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> "I'm going to guess Apple has some stricter requirements on getting an enterprise developer program account, and I don't know if there's any restrictions in t

> "I'm going to guess Apple has some stricter requirements on getting an enterprise developer program account, and I don't know if there's any restrictions in the agreement." There are. Using enterprise distribution to distribute to the general public is explicitly disallowed for some IMO really good reasons (the ability to call private APIs being a big one). There's some gray area when it comes to using enterprise distribution (e.g., to external testers not otherwise affiliated with your company) and Apple generally doesn't police these, but allowing the general public to install is very, very much against the rules and will get you banned.

eridius 11y ago
I'm not particularly surprised. Actually, I would have been surprised if these restrictions weren't in place. But I figured it was worth looking into.
Mikushi 11y ago
So that's how it is nowadays, pay the Apple extortion fee it's good for you . As an app developer with principles I will never endorse Apple's business model as it is toxic and destroying the open internet. That users will not find the app is actually good as it might make them consider switching provider for their mobile OS and one less iOS user is a victory for anyone carring about the health of the internet market and mobile ecosystem at large.
- mattlutze 11y ago
  > So that's how it is nowadays, pay the Apple extortion fee it's good for you . That's not what OP is saying, though. The f.lux folks were leveraging private APIs, that are unpublished and not part of the set of tools you're authorized to build commercial apps on for iOS. Apple doesn't want to support those APIs for whatever reason, so they're not included in the toolset. Just because you can find a way to do something (like distributing binaries to have users compile into their own version of an app, trusting that the distributor is trustworthy, that the distribution hasn't been corrupted somehow, that...) doesn't mean it should be allowed willy nilly. Strong requirements like this at some level have kept quality in the average iOS app high. I recently dumped Android for iOS again because I got sick after 4 years of my devices never quite working right. If I don't have to spend so much time on my iPhone policing apps from randomly deciding to go off the reserve (like happened even with quite popular apps on Android), I'll take that over complete unfettered license to muck about in the operating system. Cause that as a practice just doesn't turn out well. For every f.lux there's 100 development operations who are gonna screw something up.
  - bad_user 11y ago
    I've been an Android user ever since 2011 and I also own iOS devices. Care to name "popular apps on Android" deciding to "go off the reserve" and that don't work? My first smartphone was actually an iPhone 3GS. Because of Apple's walled garden, it couldn't help me with a really simple and downright obvious task for a smartphone - blocking unwanted phone numbers from calling or texting me. People had to jailbreak their phones and install Cydia in order to do that. And because Apple caters to users instead of mobile careers, my iPhone could not tether my 3G connection either because Orange wasn't allowing it without an extra $5 per month. Oh wait, I think I got that backwards. So another use-case for which my smartphone was completely unsuitable for. Now I've got an iPhone 6s that I received as a gift (well, I'm blessed with friends that think I want Apple stuff just because I use a MacBook for work). And I find the restrictions to be as annoying as ever. Yesterday's Firefox release for iOS reminded me of this very fact. On Android I've got the real Firefox and it can do extensions and it can innovate. For example I was blocking ads long before iOS 9, the very concept of ad blocking happening for Firefox first. Plus I use Firefox on my desktop so syncing is nice and I hate monocultures, like what WebKit has become. You see, I couldn't give a crap about F.lux, but I do care about having Firefox, as it's the open-source browser that saved the web and the browser that now keeps WebKit from taking over the whole market, like IExplorer 5 and 6 once did. > I'll take that over complete unfettered license to muck about in the operating system I understand that, but this is were we disagree the most. In society people can be very evil, people can steal from you, can leave you without your job, people can hurt you and your family in myriads of ways. Yet we can cope with this uncertainty, as we've invented institutions that protect us in times of need, we came up with rules for interacting with society (e.g. the concept of trust), we do our part in educating our children to not be complete assholes and all of this usually works, in spite of having certain rights and freedoms, like the freedom of expression, the right to having property, or the right for privacy. People often forget about that last one of course, as we increasingly prefer to police our peers in the name of security, in spite of a lack of evidence that it leads to a more secure environment and often forgetting what it is like to live in a police state, though as somebody that grew up in an Eastern Europe country that was once a police state, trust me when I say that's not nice. But back to the point - personally, I consider any platform that rejects useful apps to be completely inappropriate, no matter the reasoning. And of course, Apple can do whatever they wish with their property, which is a fundamental right after all, but that doesn't mean I can't exercise my freedom of expression to bitch and moan about how much that sucks.

eridius 11y ago

I'm not particularly surprised. Actually, I would have been surprised if these restrictions weren't in place. But I figured it was worth looking into.

Mikushi 11y ago

So that's how it is nowadays, pay the Apple extortion fee it's good for you . As an app developer with principles I will never endorse Apple's business model as it is toxic and destroying the open internet. That users will not find the app is actually good as it might make them consider switching provider for their mobile OS and one less iOS user is a victory for anyone carring about the health of the internet market and mobile ecosystem at large.

mattlutze 11y ago
> So that's how it is nowadays, pay the Apple extortion fee it's good for you . That's not what OP is saying, though. The f.lux folks were leveraging private APIs, that are unpublished and not part of the set of tools you're authorized to build commercial apps on for iOS. Apple doesn't want to support those APIs for whatever reason, so they're not included in the toolset. Just because you can find a way to do something (like distributing binaries to have users compile into their own version of an app, trusting that the distributor is trustworthy, that the distribution hasn't been corrupted somehow, that...) doesn't mean it should be allowed willy nilly. Strong requirements like this at some level have kept quality in the average iOS app high. I recently dumped Android for iOS again because I got sick after 4 years of my devices never quite working right. If I don't have to spend so much time on my iPhone policing apps from randomly deciding to go off the reserve (like happened even with quite popular apps on Android), I'll take that over complete unfettered license to muck about in the operating system. Cause that as a practice just doesn't turn out well. For every f.lux there's 100 development operations who are gonna screw something up.
- bad_user 11y ago
  I've been an Android user ever since 2011 and I also own iOS devices. Care to name "popular apps on Android" deciding to "go off the reserve" and that don't work? My first smartphone was actually an iPhone 3GS. Because of Apple's walled garden, it couldn't help me with a really simple and downright obvious task for a smartphone - blocking unwanted phone numbers from calling or texting me. People had to jailbreak their phones and install Cydia in order to do that. And because Apple caters to users instead of mobile careers, my iPhone could not tether my 3G connection either because Orange wasn't allowing it without an extra $5 per month. Oh wait, I think I got that backwards. So another use-case for which my smartphone was completely unsuitable for. Now I've got an iPhone 6s that I received as a gift (well, I'm blessed with friends that think I want Apple stuff just because I use a MacBook for work). And I find the restrictions to be as annoying as ever. Yesterday's Firefox release for iOS reminded me of this very fact. On Android I've got the real Firefox and it can do extensions and it can innovate. For example I was blocking ads long before iOS 9, the very concept of ad blocking happening for Firefox first. Plus I use Firefox on my desktop so syncing is nice and I hate monocultures, like what WebKit has become. You see, I couldn't give a crap about F.lux, but I do care about having Firefox, as it's the open-source browser that saved the web and the browser that now keeps WebKit from taking over the whole market, like IExplorer 5 and 6 once did. > I'll take that over complete unfettered license to muck about in the operating system I understand that, but this is were we disagree the most. In society people can be very evil, people can steal from you, can leave you without your job, people can hurt you and your family in myriads of ways. Yet we can cope with this uncertainty, as we've invented institutions that protect us in times of need, we came up with rules for interacting with society (e.g. the concept of trust), we do our part in educating our children to not be complete assholes and all of this usually works, in spite of having certain rights and freedoms, like the freedom of expression, the right to having property, or the right for privacy. People often forget about that last one of course, as we increasingly prefer to police our peers in the name of security, in spite of a lack of evidence that it leads to a more secure environment and often forgetting what it is like to live in a police state, though as somebody that grew up in an Eastern Europe country that was once a police state, trust me when I say that's not nice. But back to the point - personally, I consider any platform that rejects useful apps to be completely inappropriate, no matter the reasoning. And of course, Apple can do whatever they wish with their property, which is a fundamental right after all, but that doesn't mean I can't exercise my freedom of expression to bitch and moan about how much that sucks.