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The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

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Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#81
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I never have seen such piece of crap like "Notarization". One of the Apple's failures ever (if is not the most one). A nightmare (and not cheap) to deal with it as a developer.

$100/yr is fairly cheap all things considered, and it takes thirty minutes Max to set up a bash script to handle it. And that’s just non-Xcode. If you use Xcode it’s often automatic.

Cheap considering what? Considering the 30% margins they take on any further sale? Considering the 25$ one-time fee the Play Store takes?

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#82
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100/yr is fairly cheap all things considered, and it takes thirty minutes Max to set up a bash script to handle it. And that’s just non-Xcode. If you use Xcode it’s often automatic.

> If you use Xcode it’s often automatic. You can't have read the same article I just read!

Not everyone has the same difficulties the author did.

XCode notarization does work for many developers, perhaps even the majority! It is a fragile process, though, and the author is not the only one for whom it fails.

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#83
post #2

Apple devices are becoming increasingly unusable for developers. Fantastic opportunity for Linux apps to gain more dev resources, as anyone with a bit of foresight sees little future in macOS, iOS, Windows, or Android as development platforms.

This comment could have been written a decade ago and it was as laughable back then as it is today. Developers do not dictate the success of a platform. Users do. And they don’t want Linux on the desktop.

> Apple devices are becoming increasingly unusable for developers.

Nothing laughable about that. It's absolutely 100% true. That's why only 25% of developers are on a Mac. Outside of the Silicon Valley bubble that number goes way down.

> Fantastic opportunity for Linux apps to gain more dev resources, as anyone with a bit of foresight sees little future in macOS, iOS, Windows, or Android as development platforms.

Linux apps have steadily been gaining more dev resources. That's why we have big companies like Microsoft bending over backwards to make things like VS Code run on Linux or in Linux container tech.

> Developers do not dictate the success of a platform. Users do. And they don’t want Linux on the desktop.

Linux is on more systems than any other OS. Was that because of Users? Nope.

If Macs and iPhones disappeared tomorrow, the world would largely continue on without much hassle. If Linux or Windows disappeared, we'd have a worldwide catastrophe on our hands. Users never chose Windows either. Developers and the businesses that they worked for did.

The number of normies using Linux on the desktop isn't a good metric. There are as many devs on Linux as there are on a Mac. Of those, I'd say more than half are not even targetting iOS but rather the web. So, Apple is always just a few bad moves away from losing those web devs to a Linux desktop.

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#84
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure. It's a chicken egg problem: if developers get so frustrated that they suddenly start building great experiences on Linux, the users will flock there. It won't be a fast exodus, and it won't be clear cut, but it will set in motion a transition. Developers follow demand, but users follow supply. If enough developers create supply elsewhere, and that supply gets interesting, users will come.

Many OEMs including large ones like Dell have built Linux desktops and laptops over the years. No one buys them. It’s not because of the lack of apps but because the basics are so poor e.g. broken sleep mode, driver instability, poor battery life, changing UI etc

Been using the dev models for almost ten years, none of those are a problem. Ubuntu Mate is a good choice for a stable gui.

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#85
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally gave up, I treat all of their platforms as "legacy" and only port stuff as "best effort" similar to what I was doing with IE in the IE days (yes, that also includes Safari).

Recently getting into web development, getting things to look right on Safari has been such a pain... they really just work on Firefox and Chrome, but every time we deploy a new version, the one coworker with a Mac will message us about some arcane difference in behavior for certain CSS we're using on Safari. I wish we could drop it, but our Analytics disagree, sadly.

What's worse, Apple will insist that the "open web" is the alternative the app store on iOS. Apple controls the portal to that open web too! And either through intention or incompetence, its a non-starter for developers! Even alternate browsers on iOS are forced to use the Safari/WebKit engine; its not even close to "open".

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#87
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100/yr is fairly cheap all things considered, and it takes thirty minutes Max to set up a bash script to handle it. And that’s just non-Xcode. If you use Xcode it’s often automatic.

Cheap considering what? Considering the 30% margins they take on any further sale? Considering the 25$ one-time fee the Play Store takes?

For macOS (which is what we're talking about in a topic about notarization), you can sell your software any way you want outside of the App Store, without the 30% cut. There's still a $100/year developer account fee to be able to notarize new builds of your app.

This is not iOS where the App Store is the only way to install an app.

This comment is not an endorsement of any aspect of Apple's business model, I'm just correcting a factual error in your comment.

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#88
post #56
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure. It's a chicken egg problem: if developers get so frustrated that they suddenly start building great experiences on Linux, the users will flock there. It won't be a fast exodus, and it won't be clear cut, but it will set in motion a transition. Developers follow demand, but users follow supply. If enough developers create supply elsewhere, and that supply gets interesting, users will come.

One can already see it in some areas with the popularity of containers, with many developers choosing Linux as other operating systems have poor to no container support (often nothing more than running them in a Linux VM). Stupid anti-developper practices of proprietary OS vendors will result in only more developers migrating to Linux distros.

Microsoft has pretty much solved this with WSL/WSL2. I hate the obsessive stalking and much of the redesign of Windows 10, but at it's core, it's better for many general consumers.

As a developer, I run into Windows' superior dealing with low-memory situations quite often. My work dev machine has 16GiB of RAM, but my full-stack development work is pushing my system past the 16GiB mark easily now. Coworkers using Windows have similar problems, but their system slows down whereas mine completely freezes for 30 seconds at a time while the system struggles to find some free memory.

For the people who would tell me to "just get more RAM": it's out of my hands, and 16GiB should be more than enough for this type of work anyway. Most software written these days, especially tools aimed at developers, seems to think everyone has 128GiB of RAM and that bad memory handling can best be solved by buying more hardware.

With Gnome 40 and systemd 248, the Linux experience will become just a tad more friendly for both general users and developers, but there's a lot of improvement that can still be made to the Linux experience.

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#89
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not just apps, drivers and OS basics are key too. I tried half a dozen times to switch to Linux as a daily driver. I gave up the last attempt because two things happened: someone out there pushed a bad update that crashed my GUI for no readily apparent rhyme or reason, and I could not for the life of me get my scanner to work. Now if I wanted to have 17 CPUs or hook a HAM radio into it or do something truly weir…

Well yeah, "software", including drivers and OS integration, not just "apps". Linux phones no longer seem limited by hardware or cost (at least judging by my PinePhone), more stability and support. Once stability is there in terms of reliability of the core "Minimum Viable Phone" apps, which seems relatively close, there will be a great opportunity for design-oriented founders/brands to craft highly polished experien…

Branded phones have been a thing for a very long time, and not enough people are interested in them to make any of them successful.

I'm glad that you're happy with your PinePhone, and I hope that one day in the future it achieves perhaps 1% of the global market for smartphones. I doubt it, but that would be nice.

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#90
post #85
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently getting into web development, getting things to look right on Safari has been such a pain... they really just work on Firefox and Chrome, but every time we deploy a new version, the one coworker with a Mac will message us about some arcane difference in behavior for certain CSS we're using on Safari. I wish we could drop it, but our Analytics disagree, sadly.

What's worse, Apple will insist that the "open web" is the alternative the app store on iOS. Apple controls the portal to that open web too! And either through intention or incompetence, its a non-starter for developers! Even alternate browsers on iOS are forced to use the Safari/WebKit engine; its not even close to "open".

People almost only talk about the missing features on Safari and while that's true that they are blockers in some areas (like PWA for instance, that's not a coincidence...), the main issue for me is that Safari is a very buggy browser engine. It's hard to emphasis how a massive amount of small details aren't right at all, you will encounter Safari bugs even on a basic website.

Safari feels like it's in "maintenance mode" at best.

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