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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

Right. I'm just saying, user-freedom is technically preserved. This is a huge inconvenience, and bad for Epic's business, but it's not a ban. As an owner of Mac hardware, I still have control over what I can do with my machine.

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Do you honestly think Apple is going to keep this true for Macs in 2 years? 5 years? 10 years? I think there is slim to none chance that they give a shit about the "openness"of Mac.

As far as I'm concerned, Mac openness is just a cat that got out of the bag, before anyone knew they could produce a _mint_ from rent seeking walled garden platforms. I find it highly unlikely Apple is not looking to correct this mistake on Mac, even if it's done so gradually that by the time the pull the trigger, no one even bats an eye.

Even Steve Jobs knew you needed "trucks" of computing. I'm generally fine with my phone being locked down, because I use it for straightforward tasks. I (and the many other developers who use Macs) need my laptop to be a "truck". If it stopped being that, I'd stop being a customer. But we're not at that point yet and I think Apple would be really dumb to go there and alienate a huge market.

I believe they’ll likely keep this the case, not out of generosity, but because the most valuable thing Mac gets them is developers writing apps for iOS. This will only become more true in time unless there’s a sudden reversal of the trend towards phones and tablets over laptops. They may not care about power users in general, but allowing developers to run their own code to target their platforms is crucial, and there’s no mint to be made on macOS by fully locking it down due to the reduced marketshare.

I would not be shocked however if at some point they switched to developers having to buy special Macs to have this capability, and normal Macs would cease to be able to turn off secure boot and SIP and would require code signing/store distribution universally.

Given you need to be a bona-fide security researcher to qualify to gain access to a partially-unlocked iPhone[1] - I think you’re on to something: having DRM built-in to the lowest levels of the hardware means it’s possible for Apple to truly control the system.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/programs/security-research-devic...

That's not freedom. Most users are going to think the unsigned app just doesn't work, and almost none of them are going to know that there is a magic ritual they need to perform in the Settings app to launch the program they wanted to run in the first place.

The point is though that they have the ability to 'ban' it for 99.99% of users who don't know that.

This isn't a social app, it's a professional tool that multimillion-dollar businesses are built on (most of which have in-house engine programmers). They'll figure it out if they have to. Heck, Epic could publish instructions for doing so.

Unreal Engine isn’t a shared iOS component. Apple doesn’t care about signatures on individual lib/so files: only the signature on the published app package. When you make an app or a game using an existing engine then only you become responsible for it.

A ragtag band of devs all banned-for-life from Apple’s stores could put together a new app-engine or game-engine that other devs use as the basis for their app and provided that those apps don’t break the rules about undocumented APIs or malware (and no-one in Apple’s higher-ups gets suspicious...) then those apps will appear. I don’t believe Apple has any way to automatically ban or delete all apps that use the same third-party libraries by using their macOS Notary system or iOS Certificate revocation system - they’d have to inspect every published app-package individually (granted, this would be automated, but you know what I mean).

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