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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Ah. Epic International. If apple has blocked that other account, would it have removed all Unreal Engine powered iOS apps from the App Store, just like all Epic games are now removed from the App Store?

I press this question because IMO that would be a serious tactical mistake on Apple’s part, and it’s surprising that Apple would make it (even incidentally). The judge’s injunction may have saved Apple from itself.

But I don’t know if it’s true that all UE iOS apps would be removed, if Apple terminated that other account. It seems like no one has given a concrete, conclusive answer.

It’s like blocking all apps that happen to use the leftpad library. It’s not those apps’ fault for what Epic is doing with Epic Store. It’s completely unrelated. And it would be worrisome if, by Apple’s decision, all businesses who built their futures on Unreal Engine were put out of business overnight.

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No. Even if Apple terminates the 'Epic International' account - nothing will happen to existing Unreal Engine games on the store by other developers.

The issue is that Epic will lose access to Apple developer tools and will struggle to maintain Unreal Engine going forward and as such that may hinder development of those games in the future.

There's no indication or reason to believe Apple would manually remove all UE based games (because it wouldn't be something they 'revoke' and all UE games stop working).

Why would they struggle to maintain Unreal Engine? The developer tools/SDKs are free to download and you don’t need a developer account for that. All they will lose is access to pre-release tools such as betas or the Apple Silicon transition kit. It just means they might not have a release ready on launch day, but should be fine after that as the tools are made public.

The theory was that apple might revoke their ability to use the developer tools/SDKs (Broadly, this is what was stated in the letter saying their developer account would be revoked, even though you don’t need a paid developer account to download some of that stuff).

Xcode, the SDKs, etc. are licensed, not open source, and probably contain clauses allowing apple to terminate the license.

Beta versions of iOS and macOS are largely behind a developer paywall as well.

They wouldn't be able to publish OSX binaries.

You can't even run a hello world app on iOS device without signing it with a developer account, and the restraining order that blocks apple from terminating epic international's developer account is just temporary. There is still chance that epic will lose developer account needed for developing unreal engine. You can run unsigned code on iOS simulator, but the simulator lacks many api and can't replace running on real devices (unlike Android emulator that can emulate almost everything a real device does).

> You can't even run a hello world app on iOS device without signing it with a developer account

What on Earth... Is this the same for Android? I come from the web, and this sounds like madness. You need to login to write code?

It's not the login. They need to sign the binaries with that account, otherwise those won't run on an iOS device.

No, on Android you can sideload anything. (Do you not use smartphones at all? How do you not know this?)

This hasn't been true for iOS either for the last N years, AFAIK you can sign apps for free to load on your devices, but the signatures are valid only for a week, so you have to reload the apps at least every week.

> AFAIK you can sign apps for free to load on your devices, but the signatures are valid only for a week, so you have to reload the apps at least every week.

Guess where the key required for signing the binary comes from? That's right, it comes from your apple developer account, automatically downloaded and provisioned by xcode when you hit the build button. Without a developer account you won't have any valid key to sign the build, even for debug build. Afaik the only way to skip this is to jailbreak your device so it can run unsigned binary.

But this is with a free account you can register for anyone, with semi fake personal data even

To run on the simulator or build towards a simulator target you don't need anything.

No, all Unreal Engine apps wouldnt have been removed. But it would be harder for Epic to develop the engine, and other developers would be less inclined to use the engine knowing development would be impeded.

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