What bothers me about this -- and it bothered me enough to leave the platform -- is not fees, or "hobby computing," or "it's just for my own use," or trying to figure out why this or that would be in Apple's interest. What bothers me is that it feels like an offense against the entire notion of what a computer is. I am, of course, aware that many (perhaps most) computers in the world are effectively appliances, but a…
The problem is the computer has changed, it’s not a computer, it’s a node in a ubiquitous global network. 2003 and 2023 are very different and we’re feeling the negative impacts of global connectivity. Look at the trackers like AirTag. A gadget to find your keys is incredibly useful, but can also turn into a device to aid criminal activity pretty readily.
Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
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Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
The excuse that freedom exists because one other market player is not a tyrant skates extremely thin ice. If Android went dark side too, where would we be? This excuse is exhausting, lacks any principles whatsoever; these are general purpose devices, browsing the web & allowing arbitrary apps to be developed & squeezed into the world, if they pass through the tyrant's gauntlet. That one company offers some modicum of…
The market has no interest in your individual freedom. If the citizens don't demand it,there is zero incentive to provide it. Don't try to convince Apple or Google or Microsoft or whomever to not be evil. Convince your fellow persons of the need to demand open devices. Good luck.
It should be an absolute no brainer to protect the species, to not close the book on possibility forever, to not let the species be limited & cajoled by impersonal & vast techno-captial-ocratic enterprises, that will hedge us in. But the short term wins arent super clear. "What is the use case?" "We dont know yet." We might have to enable possibility, act on principle, to find out.
The threat of living in a post science world, where the universe around us is illegibile because we made it that way, where we cannot learn or see or work some of the most important & connective matter around us, seems like it's worth all the cards, is a no brainer to go all-in to defend against. The war against general purpose computing is a slow & creeping infernal damnation.
Asking each person to individually be aware of & demanding of what humanity needs feels like a lot. The game is long & plays out in decades, and a lifetime of vigilance seems like a lot for the free market narrative to ask us all. It makes me think perhaps humankind needs representative bodies that can look out for & enable the future to remain open, that can steer us away from the irrevocable ever-narrowing paths, away from an incomprehensible state of being, away from the traps.
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember "Bicycles for the mind" well: http://raganwald.com/assets/images/bicycle-jobs.jpeg But as a metaphor, I don't think of a bicycle as an appliance. Mainstream bicycles are brutalist: The chain and gears are usually on display and user-serviceable. Parts like wheels, saddles, and handlebars are standardized in a way that allows users to mix and match components freely. In the days of steel frames you could ma…
I wish they were more like an appliance. The fact that I constantly have to fiddle with the damn things is why I don't ride more. If they were more like modern cars or, indeed, iPads, that'd be ideal. Instead it's like "well, let's go discover what work I'll have to do on my bike before I can ride it...." Ugh. I do enough handy shit, I don't need a bicycle-maintenance hobby.
Hub gear, Marathon Plus tyres, don't store it outside, and just drop it into your local bike shop every ~2000 miles or so as the brake pads get worn out.
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#384Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why shouldn’t he complain about it though? If nobody complains there’s no chance things will change. Sure people could vote with their feet, but not everyone is willing to do that. They should still be allowed to ask for improvements.
But his unwillingness to vote with his feet is the actual message here. He's basically saying: Here are the horrible things that Apple is doing to me and yet I'm still giving them my money and investing myself in their developer ecosystem. That's how much I love them, for some reason that remains unstated in the article. That's what the parent commenter alluded to: There's some really weird psychology happening here,…
It's not much of a choice - and yes - Android exists, but in a duopoly of 2 shitty choices, Android is arguably the shittier one. Yes, you can install arbitrary apps there, but then you lose much more of your privacy, security, and long term support.
Voting with your feet doesn't work when every company in the segment is equally bad or very likely to become equally bad in short order.
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#3862 weeks ago I created a prototype in SwiftUI to present at work this week and I was going to use my phone. An hour before the meeting I decided to open it and do one last run-through to refamiliarize myself with it. I got the same notice. Had to scramble to rebuild/provision and re-install on my device from my Mac that was in another part of town - for which I had to drive. And then I got some strange errors because…
Apple has plenty of reasons for people to be upset, but testing your live demo an hour before going on is not their fault.
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#387The relationship some developers have with Apple should be a case-study with multiple PhD thesis in psychology. Not even in movies I've seen so many cases of children desperately chasing their emotionally unavailable parent. Apple is a trillion dollar company, it's the "parent" who sells you +$40 dongles for everything. "Hobbies" are only good if they make them money AND doesn't increase their risk or any liability.…
I agree, but... in my experience Android and Android devices suck in comparison to iOS and iPhones. Why can't anyone else create a true competitor to iOS and iPhone that is as open as Android? Is it because of Apple patents? Is it because they assume that if a company as large as Google couldn't do it then nobody can do it? Is it just developers are such a small part of the general populace that there is no money in…
I wonder how much of this is "the thing I'm used to is the best thing?" every time I hear this sort of comparison (regardless of which type of machine the commenter thinks is "best".)
The thing that makes me wonder is because my experience is the opposite of yours -- I think Android is much superior to iOS. But I suspect much of my opinion is because I'm much more used to Android than iOS.
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#388It feels like Apple doesn't even want commercial indie developers on their platforms either. The whole process around entitlements and app review is absolutely maddening for small teams that don't have insider connections at Apple. For context, there are things that your device is capable of, but the OS will prevent you from doing without Apple's blessing (an "Entitlement"). Even in test code that you're not shipping…
Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is slippery-slope fearmongering. In reality, Apple has gone out of its way to ensure that Apple Silicon Macs can boot other operating systems if the user so desires, and can do so without sacrificing security.
People've been saying this crap since I started using Macs over a decade ago. They're always sure Apple's on the brink of locking MacOS down into an appliance OS. They still haven't, haven't even made any big moves that way, but maybe eventually that crowd will be right in the same way that if you predict a recession every year, you'll eventually be right.