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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

Well you could write your game in JS and deliver it over the web. Flash games were all the rage when I was a kid.

But for now, non-notarized executables don't fail, they just need to be enabled by an admin account through permissions.

You surely can’t be oblivious to how this has been a process of boiling the frog slowly — almost certainly they will eventually be permanent-blocked like on iOS.

You surely can't be oblivous that, user wise (security, ease of use) this is a process of improvement slowly...

MacOS might have bugs due to neglect, bad priorties, too fast deprecations, etc.

But all the extra restrictions (notarization, sandboxing, dropping 32-bits, etc) are in the right direction for a consumer platform (i.e. not for devs), for making the computers easier and more secure, like appliances that just do what you bought them for. And they will be part of any/all platforms going forward (including Windows, and new platforms like Fucscia).

As for Linux, it exists for 2.5 decades, it has been free since forever, it's still not adopted by the masses. It's not in the direction that most want.

I'm not sure who you're arguing with, but the poster I was replying to noted the status quo is that you can run unnotarized executables. To your point, that should not be taken to mean that we won't eventually see it evaporate. On the contrary, we should assume it will.

>I'm not sure who you're arguing with

I'm arguing against your comment: "You surely can’t be oblivious to how this has been a process of boiling the frog slowly — almost certainly they will eventually be permanent-blocked like on iOS".

And I'm saying that this is a good thing in some ways (whereas "boiling the frog slowly" doesn't just point to the graduality of the process, but also implies it's bad).

I don't disagree on the graduality or that we will "eventually see it evaporate" (it being various current more open abilities).

To kill the analogy — developers are unambiguously the frog. You’re arguing about who we should care more about, the frog or those who will be having frog for dinner — this has no bearing on if the frog being boiled is a bad thing but it certainly is from the vantage point of the frog ;)

WebGL isn't fully supported on iOS, so there goes your nice little web game.

If you're an amateur and can't afford $100 dev license, why are you targeting a premium mobile platform that you'd need to test on?

Just don't support ~~MacOS~~ [e: iOS, my b], this is what I mean by going the "amateur" route. If you don't care about distributing software professionally, then just don't deal with the headaches and costs.

Last I checked MacOS wasn't a premium mobile platform... it's a general computing platform for desktops and laptops.

I was replying to the comment that WebGL isn't fully supported on iOS.

Last year I was building web games* with Phaser. To better support iOS, I just changed the renderer to `canvas` when an iOS user agent was detected. In the end, the games worked pretty well on iOS devices.

*Games I worked on: https://livegame.show/play/ride_v3 | https://livegame.show/play/pewpew_v6 | https://livegame.show/play/bubbleshooter3

I will say though, Apple does seem to almost purposefully hold back the web on iOS. I suppose this makes native iOS apps, which must pay Apple 30% of their revenue, more appealing to users. On iOS, the Firefox and Chrome apps aren't allowed to include their own browser engines. They have to just wrap Safari webviews.

On Android, the Firefox app is allowed to include it's own browser engine. An engine that supports adblocking extensions like uBlock Origin.

I think this is an issue with phaser. I’ve also made a bunch of web games with various frameworks, and webGL works fine on iOS in many other contexts. The js port of cocos2d is webGL compatible on iOS.

Consider though that flash was a security dumpster fire that coincidentally ran as fast as something unburdened by security concern, and that the most certainly pirated full Adobe suite used by a young beginner developer was installed by some sketchy exe that would no way be notarized by any sort of authority

You would think... but they already made it so even riot can't delete binaries from /use/bin, and you can't disable that setting (have to boot into a special mode)

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.

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."

I hypothesize "fantasy consoles"* are potentially fertile ground for young developers. They impose a lot of restrictions, but to someone starting out that means fairly low limits to understanding the basics of the environment (as opposed to something like UE4). They're also cheap or free. And some of them (like PICO-8) host user-created games.

*https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy

You can still do that, you just have to find users dumb enough to authorize the running of an application downloaded randomly from the internet.

Oh, and they need to authorize it from an admin account. So, yeah. Not sure there are a lot of people out there that dumb. Unless you're some well known downloaded product like Blender or something, I would think you would have a hard time getting people to run your software.

At the same time, to be completely fair, you probably should have a hard time getting people to run your software. That's pretty much exactly how a lot of malware is distributed.

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