Make the app a Web App and visit it in Safari.
Apple has banned it being notarized and distributed from their App Store but iPhones still have access to the conventional web which Apple has no control over.
Apple also loses all code auditing and screening, meaning they can't ban GPL licensed PWAs like they ban alternative Linphone builds (as they are GPLv2), Signal Private Messenger builds (GPLv3) and only the official developer can build and submit these apps to the app store.
Apple's GPL ban also effiectively mandates these apps having broad CLAs to ensure they can relicense the code for use in the Apple App Store.
Edit: removed bonus apostrophe
This was also the music industy's fear of digital data about 20-30 years ago.
Both the Music industry and Apple seek to maintain their control and thus their cash cows, but whether that will continue to work out for Apple remains to be seen...
And what is it's replacement? It seems in app purchases are what keeps up a large part of mobile apps.
iTunes changed the music business, but I have not noticed a similar change for mobile apps, web or not.
If I make my app available via my website as a PWA, and all the hosting costs are my own, and don't use any of the app store's services, why does Apple deserve a share of the in app (in PWA?) purchases?
http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/
[…]
Anyway, the message is pretty obvious: Apple won’t ship anything that’s licensed under GPL v3 on OS X. Now, why is that?
There are two big changes in GPL v3. The first is that it explicitly prohibits patent lawsuits against people for actually using the GPL-licensed software you ship. The second is that it carefully prevents TiVoization, locking down hardware so that people can’t actually run the software they want.
So, which of those things are they planning for OS X, eh?
I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?
The consequence is that Apple can't merely settle to solve patent disputes for any included GPLv3 component, but has to find a way to have the upstream component (and all deviations) have free use of the patent.
There is a way for end users to modify their software now, but I don’t know if it would satisfy that developer. VLC relicensed to make clear they don’t require distributors to do this.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store...
As far as I can discern, Linphone is provided in the App Store under a proprietary license, VLC had to relicense as LGPL, and GNU Go is still not on the App Store.
And anyway, a PWA should be actually progressive. If it requires all the features it’s the opposite of progressive.
The original point was that apparently there are no "work arounds" not mentioning that it could be done via WebApp seems a little disingenous.
Pointing out a "work around" for the developer is meaningless, in terms of "hey! they can reimplement it as a web app to bypass Apple's shitty walled garden!" is completely useless to these folks in HongKong right now.
Part of these are social network effects (all my friends use it, plus the apps they use need you to use the same apps, meaning you have to use the same OS or one of the big ones, etc).
Part of them are actual network effects (you've already used the same g-suite or whatever apple provides, and moving to something else - if it exists at all - is either very difficult or impossible).
I'm sure there's others I am not thinking of right now.
But both leave only the "hardcore" privacy and open source activists as your only market - and that's so small that only others of similar persuasion even both to create and host those alternatives, if they exist at all. Since the market is small, and developers/time is lacking, UI and other parts of such apps/operating systems/ecospaces tend to be non-existant or suffer other oddities that keep them out of being adopted by the masses, unless those people get fed up enough with the existing products to be willing to put up with all the downsides of a more free and open system.
Which is kinda where Linux is today - a combination of becoming "good enough" - but also coupled with more than a bit of "corporate America" (and/or "corporate west") helping to make it just a tad better (for business use, for gaming, etc) - and the masses who are getting fed up with Apple and/or Microsoft - a few of them peel off to see what it's all about. Dual boot, or virtualization (and Microsoft has made that easier, too), they get a taste, and some think "hey this isn't really that bad - I can do almost everything" and some migrate over (with the big exception - games - but Valve and Steam are helping in that regard, too).
That's what is needed in the mobile realm, and nothing exists yet. Yes, there are alternatives, but the real bugger has been the hardware - which is very locked down, and only (again) the hardcore and activists are willing to go the extra mile to break open (root, jailbreak) consumer-available hardware, or purchase already "open" hardware, or go so far as to build their own hardware (I am contemplating this option, personally).
Until it gets easier for the "masses" to get a more open hardware mobile platform, the next step of an open ecosystem, operating systems, and apps is much for difficult to make happen. With Apple and Samsung being the main two hardware providers (for iOS and Android respectively), with the way both lock down their hardware, it will stay this way.
But really - for Android at least - Samsung does this mainly for the providers themselves. For instance (in my case), I have a G7 - but it's a T-Mobile version. I paid for it in full (I don't have a contract with T-Mobile, but they are my provider) - but Samsung provides a different version of the G7 (with a different processor and such) than they do outside the USA. That hardware is much easier to root, while the USA version is seemingly made to be as airtight as possible to root (with a constant back-and-forth game being played behind the scenes). It is strange - it's partly Samsung, partly the providers.
Ultimately, I'm just going to opt-out of this hardware game and build my own platform; I already have the 4G module to support phone and data (and I am planning on using it for data only, as I virtually never use my phone for voice calls). If I am lucky, it will be my winter project.
So true, which is why we need antitrust enforcement. If you run a platform or a service, you have to provide access to that platform or service to your competitors under the exact same terms as your customers. Anything less is the definition of anti-competitive.
In addition there is nothing stopping them for trading their iPhone for a more expensive Android.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is a likely outcome.
Documentation on iPhone hardware is basically nonexistent. Someone would need to reverse engineer it all and write drivers from scratch.
Hong Kong has multiple private companies providing eyeball access. It would be far more difficult for the Chinese government to get all of their compliance. If they just wanted to get traffic information, it would be far easier to just collect a statistical sampling collected from flows data on core routers for general info or to monitor specific IP's using rulesets without the massive undertaking needed for always on firewall capabilities on every single packet.
The other aspect of the Great Firewall is the alternative ecosystem inside it, and the censorship system embedded in weibo etc. It will be interesting to see if surveillance capitalism apps like Wepay and Alipay suffer a setback in HK in the wake of the protests. Cf https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-24/alipay-s-...
I don't think this is accurate, though it may come to be in the future. Which is sort of the point, why allow the techno dystopia to come?
Is the web censored in HK?
You mean years ago?
Not that I support this move by Apple, but ... how is this different from them rejecting any application for any reason? We've had a ton of stories on HN of them doing that (for various different reasons)...
Apple's position was never okay, and I hope this situation makes more people realize that.
Let's not pretend this is business as usual, however morally bad the usual business already is.
People always seem to think of this as a false dichotomy, so I want to emphasize again that I think Apple's curated App Store is great. It just shouldn't be the only way to acquire software.
- Have a store with, say, quality control, and the option to side-load
- Have a store with "quality control" (and, as I see it, some rather large levers to fight competition), no option to side-load, but don't bow to state actors
- same, but bow to state actors.
I wish it's the first, I thought it's the second, but we now see it's the third. I think the the third is worse than the second option.
Bowing to state actors is a decision individuals make.
If the platform gives specific people the ability to bow on behalf of everyone (as iOS does - reviewers have that power), eventually some of those people will do so.
A centralized app store must at least bow to the state actors where its business operations and servers live. Otherwise the state actors will take their hardware and remove the business from existence.
If the OS supports direct installation, then you avoid the inherent risks of centralized software.
Granted, you gain the risks of decentralized software.
Magic bullets are few and far between.
This isn't new. Apple has always bowed to state actors in order to damage minorities, literally ever since the app store launched with it's censorship targeting sex workers and sexual minorities on behest of the US government.
This one is just more obvious, but not new.
Was it okay when Apple got rid of Alex Jones's app? He was spreading misinformation about vaccines, that's pretty darn dangerous. I guess you could argue that wasn't due to a "state actor", but is anti-Hong-Kong pressure from Chinese citizens all that different?
And here's the thing—I do think platform holders sometimes need to make moral judgements, and I'm glad Alex Jones is banned from the App Store. I'm significantly less glad that it's completely impossible to install his app anymore. It's the difference between not actively giving someone a megaphone, and actually banning speech.
The difference is between taking something down because you agree with the rationale the entity-that-wants-something-taken-down gives you, such that you'd do it even without that entity in existence as long as you knew the information they told you; vs. being intimidated by that entity into doing so, such that without the entity, you'd have never done anything.
In any case, I'm allowed to make a moral judgement. We do this all the time: Breaking the law is bad, but stealing is less "bad" than killing. And so on.
I know right? It's crazy people pay more money for less.
I'm not sure how to teach Apple users, they seem to find an excuse for every anti-consumer thing they do.
There are real benefits to having a curated, sandboxed, and audited selection of safe, quality software. Most users should never need to leave such an environment
What is necessary is an escape hatch—one that doesn't involve continual software reinstalls, or outright buying new hardware. It's fine to hide the option away in settings, where most users won't find it. But in extraordinary circumstances—like when your city is rioting against your government—people will help each other locate the switch, and download what they need to stay safe.
I can't totally disagree. To have a completely secure device you have to lock out the user since the user is often the least secure component of the system.
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-dancing-bunnies-problem/
A modern security and privacy conscious OS would be "principle of least privilege" from the ground up. It would be written into the DNA of the kernel and OS from the first line of code, not bolted on later via permission managers and leaky APIs and then mandatory notarization by a central authority to work around the fact that the whole mess is still insecure.
We do have something like that. It's called a web browser. A browser is a small VM that runs utterly untrusted code relatively safely. In many cases it's code from the sketchiest ad networks and other hellholes imaginable.
Imagine if your real OS were like that. Install anything even known malware with fairly strong confidence that you're safe and that it can't do anything you don't explicitly grant to it.
> We do have something like that. It's called a web browser. A browser is a small VM that runs utterly untrusted code relatively safely. In many cases it's code from the sketchiest ad networks and other hellholes imaginable.
Given how many issues there are with ad tracking, fingerprinting, and other privacy related issues, I don't feel the web browser is particularly safer than an iOS app. What can an iOS app really do that a browser app cannot at this point?
>He says that you can opt out of code signing and the App Store on Mac because that's a professional OS
And this is why he's wrong: it's NOT a "professional OS". My sister has a Macbook Air, running MacOS. She's not a professional (computer user). Mac computers aren't just for "professionals" (esp. software devs), they're sold to anyone who wants something with a bigger screen than a mobile phone or tablet, and wants a keyboard to type on and wants to be able to have a normal filesystem to work with. In short, anyone who still wants to be able to use a normal PC.
She uses her Mac for typing documents (she likes to write), watching movies, etc. She is absolutely NOT what I consider a "tech-savvy user". So why does she "need" to be able to opt out of code signing and the App Store?
So, no, he's completely wrong. If Apple only sold their computers to software devs, he'd have a good argument, but they don't, so he doesn't.
My two real beefs with this arrangement are the requirement of a Mac, and the potential use of the App Store curation to block apps for political reasons, as is happening with HKmap.live.
Fwiw, it’s not one-time. It’s $100 every single year.
It's not that they're paying more for less; it's that they're paying more for a curated less. For the vast majority of Apple's customers, this works out great (provided they aren't ever going to engage in an antigovernment protest).
Please don't get it twisted. What Apple does has value to many people; it's not as black-and-white as you seem to make it out to be.
There is nothing on this world, nothing, is good anytime anywhere to anyone.
Hopefully this alleviates the immediate negative consequences of the removal.
Microsoft tried the same crap with their store, which was fortunately rejected to a large degree. The future of software shouldn't look so backwards. I can understand users being drawn in by accessibility, which is hard to realize for more open systems. But I don't really understand developers choosing Apple aside from monetary opportunities.
Macs try to go in a similar direction, so these comments saying I shouldn't care about app notarization are nothing but short sighted in my opinion. Because the security benefit is minuscule and new dangers like this pretty impalpable but nevertheless very real and the degree of enforcement of these mechanism will certainly increase as soon as Apple sees the opportunity.
Overall a crappy platform to develop against.
I don't like it either, but don't fool yourself: lots of people don't care. They don't care if it's "their device" or not. They're perfectly happy to pay $1200 for a high-end device they don't have full control of, because it signals wealth, and does what they want it to do.
Just look at how many people lease cars instead of buying them. It's not that different; they don't own those cars, they're really just renting them. They're not allowed to modify them, and can get in trouble if they don't follow the maintenance schedule or drive them too much. But for those people, they're fine with that.
>Microsoft tried the same crap with their store, which was fortunately rejected to a large degree.
This is probably for at least two reasons. 1) There was already a huge ecosystem of Windows software out there, long before MS tried to ape Apple. Those companies were already successful in selling their apps directly to customers, without having to give MS a 30% cut. Why would they want to adopt MS's new strategy? 2) MS being MS, they most likely bungled it in some way. This happens every time they try to ape Apple or someone else; the first few iterations are absolutely terrible and a big joke. Sometimes they persist and it finally works out for them, other times they finally give up (e.g., PlaysForSure, Zune).
Imagine you're a Hong Kong protester. You're spending a significant portion of your time in the streets, and the rest at work, or school, or whatever other life tasks you're responsible for. Do you really want to spend an hour reading up on how to Jailbreak your phone? And then, because this is a "tethered" Jailbreak, what happens if your phone reboots and you're not near a computer?
There is a balance to be struck here. Sideloading can't be too easy, lest people get tricked into doing it. But it shouldn't require more than five minutes, and it should be a one-time process. (Or at least nearly-one-time: making it annual might be reasonable.)
But the downside is of course that Apple is in control, and like any corporation it will do things with that power that are unethical, immoral, anti-competitive, anti-consumer, etc. to the fullest possible imaginable degree.
Its like when you buy a DRM protected piece of content and that company revokes access in the future. Its entirely predictable and preventable.
Customers buy DRM content all the time and they buy Apple products instead of phones that give you freedom. Ignorance is not an excuse, I won't blame Apple, they aren't people, they just do what is natural in all corporations, I blame people/consumers, they deserve every single last bit of totalitarianism that is coming their way.
There is nothing wrong with code signing. There is everything wrong with making Apple the sole arbiter of mandatory code signing. It's the difference between being against locks, and being against someone else owning the keys to your house.
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> I won't blame Apple, they aren't people [...] I blame people/consumers
No, you can't blame people. It isn't the individual consumer's job to consider the ins and outs of how they may be limiting their free expression in the future. That's not realistic.
Corporations are not robots; Apple is run by people, and specifically people who should be considerably more knowledgable on this subject than the average consumer. They should feel some level of social responsibility.
This will not be the last time Apple ends up in this type of situation. I hope we have the right conversations about them, and I hope they make Apple hurt. Because this was entirely predictable, and entirely of Apple's own making.
Sometimes I wonder how many instances to the contrary people need to get this falsehood out of their heads. Corporations are only beholden to their shareholders, if any one person at Apple (including the CEO) is not at all times acting solely to maximize the profit to their shareholders they will be replaced by someone who will. The government has to force corporations to their will through tight regulations, consumer protection and anti-trust legislation. Why are all corporations spending this incredible amount on political corruption/"lobbying", its because all these things work.
Why do we consider it acceptable for CEOs to shrug off any and all social consequences of their actions? We can and should outlaw actions that are socially harmful, but we shouldn't just shrug our shoulders when powerful people find ways to skirt those rules to enrich themselves.
Anyway, even if it were true in practice, this is entirely the result of laws and court decisions. Governments could change it with the stroke of a pen.
Google apple largest shareholders
Being a software engineer I side with consumers more as I use a ton of services, but that's the flip side to the convince the consumer has absolutely no ownership to anything.
You sure about that? I mean yeah, "we" as in at least you and I, but the general public... I still enjoy https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html as prophetic fiction and occasionally remember that around 10 years ago Amazon in reality remotely deleted copies of Orwell's 1984 from kindle devices when Amazon learned that version of the book was put on their kindle store without authorization. (But at least on the issue here Amazon does better, it's not hard to load your own mobis or convert things to mobi format. I suspect the kindle would still be very popular without such ease though.)
...no, sadly I'm not sure. The point I wanted to make is that banning certain apps is no better than banning certain books.
I originally wanted to write something like "We wouldn't be okay if certain books were banned on certain brands of bookshelves", precisely for the reason you mention—but I decided the comparison would be too weird.
That said, I don't think it's a coincidence that every e-reader (as far as I'm aware?) allows sideloading, including the Kindle line, which Amazon sells at a loss. The optics of any company "banning books" would just be too poor. I wish the optics on "banning software" were equally poor.
It's not your iphone/ipad/Macbook, it's Tim's iphone/ipad/Macbook that he deigns to let you use, but only at his pleasure and only to do what he thinks is OK.
Apple should never have been capable of making such a drastic decision for all of their customers. It's one thing to make determinations about what products are allowed in your store, but quite another to unilaterally ban software from what is many people's primary computer. We live in a digital age, and software is a form of free expression. We wouldn't find this acceptable with eBooks, and we should not find it acceptable for applications.
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† Unrealistic workarounds include paying $100 per year for a developer account, reinstalling the app once every seven days, or finding a shady, stolen enterprise certificate. These are not real alternatives for 99% of people.