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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”

#71

Post by studius »

webmobdev wrote: post #62
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…

> 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 towards macOS users. So blame Apple for it - why do you blame the developers? Apple wants you to forget that it is the developers that add value to a platform, and yet it charges them for the "privilege" of creating apps for th…

While Apple isn't right on everything, they are a business, and they have the responsibility to decide what they will provide and what they won't.

If they can't change X because it will screw over critical application group Y, then developers can complain as much as they want until they have some practical way to deal with that. If they were constantly screwing over Y, where Y was different depending on the problem, they could eventually screw up all of the apps, users, and developers.

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

#72

Post by wscott »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #69
rwmj wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This worries me for a similar reason - I get requests to port some software I wrote over to the Mac from time to time, and the new M1 Mac Mini is cheap enough that I might have bought one to do this development. But I'm not keen to spend any money or time on an ecosystem which might be closed down in the future.

Aeah, how much more proprietary and strange are the Apple API's going to get? They'll have control over the entire vertical, and can put all kinds of undocumented crap right in the silicon.

even to the syscall level, like the MAP_JIT flag to mmap() https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...

not optional and requires special app entitlements to enable. So you are not going to write portable code that has a JIT without apple-special code.

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

#73

Post by SSLy »

murphy1312 wrote: post #64
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…

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.

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

#74

Post by allx64 »

dcow wrote: post #22
alias_neo wrote: post #7

This appears to be a very typical response from an Apple user who doesn't understand the lengths and hoops developers have to jump through to work around Apple's many, many restrictions, bugs and limitations. In my day job, our Apple developers have spent years finding solutions to iOS restrictions around CallKit, Push Notifications and NSTodaysProblem, and those are just the things Apple has intentionally restricted…

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…

Perhaps they turn hostile because of macOS users. Such users have submitted sloppy this-works-for-me-style build patches to my project, which later were deemed incorrect by actual macOS experts. I had to do everything over again.

Then I was rudely accused of not using cmake, when autotools perfectly support cross builds (better than cmake on Linux).

It is not my problem if a purported Unix does not ship gcc or if clang cross builds are painful. Go and install gcc!

If Apple were interested in being supported, they'd fix their tool chain and provide free testing infrastructure to OSS developers.

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

#75

Post by Ensorceled »

wscott wrote: post #47

First off, what a level-headed friendly response from a developer who is clearly frustrated by Apple's bugs and policies. As someone who has had to support commercial software this is not easy to do consistently. Second, this has significantly tempered my lusting over the new M1 macs. I think I can be content with my ThinkPad's running Linux.

Yeah, I'm wondering if my next work computer will be something different after almost 20 years of working on NeXT/Mac OS X/MacOS because I'm not sure general development will continue to be viable on the M1s.

Spent another weekend moving my wife over to a new Windows machine ... not interested in that environment.

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

#76

Post by [deleted] »

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,…

[deleted]

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

#77

Post by toyg »

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.

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

#78

Post by webmobdev »

studius wrote: post #71
webmobdev wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 towards macOS users. So blame Apple for it - why do you blame the developers? Apple wants you to forget that it is the developers that add value to a platform, and yet it charges them for the "privilege" of creating apps for th…

While Apple isn't right on everything, they are a business, and they have the responsibility to decide what they will provide and what they won't. If they can't change X because it will screw over critical application group Y, then developers can complain as much as they want until they have some practical way to deal with that. If they were constantly screwing over Y, where Y was different depending on the problem,…

Yes, developers on Apple platform need to be more vocal with their criticism and, if necessary, even boycott their platforms to be heard.

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

Shish2k wrote: post #24
alias_neo wrote: post #7

This appears to be a very typical response from an Apple user who doesn't understand the lengths and hoops developers have to jump through to work around Apple's many, many restrictions, bugs and limitations. In my day job, our Apple developers have spent years finding solutions to iOS restrictions around CallKit, Push Notifications and NSTodaysProblem, and those are just the things Apple has intentionally restricted…

> I encourage others to "put their money where their mouth is" and show a little support for the people making and sharing this software for free Just went to donate for myself, and happened to spot Rachel’s name in the list of donors too, so that’s a nice little end to the story :) (Not as nice as “apple either fixes their APIs or permits people to work around them”, but still...)

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by Ensorceled »

schoolornot wrote: post #5

As a Mac admin VPP/App Store distribution is still quite finicky. I don’t understand why Apple has to flex and restrict NetworkExtension/VPN apps to Mac App Store. More iOS-ification of the OS.

That's not a problem for me ... it's all the other issues: the crappy/buggy frameworks, the crappy store experience, no Test Flight, removing the app for a donations page.

Apple's overly protective threat modelling/mitigation is a selling point and not a "flex" for me.

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