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Back in the 2007 or when it came out in Sweden I bought the iPhone and started developing for it. This was cool, new and exciting and it was fine as long as my

• tsycho 1y ago
  I totally agree with your sentiment, but can't you still do that with Android? IIUC, you can still load apps directly via adb. Is that not correct?
  • fullStackOasis 1y ago
    Yes, you can still do that directly (I did that just the other day). I can't entirely understand Google's announcement, but it almost sounded to me like they will forbid sideloading if you're not an "official" dev (gone through their hoops). I also saw something in their statement about wanting to support hobbyists. It sounded like an afterthought.
• jb1991 1y ago
  I don’t know what it was like back then but in today’s world you do not need to pay Apple any fees if all you’re doing is writing software in Xcode and deploy it to your own device. You do need a developer account, the free version of one, but you only need to pay the fee if you’re going to publish on the App Store.
  • sebtron 1y ago
    Don't you also need to buy a Macbook? That is quite expensive. I guess in Apple's view also developping on a non-Apple device is a security risk.
    • jb1991 1y ago
      I’ve never considered or tried anything other than using a Mac, so I don’t know. But I was responding to a comment about a different matter, the fees for a developer account.
      • bluescrn 1y ago
        The Mac requirement was a pain for game developers using Unity/UE primarily on Windows, and wanting to target iOS. (Back when mobile games seemed like they could be an exciting new thing, before predatory F2P enshittification killed that market...)
  • rezonant 1y ago
    Free provisioning: If you do not pay the developer fee an app installed via Xcode will work for 7 days. Afterwards the app on your phone will *stop working*, and you must open Xcode on your Mac again, and push a new build to your phone if you want to keep using it. Paid provisioning: If you have paid the developer fee, a build will expire based on the amount of time left before that payment renews, so if you build and install an app a month before your developer fee renews, that build of the app (that you installed via Xcode) will stop working in 1 month.
    • maybewhenthesun 1y ago
      We're stuck between two mafia families :-(
      • actionfromafar 1y ago
        A.K.A. Digital Feudalism.
    • jb1991 1y ago
      I've been doing it that way for years on the free account, never seemed like a bother to me. I usually have a tweak I want to make to the code anyway. But I suppose some might find it inconvenient. In any case, to say you can't put your own apps on your phone without paying a fee is incorrect, which is the comment I was responding to.
      • rezonant 1y ago
        Saying what youve said above and knowing full well how this works, but failing to mention a crucial fact like this is deceptive.
        • jb1991 1y ago
          I guess some are more bothered by this than others. A bit harsh to claim there is deception going on. Like I said, I’ve never paid Apple a fee and I have several original apps on my iPhone.
• frankacter 1y ago
  >This is why I switched to Android, just for Google now to pull the rug from under my feet again 1) You can continue to install unsigned APKs via adb with the upcoming update. 2) Signing APKs for sideloading requires a Google development account which is a one time fee of $25, no yearly fees. So still a free sideloading option available, and if you want to avoid adb it is a one time cost that is 1/4 the annual rate on Apple.
  • skylurk 1y ago
    First they came for F-droid...
    • galangalalgol 1y ago
      This is the obvious problem.
  • fainpul 1y ago
    I would call it "free developer experience" (using ADB), not "free sideloading". If you want to send your app to a friend to download and install it directly on their phone (without using a computer with ADB), you need to be Google-approved and register your app first.
    • galangalalgol 1y ago
      I think you could use adb over tcp from a chroot in the phone itself? But that doesn't really make it easier from their standpoint, and this is just a step towards full lockdown which is coming.
    • frankacter 1y ago
      OP I was replying to presented his scenario of self developing an app he uses on his own personal device, my response was specifically in regards to that use case, not any hypothetical third party person.
  • monegator 1y ago
    1) Oh yes of course, here friend you just need a PC and the command line tools (unless soon you'll need to be a registered and VERIFIED developer) to install revanced or any open source app 2) Unless they decide to ban you (they can if you don't show any activity in the developer account for X months) and of course because you were verified you can't simply apply again and pay again, because you were banned!!!!
• rafaelmn 1y ago
  100$ a year for a dev in Sweden - that's like money you wouldn't notice if it got lost in your pockets - and I am sure it cuts down on spammers and covers administrative cost. I have no problem with a store having a small admission fee - that's perfectly reasonable and they do have operational costs. It would be nice if they had some way to waive the fee for popular OSS to garner some god will with the devs. Taking a 30% cut of revenue on the other hand ... both platforms are guilty of this
  • 4gotunameagain 1y ago
    We are not talking about software distribution or admitting it to a store, we're talking about executing something on your own device, a device that you purchased.
    • rafaelmn 1y ago
      You can do that without dev license ?
      • willtemperley 1y ago
        Yes, but app is only usable for 7 days on iOS.
        • rafaelmn 1y ago
          Yes that is annoying - I hate Apple anti side loading stance. But that still doesn't make 100$ fee to apply for distribution/integration with their ecosystem unreasonable.
          • 4gotunameagain 1y ago
            Are you even reading the comments you are replying to, or ? You need to pay $100 to execute code on a device that you own. Without a 7 day time limit. And only if you have the technical expertise to do so. This is not a fee for distribution/integration. This is feudal rent.
• thecupisblue 1y ago
  Ironically, somewhere around 2014, Google was doing the exact same style "keep Android open" campaign, recruiting developers around the world - including me, to help lobby for keeping Android "open" and tell the horror stories of issues that random OEMs caused by forking Android, breaking compatibility and security. Made sense to me at the time and they were really into "Android should be open source" vibe, so I supported it. 10 years later, I'm also rugpulled. Their vision has dramatically shifted into trying to build a walled garden on top of Android, but now they are haunted by their open source roots, and the walled garden is just a really tall pile of bricks laid around it. So many times we've been promised things, only for them to be delivered in a half-baked state with half of the parts open source while other parts were closed only to Google and Google approved apps. So many times the issue trackers for different parts of the platform ecosystem have changed, that some issues are impossible to debug without using web archive. And just as many times, they have been closed, ignored for years or unnoticed, being ping-ponged among team members until they forget about it. Yet, even with all of the closed and privatized parts of the ecosystem, they are still not able to deliver on an ecosystem promise. They control my email, my photos, my cloud, my browser, my phone - yet cannot keep a single thing properly in sync. Still, I download something and I do not know where it went. Still, I cannot Airdrop things without a 3rd party service. Still, I take a photo only for it to appear on the cloud 5 minutes later. Still, I cannot have a "sandbox" account for testing that just works, but have to juggle multiple accounts, causing their auth system to break 80% of the time when testing. As a developer, I do not plan to support Android anymore. I recently got an iPhone, and am now fully switching to it. Even tho I am long on $GOOG stock, because the money printer go brrr, I will be spending that money in the Apple's ecosystem from now on.
  • munchlax 1y ago
    It doesn't make sense to choose between a snake that bit you and another that bit you earlier. If you don't want to be bitten, get out of the snake pit.
  • fainpul 1y ago
    Apple pisses off many HN users who then swear to switch to Android, Google pisses off many HN users who then swear to switch to an iPhone – so for both companies, in effect, nothing changes. Aside from that, the masses don't care or know about any of this. A couple of HN users don't make a dent in the revenue of any large company. What we can do is work on alternative ecosystems or at least support the small companies and organizations who do with our wallets.
• torben-friis 1y ago
  Im a millennial dev which happens to have a Gen Z brother who also chose this profession. Seeing him walk my steps 15 years later has been eye opening for the brutal cultural change. They’re socially conditioned to assume that anything free is a scam or illegal, that every tool is associated with a corporation, and that learning itself is going through certain hoops (by the uni, the certificator or whatever) so that you get permission to earn money a certain way. As more doors get closed, I fear this process will solidify.
  • courseofaction 1y ago
    They're right. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and Enshittification have been the core experiences of digital life with corporations in charge of platforms. My hope is that LLMs will help open source developers provide reasonable alternatives to the gatekeeping and spyware that corporations are now making their bread and butter. Example: Recent tried to use Unity LTS for a small project - the software is a joke now, basic functionality is broken out of the box. A couple of hours with an LLM and I had all the features I needed using a more lightweight library, monogame. Not an operating system, but I'm hoping the pattern will continue as LLMs get more proficient at code - the moat of "this is hard and laborious to do" will be drained.
    • torben-friis 1y ago
      An issue is that it’s not only the corpos, there’s also an increase of individuality that has become the norm. For example, try to learn from an online resource and you’ll see that the most popular sources (YouTubers, twitchers, etc) are all preparing a rug pull to a non free resource, slipping undisclosed ads as content or straight up selling snake oil. I grew up assuming that a random guy on the internet had always genuine intentions, even those who were assholes. Now the default is either a paid account, a bot, or someone trying to grind for personal gain. Everything’s adversarial.
  • slightwinder 1y ago
    > They’re socially conditioned to assume that anything free is a scam or illegal, that every tool is associated with a corporation, and that learning itself is going through certain hoops (by the uni, the certificator or whatever) so that you get permission to earn money a certain way. To be fair, there are also legit reason for why it evolved this way. It's mainly for quality and reliability. There is so much crappy sloppy work from unqualified workers, and it used to be even worse.. The easy available free knowledge really helped to rise the standard even for people without proper education in an area.
• pyeri 1y ago
  This situation would have been avoided if we, as community of engineers, had insisted on full and uncompromised open source (Stallmanist or GPL way) right from the start instead of going the ESR way of half-hearted open source where it's technically open but corporates get to have a free lunch and make abuses. Like most coders, I also prefer the permissive MIT/Apache/BSD licensing for most software projects but incidents like these make me question the direction we are heading towards. They raise fundamental questions about freedom itself - looking at the broader picture, is having a restrictive kind of freedom (GPL) often more beneficial than having full permissive freedom (MIT/Apache)?
  • survirtual 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • sham1 1y ago
      Yeah, this is pretty much the rationale behind the Paradox of Tolerance, which you alluded to. Just as a tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance without eventually just becoming intolerant, this clearly demonstrates that the same is true for Free Software. If we tolerate the use of Free Software for the use of the non-free software, eventually one loses the freedom in Free Software. It's of course not a perfect analogy since the original Free Software still exists, but since in practice the dependency was from free towards non-free, like in this instance, it still works. Google and its anti-freedom practices are still in effective control of the Android ecosystem even though it's still technically free by way of AOSP. And just as how some people argue that intolerance of the intolerant by a tolerant society is bad, so do some people argue that things like the GPL is bad because it prevents downstream modifications etc. going from free to non-free. Maybe this will help re-evaluate the culture around this stuff.
      • davemp 1y ago
        > Paradox of Tolerance, which you alluded to. Just as a tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance without eventually just becoming intolerant I’ve always thought this was hand wavy nonsense. Tolerance and tolerating is so ill defined in these discussions that they end up pointless. I’m also not sure game theory supports that intolerance wins out if you view it as repeated instances of the prisoner’s dilemma.
• esskay 1y ago
  See I was similar but the big difference back then was a random little 99c app on iOS would make you several thousand dollars a month, so the $100/year fee was nothing for a long time. It was only after around 2012 that things changed. On Google Play I never, ever had any app be anything close to as successful as on iOS. I think I probably made less than 1/100th the amount I did on iOS back in the day.
• jammo 1y ago
  I can see why they add the fee, but they would both garner so much goodwill by giving free accounts if the app you publish is open source. I don't think it would be that hard to automate by requiring a GitHub link.
  • justinclift 1y ago
    > goodwill Doesn't seem like something they consider a positive though.
  • yard2010 1y ago
    Those days are over. Being evil means there is no goodwill to begin with unless you can exploit it financially wise. Google stopped being not evil, they specifically deleted it from the code of conduct. Ofc, being evil is subjective. But also this is the first excuse of evil players!
    • tempaccountabcd 1y ago
      [dead]
• HumblyTossed 1y ago
  Yeah, I don't understand why people put up with Apple for this. I would love to write small personal apps for my iPhone. But, I don't want to use a mac, I don't want to pay a fee every year and I don't want to use the apple store (yes there are convoluted work-rounds for the last one).
  • jama211 1y ago
    It’s precisely because it’s a filter, they _want_ to filter for people who take it seriously and/or are seeking app sales. This is a company that chooses to pay people to review every app submitted to the app store, they don’t want millions of apps by tinkerers being submitted, and it reduces total crapware in the store. I’m not necessarily advocating for this approach, just explaining why they do it. Doesn’t the play store also charge a fee? It’s smaller from memory but it isn’t free
    • HumblyTossed 1y ago
      Then why don't they make it stupid easy to just make a build for the iPhone and transfer it directly? Also, I am highly suspicious that they check every app submitted to the app store with a human.
      • jama211 1y ago
        They do? I did it last week. Build and run on device on Xcode is one button.
  • fullStackOasis 1y ago
    Have you tried Expo Go?
• morshu9001 1y ago
  You don't need a paid dev account to build and run on your own iPhone. I didn't have one most of the time