To make non-App-store apps annoyingly unusable, so the App store will sell more apps, instead of people downloading in other ways?
Just like Apple cripples the Safari browser and PWA apps.
Long term, maybe Apple wants to be able to remote-forbid apps if Apple is developing their own competing app?
Whilst most developers working at Apple understands this, and don't like it? Maybe the developers even feel happy about people here at HN being disappointed, and think that "now the business people here at Apple notice that this causes disappointment" ?
If this drives developers from OSX to other OSes, chances are they will develop apps for those OSes first.
Apple is too big to fail at this point, but driving developers away from your platform isn't a very clever strategy. You never know when you are going to hit a tipping point, and after you notice and people stop using macosx for development its already too late.
It took me ~150 hours to migrate to Linux, but my user and developer experience on Linux is much better than on MacOSX (emacs daemon "just works"!!!), so after all that work I wouldn't consider switching to OSX in the next 5 years at least. I had a Macbook air 2012, and because Apple still hasn't released a laptop that isn't a downgrade from that in some sense (keyboard, magsafe, ...) I've went with a think pad instead. Tiny details, like having a webcam that doesn't suck now prevent me from going back to OSX.
What’s the Linux equivalent of “notarization”? I’m not sure. Of course there’s probably more than one answer to that - let’s just taking signing packages as an example.
In theory Apple could put their weight behind vetting some of the popular open source packages perhaps? Or delegate that to the maintainers of those repositories and make them trusted? Like homebrew, for example (maybe a poor example, but you see how I’m trying to compare this with Linux...)
This is after all, what actually makes macOS useful to people on the command line 99% of the time, anyway.
So anyway, I agree on the surface it seems like this might be beneficial to Apple, but it doesn’t appear to be well considered.
They could invest more time in better sandbox and/or container type features that let people define some of their own more granular security boundaries. But they aren’t I guess? What are they doing here?
Selling UNIX underpinning was just a marketing move for willing to betray GNU/Linux and BSD in name of a better laptop experience, instead of helping OEMs selling their stuff.
Something that NeXT also did against the Sun workstations market.
On Linux side of the this kind of security measures never work, because the moment someone introduces something like this, the distribution gets forked.
It works on ChromeOS and Android, because it hardly matters to userspace that Linux is the actual kernel, Google could embark (and it is actually) in a kernel replacement project and most stuff would just work.
One cannot give the money instead to Apple and then come back complain that they were mislead.
NeXTSTEP was also a true UNIX, that wasn't why most business bought it, rather Renderman and other graphical based tooling.
I have used Apple platforms on and off since the LC II days, their commercial view was always quite clear to me.
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/
They do GNU/Linux, but BSDs should probably work on their hardware, as mentioned on this old post (sorry in German).
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/de/Infos/News/OpenBSD-6-3-cu...
Or by getting in touch with companies like os-cillation.
https://www.os-cillation.de/en/opensourceprojekte/bsd-specia...
> max 1,65cm dick