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Comment by HappyDreamer | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't this have been a business decision? Not about security? (just what they say?)

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" ?

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Most of the apps that sell well originate from a developer solving a need they had, on the system they were using.

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.

I don't think the people at Apple are actively trying to make non-App Store apps unusable because they want to make more money from the App Store or anything. It's just that they want code to pass through them, and as a by product making code that has been vetted less or does things that could potentially be abused is made more annoying to run. Such a change is divisive, as you may have guessed.

That vetting will come at the cost of 30% of money paid for your software and any money earned within the software.

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