> I don't feel comfortable charging people for something they might not even be able to run.
Honestly, if you're charging users, then there's absolutely no question about it, you get the membership. Your entire "expecting the user to do so" point completely goes out the window the second you said it's a paid app. If you have the revenue, then it's simply a cost of doing business in the Apple world. Plus, once again, you're being way overdramatic. "might not even be able to run" is taking it a bit too far. Your app will be able to run. If you don't trust your users enough to click twice, then maybe you need to learn to trust them more. It's not like it's a hard thing to do, and it only needs to happen once.
Remember, this is Apple's OS, Apple's ecosystem, and Apple's SDKs. You play by their rules or not at all. That's the way it's always been, and that's the way it will probably always be (but never say never, look at Microsoft, they're doing things nobody would have ever expected). Yes, it sucks. Yes, it isn't fair. But as with all major companies, it never is. They will always have the upper hand because they're the ones providing the user base and all the tools necessary to get the apps out there and onto their machines. As long as you are developing for their platform, you have to play by their rules. Honestly, be happy they haven't moved the default to the much more restrictive "Mac App Store" yet.
And to be fair, I see where Apple (and Microsoft, IIRC they have SmartScreen which does the same sort of thing but to a lesser extent) are coming from. I'm sure that it lowers the chance of accidentally executing viruses by quite a bit and also slowly is teaching users to think before they execute (especially if you have to right click and click Open).
> Honestly, if you're charging users, then there's absolutely no question about it, you get the membership. Your entire "expecting the user to do so" point completely goes out the window the second you said it's a paid app. If you have the revenue, then it's simply a cost of doing business in the Apple world.
Yes, because Apple demands rent. They create a problem and then charge you to fix it. This is called rent-seeking. I think that is a bad behavior.
> Plus, once again, you're being way overdramatic. "might not even be able to run" is taking it a bit too far. Your app will be able to run. If you don't trust your users enough to click twice, then maybe you need to learn to trust them more. It's not like it's a hard thing to do, and it only needs to happen once.
I used to do tech support for a medium-sized office. I would frequently get called to people's desks because their computer wasn't working, only to find that their email client had put up a dialog with the message "The email address 'somebody@thatcompany.cok' is not a valid address", I'd have to verbally tell them they mistyped the address — sometimes, even after this, they'd just stare at me like a deer in the headlights and I'd have to type in ".com" for them before they felt like they could use their computer again. And then they'd do it again the next day.
I remember patio11 once shared an anecdote about a school teacher who called his support number because she thought Bingo Card Creator had broken Google. It turned out that she'd gotten a new home computer and Bing was the default search provider, and she couldn't figure out how to operate Bing because it wasn't Google.
I have to wonder if you have had to do a lot of support work, because I think you're trusting users way too much. There are many, many people who are really not stupid, but get flustered when doing unfamiliar tasks on a computer.
> Remember, this is Apple's OS, Apple's ecosystem, and Apple's SDKs. You play by their rules or not at all. That's the way it's always been
No, it isn't. It wasn't even this way just five years ago. I was one of the early adopters of OS X, and one of the things I loved about it was how open it was, so even some kid like me (at the time) could easily make software. Apple has gotten worse and worse about this over the past decade.
> No, it isn't. It wasn't even this way just five years ago. I was one of the early adopters of OS X, and one of the things I loved about it was how open it was, so even some 17-year-old kid like me could easily make software. Apple has gotten worse and worse about this over the past decade.
I never said that was the way it's always been. I said that "playing by their rules or not at all" was the way it's always been. Which is true, Apple is very big on controlling every aspect of the user experience. It was a matter of time before their massive obsessiveness leaked from iOS to OSX, but it's always been Apple's rules or nothing. Their rules for OSX have historically been very lax, but that wasn't my point at all.
> Yes, because Apple demands rent. They create a problem and then charge you to fix it. This is called rent-seeking. I think that is a bad behavior.
Well, they're providing a service for $99 that extends beyond the signing to be able to run in OSX. They include the ability to list in the various app stores, to have beta programs, access to early APIs, access to developer forums, and more. All that costs them money. They have to get that from somewhere.
> I have to wonder if you have had to do a lot of support work, because I think you're trusting users way too much.
I trust my users just fine. Just because there's one or two crazy stories (I mean, everyone has a few stories of horribly stupid users) does not mean the majority of users are that bad. If you're targeting all 100% of possible users, then sure, those instructions would be useless. However, I'd be confident enough to say that 90-95% (honestly probably leaning towards 95, but still) of users will be able to follow those incredibly simple instructions. So at that point, you have to ask yourself if the $99 (plus all the other perks like early access to APIs) is worth having those 5-10% of users who can't follow them. Because that's what it really comes down to.
It is not just rent; it is a security feature. Whether this feature is being used wisely is another question...
A few months ago I sent Apple security an email about a fake Flash installer with a valid Developer ID certificate. It turned out that someone else had written an article about the same malware five days ago, and reported it to Apple, yet the certificate was not revoked yet - so it doesn't seem that Apple has a 'rapid response' system in place currently (or then, anyway), perhaps because incidents are still relatively uncommon. But they did promptly thank me for my report, and I bet they ended up doing something about it (I ought to check) - and thanks to Developer ID, they at least had some kind of payment trail as well as a name, likely making it harder for the same person to get additional certificates.
Of course, this trail could be achieved with a lower price. But you do get a number of benefits with the subscription, and since the Mac and iOS developer programs merged into one today, at the same $99 as each previously was individually, if you develop for both the price just halved. It's a start, at any rate.
> A lot of people are intimidated just looking at instructions like that, and will just give up.
You realize it's probably one of the easiest tasks ever, and it's literally 3 steps. Anybody even my grandma can do that. If they know how to download your app and "install it" they will be able to do those simple steps.
And it's a one time thing, not like they need to do it every time they go to install an app.
Anybody can do it if they're of the right state of mind, but as somebody who used to do IT for a medium-sized office, all I can say is you're mistaken if you think most people are that way. The task is intimidating and involves 1) going through a context menu (something many Mac users will never even have done before), 2) dealing with a dialog (people get nervous the second a dialog shows up and often don't even read them), 3) if they have read the dialog, ignoring the fact that they're doing something it's telling them not to do.
> (something many Mac users will never even have done before)
This isn't the 90s. Two-button mice are the default now, and have been for many years. I'm pretty sure everybody has done it at least once, and probably even knows what the term "right-click" means.
> ignoring the fact that they're doing something it's telling them not to do.
They're not doing something it's telling them not to do. Have you even looked at the dialog? Have you read it yourself? It simply asks the user if they're sure they want to open it as it's from an unidentified developer: https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare/images/en_US/osx/exemption_dialog.png https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare... Nothing in it is telling them they shouldn't or can't open the app, they're not going against anything by saying "Open" (in fact, that might just be why there's an Open button there in the first place, because it's an acceptable choice).
Seriously, you're being overly untrustworthy about your users here. You seriously can't think this is that big of a problem. Because it isn't. Other apps have managed to solve this with download instructions, it's really not difficult, and the fact that they're still alive and running shows that users clearly know what they're doing enough to right click once and press Open once. It's not a difficult task by any means of the imagination.
Apple isn't forcing you to pay if you want to run your apps, they're warning users and forcing them to take an extra step to run unsigned code. That doesn't completely prevent malicious code execution but it definitely helps which is a net win for users.
Complaining that they ask for $100/year to use their official distribution channel (which incurs ongoing costs for them) seems unreasonable considering the quality and quantity of tools they provide for free. Xcode is a pretty awesome IDE considering it's free to use.
And people used to write "microsoft" with dollar signs... No "s" in Apple...
As a developer and a user, I more or less like the system. I feel general users get a decent amount of added security without too much hassle.
Thinking of the unsigned applications that I do run, if you know about them, I don't feel it's unreasonable to expect the user to know how to get around the signing.
Philosophically, it is a bummer. Instead of a developer and customer having a direct relationship, there's now an Apple tax that needs to be paid every year or the relationship gets cut.
However, I can't think of any other way to gain the security benefits of app signing.
Ultimately, all security is a web of trust. If you're going to put an automated, self-service system at the root of that web (the Apple dev program), then you need reliable ways to establish identity and discourage high-volume fraud. A $100/year credit card charge does both pretty well.