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As a developer mainly on MacOS I feel the author's pain. There's also some legitimate gripes about Apple locking down their platform in a way that is ultimately

As a developer mainly on MacOS I feel the author's pain. There's also some legitimate gripes about Apple locking down their platform in a way that is ultimately hostile to users down the road. As a user I say suck it up. Notarization and 1st party QA will make users lives so much easier. I have yet to see people run into serious issues with either that weren't doing things that entitlements/signing were designed to prevent. The $100/year dev license kinda sucks if you just want to hack around and distribute code, but it also goes a long way to stopping people from creating spam accounts and evading bans. But it's a pretty trivial burden, if you're distributing software professionally and can't cough up $100 in revenue in a year... maybe try your hand at something else or just go the amateur route? I also don't get complaining about obsoleting 32 bit. Use obsolete software on an obsolete OS in a VM like the rest of us, we all hate supporting things until the end of time.

codesushi42 7y ago
"As a user... The $100/year dev license kinda sucks if you just want to hack around and distribute code" As a user, what does $100 a year even accomplish? It is nothing more than a racket.
- dwaite 7y ago
  You don't need to pay to run your own code or distribute un-notorized code.
damnyou 7y ago
Apple is a trillion dollar company. It can easily support running 32-bit indefinitely, perhaps with a download for 32-bit libraries libraries and/or with some sort of containerization. As a platform holder it has the responsibility to do so. Failing to do that is a clear abdication. It is clear from the post that Apple's platforms are hostile towards any sort of digital executable art.
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  It's not about "could" but about "should." Apple hasn't sold a computer with a 32 bit CPU in what, 8-9 years? They deprecated 32 bit support almost a decade ago. Software has a lifespan and always has, to run obsolete code you need to jump through hoops to get an obsolete target running. This isn't new.
  - FussyZeus 7y ago
    I've always wondered, what exactly is the overhead on running 32-bit code on a 64-bit machine? Why is support eventually dropped? I'm sure there are good reasons but I've no idea what they are.
    - unlinked_dll 7y ago
      I believe there is a little bit of overhead when it comes to mapping virtual addresses and dealing with different pointer sizes for the OS, but imo the main reason Apple wants to ditch 64 bit support is so their OS isn't tightly coupled to an ISA that has 32/64 bit modes. In other words it's not about the overhead, it's about the reliance on x86.
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        If ISA decoupling is the goal then they should be mandating everyone write to a VM like the CLR or JVM (or variants like Dalvik). It seems kind of silly to block x86 modes on x64 chips when the backwards compatibility needs of Windows pretty much insures "eternal" x86 modes. It's going to be a while before x86 modes disappear on Intel or AMD chips, and there's evidence to support that like the Itanium (IA-64) failure, and the fact that Windows on ARM made it a commitment to emulate x86 (but not x64) on ARM. x86 is likely going to be a lasting "lingua franca" ISA. Right now I'd almost put more money on x64 being retired before x86, and if anything from that perspective Apple is more tightly coupled to an ISA than before this choice.
        pohl 7y ago
cortesoft 7y ago
> just go the amateur route? But how do you even go the amateur route? You still won't be able to distribute what you make. A big part of my childhood was making games, and sharing them on shareware sites in the mid 90s. It sucks that kids today aren't going to be able to do that. There was no way I could afford $100 as a 10 year old.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  Thing is, for the common scenario of "safe enough for random users to install" we want some barrier of entry. The market where random creations of a ten year old are acceptable isn't the Apple Store, it's something like Roblox environment for user-created content or some other sandbox that is (a) isolated from the rest of the system and (b) makes it clear that it's likely not to meet even the (already low) standards of the generic Store. For all the major means of distribution the problem isn't not enough apps, the problem is too much garbage - so the direction of improving end-user experience is more filtering of apps and developers, not easier access to distribution.
  - Razengan 7y ago
    That is exactly what some developers just can't seem to get: Many users agree with Apple. But those developers are going: "No those users are wrong and should join my mob to make Apple let me do whatever I want to users' systems."
- birdyrooster 7y ago
  The amateurs will have to start distributing source. I remember back in the day when I was a kid making GameMaker games on Mac in the late 90s, sometimes I would collaborate with other developers and we would just send the source files around which were completely useable, but of course we wanted to distribute executables as if we were legitimate companies, even though our users were typically other kid developers. We had fake company names and stuff, but if we were emulating open source projects instead of cloistered corporations, we could've gotten more done together. I predict this change will cause kids to embrace open source more and distribute their projects in a way that can be shared and reused.
FussyZeus 7y ago
> ...if you're distributing software professionally and can't cough up $100 in revenue in a year... This is kinda where I'm at with this. Surely anyone even remotely garnering an audience could raise this amount annually. It's a decent cost to an individual but to even a humble audience, it's peanuts. If you can't raise even that, then IMO your game being lost is of little consequence. Not everything farted out by every indie developer is a lost masterpiece, sometimes stuff is lost because it lacks the traction to merit archival.
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  devil's advocate: $100 is a lot of money to spend on a hobby/side gig for a lot of people. Like some of us can blow more than that just on IDE's/Git clients in a year, but for some people it's a legitimate hurdle to cross. When I was in high school working on the weekends, that would have been two weeks wages, which I had other stuff to spend on. And that's from a privileged background, I know plenty of folks who's weekend/summer jobs paid towards rent/bills for their families. That said, Apple probably doesn't care about the teenagers or indie devs out there who want to make a little game for their platform. However I'd also say to those folks - if you're strapped for money, don't develop for Apple devices. Go make a doohickey on a windows or Linux box.
  - FussyZeus 7y ago
    > devil's advocate: $100 is a lot of money to spend on a hobby/side gig for a lot of people. Agree. But this isn't some lost nobody. This person has a Wikipedia Page [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathalie_Lawhead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathalie_Lawhead], is an established game developer and artist, and lives in California. She's won multiple awards and she owns at least one Mac. Like come on. The refusal to drop a hundred bucks on something that is apparently so important to her reeks of good old fashioned stubbornness, or at worst, entitlement, but even then, she has a significant audience. Crowdfund it, cough up and stop whining. Like I don't entirely agree with the $100/year model being the only option from Apple, but we're all paying that particular piper. Why is she so special that hers shouldn't be subject to the same?
pergadad 7y ago
Yes, absolutely, poor people should not be able to try to develop their skills and attempt to make apps.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  They can make apps and develop these skills, however, the apps listed for random end-users in the Apple store shouldn't contain all these experiments. This is about access to a particular distribution and advertising channel, which should happen after you've already developed the skills and are ready to offer something serious in context of which a $100/year investment is trivial.
  - damnyou 7y ago
    Notarization is a requirement for distributing your content outside the app store. Within it the requirements are even higher.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Notarization isn't the same as the App Store. This is about whether a 3rd-party application downloaded from a 3rd-pary website can be run. It used to be that you only needed to pay to get onto the distribution and advertising channel, now you need to pay not to make your user jump through special hoops on an admin account. It's not implausible to suggest that in the future, that loophole will be removed as well. Apple does not want you to download apps that they can't personally vet. The complaint isn't that you need to pay to get into their store. Of course you do, that isn't surprising to anyone. It's about whether distribution channels exist outside of their store. As to why that's a problem? To quote the author: > It really upsets me because the iOS App Store policies basically prohibited art or anything interesting (nudity, glitch, error art...temperamental depending on who reviewed you for approval). > It was hell for me to get things approved, and even when I got them approved I had to change so much about my work it really wasn't my work anymore. A platform holder shouldn't dictate so much about someone else's work. Apple has been consistently behind the curve when it comes to recognizing the artistic potential of games[0]. On a cultural level, we don't want want them to be a gatekeeper for a medium. As a company they aren't responsible enough or smart enough for that job. [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3879194/apple-app-store-guidelines-tell-game-developers-to-avoid-serious-themes https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3879194/apple-app-store-g...
boudewijnrempt 7y ago
Or just drop Apple and macOS. Even for an application like Krita, for creative people, macOS is a laughably small platform, with a very small user-base, bringing in next to nothing money-wise, nothing contribution-wise, and it tries to force everyone to use proprietary libraries like Metal, instead of properly supporting OpenGL and Vulkan. From an effort-to-income perspective, macOS isn't worth it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- s_dev 7y ago
  >From an effort-to-income perspective, macOS isn't worth it. Apple has introduced Catalyst in Xcode -- this translates iOS apps to macOS, compile once and run on two platforms. Mac App store has been notirous for not getting as much love as the iOS one but this change might reverse the direction as there will be a lot more apps coming for the Mac App Store now that they can leverage their iOS dev ecosystem.
  - w1nst0nsm1th 7y ago
    I don't know If the Mac App Store will bring better apps and grater for enthousiasm than it is now for Apple Store business model, but you can be sure of one thing : notarisation program will not last. The goal is to lock the platform like iOS and force force every user to get their apps through the App Store and nowhere else. I'm pretty sur once MacOS has switched to ARM, system partition will be in read only mode, you will not be able to install app outside of the AppStore except if you jailbreak thank to a "security flaw".
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Razengan 7y ago
  > for creative people, macOS is a laughably small platform, with a very small user-base, bringing in next to nothing money-wise, nothing contribution-wise ... As a user, statements like that – about any platform – honestly just make me want to avoid anything from the developers who make them.
viraptor 7y ago
> I also don't get complaining about obsoleting 32 bit. Use obsolete software on an obsolete OS in a VM like the rest of us You mean like games released last year which require heavy GPU usage? That's neither obsolete, nor a great experience.
- Bud 7y ago
  Please cite one game—a single one—from last year which is 32-bit only and "requires heavy GPU usage". One will do. I'm sure this won't take you long. Even if you can cite one, all that will prove is that the developer was so incredibly stupid that they ignored a full decade of warnings about how 32-bit software would be deprecated soon.
  - viraptor 7y ago
    I'd be happy to tell you what it was, but I'm on holidays away from my laptop/steam account.
    - gowld 7y ago
      I'm not even sure it's possible to acquire hardware on which to compile and test a demanding game and not have a 64 bit Dev toolchain, without going to extra effort just to avoid 64bit for what purpose? A trivial performance improvement for an app that is resource intensive while also not needing 4gb Memory?
w1nst0nsm1th 7y ago
Notarization will not last. In 2 ou 3 years max, they play the card of security again and will stop the notarization program. Why do you believe they want to bring MacOS and iOS together through same processor family and same developement api ? They want to bring iOS business model to MacOS. How is it not that obvious ?

codesushi42 7y ago

"As a user... The $100/year dev license kinda sucks if you just want to hack around and distribute code" As a user, what does $100 a year even accomplish? It is nothing more than a racket.

dwaite 7y ago
You don't need to pay to run your own code or distribute un-notorized code.

damnyou 7y ago

Apple is a trillion dollar company. It can easily support running 32-bit indefinitely, perhaps with a download for 32-bit libraries libraries and/or with some sort of containerization. As a platform holder it has the responsibility to do so. Failing to do that is a clear abdication. It is clear from the post that Apple's platforms are hostile towards any sort of digital executable art.

unlinked_dll 7y ago
It's not about "could" but about "should." Apple hasn't sold a computer with a 32 bit CPU in what, 8-9 years? They deprecated 32 bit support almost a decade ago. Software has a lifespan and always has, to run obsolete code you need to jump through hoops to get an obsolete target running. This isn't new.
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  I've always wondered, what exactly is the overhead on running 32-bit code on a 64-bit machine? Why is support eventually dropped? I'm sure there are good reasons but I've no idea what they are.
  - unlinked_dll 7y ago
    I believe there is a little bit of overhead when it comes to mapping virtual addresses and dealing with different pointer sizes for the OS, but imo the main reason Apple wants to ditch 64 bit support is so their OS isn't tightly coupled to an ISA that has 32/64 bit modes. In other words it's not about the overhead, it's about the reliance on x86.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      If ISA decoupling is the goal then they should be mandating everyone write to a VM like the CLR or JVM (or variants like Dalvik). It seems kind of silly to block x86 modes on x64 chips when the backwards compatibility needs of Windows pretty much insures "eternal" x86 modes. It's going to be a while before x86 modes disappear on Intel or AMD chips, and there's evidence to support that like the Itanium (IA-64) failure, and the fact that Windows on ARM made it a commitment to emulate x86 (but not x64) on ARM. x86 is likely going to be a lasting "lingua franca" ISA. Right now I'd almost put more money on x64 being retired before x86, and if anything from that perspective Apple is more tightly coupled to an ISA than before this choice.
      - pohl 7y ago

cortesoft 7y ago

> just go the amateur route? But how do you even go the amateur route? You still won't be able to distribute what you make. A big part of my childhood was making games, and sharing them on shareware sites in the mid 90s. It sucks that kids today aren't going to be able to do that. There was no way I could afford $100 as a 10 year old.

PeterisP 7y ago
Thing is, for the common scenario of "safe enough for random users to install" we want some barrier of entry. The market where random creations of a ten year old are acceptable isn't the Apple Store, it's something like Roblox environment for user-created content or some other sandbox that is (a) isolated from the rest of the system and (b) makes it clear that it's likely not to meet even the (already low) standards of the generic Store. For all the major means of distribution the problem isn't not enough apps, the problem is too much garbage - so the direction of improving end-user experience is more filtering of apps and developers, not easier access to distribution.
- Razengan 7y ago
  That is exactly what some developers just can't seem to get: Many users agree with Apple. But those developers are going: "No those users are wrong and should join my mob to make Apple let me do whatever I want to users' systems."
birdyrooster 7y ago
The amateurs will have to start distributing source. I remember back in the day when I was a kid making GameMaker games on Mac in the late 90s, sometimes I would collaborate with other developers and we would just send the source files around which were completely useable, but of course we wanted to distribute executables as if we were legitimate companies, even though our users were typically other kid developers. We had fake company names and stuff, but if we were emulating open source projects instead of cloistered corporations, we could've gotten more done together. I predict this change will cause kids to embrace open source more and distribute their projects in a way that can be shared and reused.

FussyZeus 7y ago

> ...if you're distributing software professionally and can't cough up $100 in revenue in a year... This is kinda where I'm at with this. Surely anyone even remotely garnering an audience could raise this amount annually. It's a decent cost to an individual but to even a humble audience, it's peanuts. If you can't raise even that, then IMO your game being lost is of little consequence. Not everything farted out by every indie developer is a lost masterpiece, sometimes stuff is lost because it lacks the traction to merit archival.

unlinked_dll 7y ago
devil's advocate: $100 is a lot of money to spend on a hobby/side gig for a lot of people. Like some of us can blow more than that just on IDE's/Git clients in a year, but for some people it's a legitimate hurdle to cross. When I was in high school working on the weekends, that would have been two weeks wages, which I had other stuff to spend on. And that's from a privileged background, I know plenty of folks who's weekend/summer jobs paid towards rent/bills for their families. That said, Apple probably doesn't care about the teenagers or indie devs out there who want to make a little game for their platform. However I'd also say to those folks - if you're strapped for money, don't develop for Apple devices. Go make a doohickey on a windows or Linux box.
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  > devil's advocate: $100 is a lot of money to spend on a hobby/side gig for a lot of people. Agree. But this isn't some lost nobody. This person has a Wikipedia Page [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathalie_Lawhead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathalie_Lawhead], is an established game developer and artist, and lives in California. She's won multiple awards and she owns at least one Mac. Like come on. The refusal to drop a hundred bucks on something that is apparently so important to her reeks of good old fashioned stubbornness, or at worst, entitlement, but even then, she has a significant audience. Crowdfund it, cough up and stop whining. Like I don't entirely agree with the $100/year model being the only option from Apple, but we're all paying that particular piper. Why is she so special that hers shouldn't be subject to the same?

pergadad 7y ago

Yes, absolutely, poor people should not be able to try to develop their skills and attempt to make apps.

PeterisP 7y ago
They can make apps and develop these skills, however, the apps listed for random end-users in the Apple store shouldn't contain all these experiments. This is about access to a particular distribution and advertising channel, which should happen after you've already developed the skills and are ready to offer something serious in context of which a $100/year investment is trivial.
- damnyou 7y ago
  Notarization is a requirement for distributing your content outside the app store. Within it the requirements are even higher.
- danShumway 7y ago
  Notarization isn't the same as the App Store. This is about whether a 3rd-party application downloaded from a 3rd-pary website can be run. It used to be that you only needed to pay to get onto the distribution and advertising channel, now you need to pay not to make your user jump through special hoops on an admin account. It's not implausible to suggest that in the future, that loophole will be removed as well. Apple does not want you to download apps that they can't personally vet. The complaint isn't that you need to pay to get into their store. Of course you do, that isn't surprising to anyone. It's about whether distribution channels exist outside of their store. As to why that's a problem? To quote the author: > It really upsets me because the iOS App Store policies basically prohibited art or anything interesting (nudity, glitch, error art...temperamental depending on who reviewed you for approval). > It was hell for me to get things approved, and even when I got them approved I had to change so much about my work it really wasn't my work anymore. A platform holder shouldn't dictate so much about someone else's work. Apple has been consistently behind the curve when it comes to recognizing the artistic potential of games[0]. On a cultural level, we don't want want them to be a gatekeeper for a medium. As a company they aren't responsible enough or smart enough for that job. [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3879194/apple-app-store-guidelines-tell-game-developers-to-avoid-serious-themes https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3879194/apple-app-store-g...

boudewijnrempt 7y ago

Or just drop Apple and macOS. Even for an application like Krita, for creative people, macOS is a laughably small platform, with a very small user-base, bringing in next to nothing money-wise, nothing contribution-wise, and it tries to force everyone to use proprietary libraries like Metal, instead of properly supporting OpenGL and Vulkan. From an effort-to-income perspective, macOS isn't worth it.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
s_dev 7y ago
>From an effort-to-income perspective, macOS isn't worth it. Apple has introduced Catalyst in Xcode -- this translates iOS apps to macOS, compile once and run on two platforms. Mac App store has been notirous for not getting as much love as the iOS one but this change might reverse the direction as there will be a lot more apps coming for the Mac App Store now that they can leverage their iOS dev ecosystem.
- w1nst0nsm1th 7y ago
  I don't know If the Mac App Store will bring better apps and grater for enthousiasm than it is now for Apple Store business model, but you can be sure of one thing : notarisation program will not last. The goal is to lock the platform like iOS and force force every user to get their apps through the App Store and nowhere else. I'm pretty sur once MacOS has switched to ARM, system partition will be in read only mode, you will not be able to install app outside of the AppStore except if you jailbreak thank to a "security flaw".
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Razengan 7y ago
> for creative people, macOS is a laughably small platform, with a very small user-base, bringing in next to nothing money-wise, nothing contribution-wise ... As a user, statements like that – about any platform – honestly just make me want to avoid anything from the developers who make them.

viraptor 7y ago

> I also don't get complaining about obsoleting 32 bit. Use obsolete software on an obsolete OS in a VM like the rest of us You mean like games released last year which require heavy GPU usage? That's neither obsolete, nor a great experience.

Bud 7y ago
Please cite one game—a single one—from last year which is 32-bit only and "requires heavy GPU usage". One will do. I'm sure this won't take you long. Even if you can cite one, all that will prove is that the developer was so incredibly stupid that they ignored a full decade of warnings about how 32-bit software would be deprecated soon.
- viraptor 7y ago
  I'd be happy to tell you what it was, but I'm on holidays away from my laptop/steam account.
  - gowld 7y ago
    I'm not even sure it's possible to acquire hardware on which to compile and test a demanding game and not have a 64 bit Dev toolchain, without going to extra effort just to avoid 64bit for what purpose? A trivial performance improvement for an app that is resource intensive while also not needing 4gb Memory?

w1nst0nsm1th 7y ago

Notarization will not last. In 2 ou 3 years max, they play the card of security again and will stop the notarization program. Why do you believe they want to bring MacOS and iOS together through same processor family and same developement api ? They want to bring iOS business model to MacOS. How is it not that obvious ?