fact that (baring exploitable bugs) you can only run Apple approved software on an iOS device pretty much makes it "THEIR machine" anyway.

You can get a free Apple developer account and run any software you build on your own devices.

Re: Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs made it clear in the 1997 WWDC speech[1] that Apple's priority is never the developers, but solely the customer experience and the final product, and if programing languages, frameworks or developers will be casualties along the way, then so be it. His words, not mine. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

Without developers there would be no customer experience. But developers keep prostituting themselves and become the victims that you mention.

I didn't mention this, Jobs is the one who called it way back when.
Post reply on HN