Lovely article but this made me sad/mad. How did we get to the point where this is acceptable? MAGA (Microsoft Apple Google Amazon) have a stultifying effect in our software sharing lives now.

Agreed. Devs are somewhat of an isolated segment of society and so there are few politicians thinking about the stultifying effects of App Store distribution or the fact that even the devices themselves are hostile to shared personal projects.

>How did we get to the point where this is acceptable?

IMO, bad actors.

40 years ago we didn't need much in the name of cyber security, restrictions, controls, etc. You most likely personally knew the vast majority of other people that had any kind of access to your systems, or that you exchanged any kind of electronic data with.

As the aperture of users and developers has opened, risks have increased. There is probably some analogy here similar to how the value of network increases exponentially with the number of connected devices, the risk factor increases exponentially with the number of users and potential software developers for an ecosystem.

Exactly. Even major “trusted” third parties like Adobe can’t actually be trusted to keep their fingers out of parts of the system they have no business poking around in. Time and time again it’s been proven prudent to treat third party devs as hostile parties by default, with trust being hard-earned.

I'm curious if Apple actually uses they software they write. Surely they must right? And if so, then how do they not improve it. Or if they don't ... perhaps they don't use other software so they don't understand how things could be different?

The author of the article, Robin Sloan, is an author that's written a couple of novels and a bunch of short stories (as well a great monthly-ish newsletter). I highly recommend giving his first novel, "Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore", a read if you liked that line.

Yeah, I’ve said in many interviews that I know a lot about signing Apple products, all learned entirely against my will.