Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lists.zx2c4.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 392 posts

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

#221

Post by literallycancer »

ubercow13 wrote: post #130
plg- wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's funny because the reason anyone cares about this whole episode is that some people felt the need to play a white knight in the developer's mailbox.

The smarter people will quit the Apple platform, and the dumber ones will quit the software whose creators refuse to put up with the Apple bullshit (plus some that try to put up with it but Apple arbitrarily fails their review anyway).

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

#222

Post by VonGuard »

j1elo wrote: post #215

Apple doesn't deserve to have such careful and detail-oriented FOSS developers like Jason, developing for their platform. He is genuinely wasting time in order to work around Apple's developer-unfriendly platform. Not that I should be telling devs where they should spend their time... but I feel like so much effort is being devoted to fix Apple's issues. > When I'm debugging these issues, I'll often times spend a few…

Completely agree. Apple has nothing but contempt for its developers, and treats them like indentured servants. "Oh it took 10 years to get your app working right? Well, it doesn't work right anymore after yesterday's patch."

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

#223

Post by CharlesW »

Dumb question 1: Why not do what Apollo for Reddit (and many other apps) does and add in-app "tips" and/or other purchases? With minimal UI support it'd be orders-of-magnitude more effective at raising money for WireGuard than a web link, regardless of Apple's markup.

Dumb question 2: Why isn't it a good idea to create a non-profit, or distribute via a partner non-profit, to reduce the App Store take to 0%? (Even without that, Apple's take would be 15% until the app hits $1 million in annual net sales there.)

I see people in the thread asking for special treatment for this (important and worthy, of course) project, which Apple obviously can't do that without creating a thousand other problems.

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

#224

Post by m45t3r »

matwood wrote: post #189
tasn wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an iPhone and macOS for development. I clocked a lot of hours on them over the years. I admit, I was sometimes jealous of mac hardware, for example the new M1, magsafe, and etc (though not the terrible keyboards). Though I was never jealous of an iPhone's hardware. I was never ever jealous of the software. I always found it buggy and user-hostile. The line you quoted was specifically about the user-hostility.…

I've used both platform, and I find iOS user friendly and easy to use. I also found iOS easier to develop for than Android, though admittedly it's been a few years since I've developed on either. Opinions are funny like that.

I think it depends on what you're doing. Are you developing native apps with one or two person teams? iOS seems easier to start. Are you developing multi platform apps with teams of hundreds of engineers? Well, Android is much much better.

Just to give an example, it is quite easy to build Android apps in a CI, while iOS is a pain (specially because there is no way to build an iOS app in anything other than a Mac). Also, most bugs specific to a platform happens in iOS (they happen in Android too, but my experience is maybe 10 bugs in iOS for 1 in Android).

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

#225

Post by blacklight »

FOSS developers should simply stop developing good software for Apple devices.

The absolute opacity of Apple's technical policies and their arrogant i-dont-care/its-your-problem approach against developers are quite renewed in the community. This ends up costing a lot of development time to developers who mostly work for free, who struggle to reverse engineer or debug what happens on MacOS/iOS, and (like Wireguard's case shows) it harms the reputation of their software because people tend to blame the application rather than the OS when things don't work as intended.

If people want to use FOSS software, then they should be able to do so on systems that support the FOSS ecosystem, that provide developers with appropriate tools to debug what's going on (ON ANY PLATFORM) and sufficient documentation for them to understand how a certain component of the OS is supposed to behave.

I know that in the past 15 years lots of tech-savvy people have opted for Apple products because "they're still UNIX under the hood, and unlike Linux they just work out of the box". But being Unix-like DOES NOT mean to be developer-friendly! Apple is still an opaque developer-unfriendly company even if it provides you with a native bash!

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

#226

Post by danShumway »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #201
danShumway wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. And Rachelbythebay is way more technically inclined than most users; if she wasn't able to correctly apply the blame to Apple, then normal users are definitely not going to be able to do that. Developers need to be more up-front about why these issues exist, we need an education push. For all the criticism about how Fortnight framed its issues on iOS (and some of that criticism was warranted), coming out of th…

> if she wasn't able to correctly apply the blame to Apple, then normal users are definitely not going to be able to do that This isn’t a moral judgement. I apply the blame to Apple. But I also choose to keep using their product. Their products are less dispensable to me than another VPN protocol.

> But I also choose to keep using their product.

I think the issue is less people who understand the tradeoffs and decide that the Mac platform is still worth using -- it's people who do not understand that there is a tradeoff at all, or who think that the root cause of all of this is just the developers being lazy.

If you're aware of the reason why Wireguard can't do updates while it's running, and you say, "that's fine, I still want to use it on Mac", that's a very different reaction than saying, "the devs don't know what they're doing."

I suspect that average nontechnical users are currently in the latter category rather than the former, but I could be wrong.

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

#227

Post by m45t3r »

TwoBit wrote: post #211

> a developer new to the codebase didn't realize that he was removing a workaround to yet-another-Apple-bug. Isn't this what code comments should be good for preventing?

The author did address this later on, saying he was sorry for not adding a comment.

Anyway, no software development process is perfect, but sure the Apple ecosystem make everything worse.

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

#228

Post by fluidcruft »

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #203
plg- wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hiya! Former mac native developer here, moving to a new company. My new corp gave me the option of a thinkpad running windows or a Mac, and I chose the mac just so I could have a sane terminal experience, UNIX-like tools, etc. I would vastly prefer to use Linux, but unfortunately that's just not an option for a company-issued machine at this juncture--and in my experience it's easier to spin up a VM on a Mac than a W…

My experience is that Windows Subsystem for Linux has been amazing on Windows and just keeps getting better. I've also never noticed any difference in spinning up VMs.

But anyway I get keeping with familiar tools but, I just disagree that MacOS is a better or even "sane" terminal platform. All the ancient GNU tools Mac ships and BSD-style "but Posix!" pedantry drives me up the wall.

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

#229

Post by lerxst00 »

TwoBit wrote: post #211

> a developer new to the codebase didn't realize that he was removing a workaround to yet-another-Apple-bug. Isn't this what code comments should be good for preventing?

This is literally what the OP has acknowledged was an issue:

> I should have caught it, and I take responsibility for it, and probably workarounds need more comments so this doesn't happen

Post reply on HN